Melking Austria for all it's worth

So it was off to Melk for the Vienna Pecks. I promised Nathan that I would let him blog about what beverage we drank in this Austrian city, so I'm not going to say what we all drank here, so hang on to his blog for more info about the mystery beverage we drank in Melk. Melk is a city on the Danube about 60 miles up from Vienna. By watching the Internet I found a rail pass that lets you travel anywhere the regional trains go for only 28 euros (which of course is thousands of US dollars given the current exchange rate, no its really only about $45, but that was yesterday). But for four people that's a great deal, so we took off to Melk to see the famous Benedictine Abby below. It could be easily seen from the train station and these pictures don't give a sense of how massive this really is. This Abby was built in the 11th century first as a gift from the Bamburg Emperor, then rebuilt in the 18th in Baroque style.

We visited the Abbey right off and bought our tickets for the only English tour given during the day, which was about three hours later. We ate at the Abby restaurant. Lori and Emily shared a schnitzel, I had Goulash, and Nathan had a great pasta dish. His was meatless, and my goulash was only meat, so we shared with each other and he had a meated pasta dish, and my goulash had pasta with it. The food was great, though. I'm not sure it was cooked and served by real Benedictines, which was a little surprising at an Abbey restaurant--I suppose.

We then strolled through the town--in which everything was closed of course because it was after 12:30pm. Mental note, everything in Europe outside of Vienna is closed in the afternoon. We did find a kind of creepy secondhand store. Lori seemed to enjoy it, but Emily and I thought this a dark and dirty place so scary we fled. It reminded me of something out of Oliver Twist or bad dreams I sometimes have about a shabby and ruined world. Lori almost bought something, but I talked her out of it. I mean, it could have been from anywhere! So we went to a park along an oxbow of the river and Emily ran to throw of the feel of the flea market.



The tour of the Abbey was unbelievable. The library held 100,000 books many from the middle ages (although missing many volumes from a 12 Century fire). The Abbey was a working school and had about 30 monks currently living in it. The displays included both medieval artifacts and modern implements of Catholic worship. We saw a 900 year old full size carved wooden crucifix that was unbelievable both in terms of its age and beauty.

I realized too that we as a church in Utah really don't make as much use of skeletons as we could. Once again I found the Abbey way ahead of us in terms of their use. Here is one of the early saints preserved as a dressed-up skeleton. It seems to me that if we kept the bones of old Stake Presidents and Bishops around on display at our Ward Houses it would make church much more interesting. I'm going to send in a suggestion to the church that this motif ought to be used much more used than it is. I mean who wouldn't want to go to church if there were skeletons on display?



This is the view from the Abbey Balcony. The view stretched over the city of Melk on the left. On the right stretched remnants of ancient forest that ran up to the shores of the Danube. This is the same forest were most of the fairytales took place. Really, this the dark forest where Red Riding Hood was accosted by wolves, where Hansel and Gretel tried to find their way home and ran into the witch, where Snow White lay in a glass coffin until her prince kissed her. How cool is that?



Fairytale forests:



One more view of the Abbey.



Ice cream was so good in Melk. Only 60 cents in Euros ($343 US or American Yen as they are called here).



Why isn't Nathan looking at the camera? Look closely in the window behind us.

All in all it was a great day!







And we saw some great ceilings: