Medieval Fun

It has been raining since Sunday. Pouring and pouring. Today was supposed to be still cloudy with some rain, but we woke up on this holiday morning (Fronleichnam, Corpus Christi) to bright sunshine. Jerry and I checked the internet until we found a fun excursion. Burg Lockenhaus has a Medieval Festival this weekend. We walked around the camp of those participating, visited the booths, watched dancing and music, and ate lunch. In the camp I saw two women working with card weaving looms. I have been meaning to get back into card weaving, so this will be an added incentive.

I decided that the stairs of the burg were too much for me, so we did not visit the whole castle, but apparently it is well worth visiting. It belonged to the Templars at one point, and the 'cultic room' has various symbols that have not been satisfactorily explained. Both general tours and specifically Templar ones are offered (at least in German). The festival is on until Sunday, May 25. There is also a Medieval festival going on in the Boehmischer Prater this weekend, if you would prefer not to leave Vienna.

When we had had enough of the crowds we drove on to the nearby Naturpark Greifenstein. We walked up to the Aussichtswarte (Tower) on the Hungarian border. And I do mean up. The forest road leads through needle trees up to the top of Burgenland's tallest mountain. OK, not all that tall, but a fair climb from the parking lot. The last thing I really wanted when we got to the top was to climb stairs, but when Steven said that there was a lovely view, I compromised and made it up the first flight. He was right. It was lovely looking out onto the Hungarian plain.

Around here it seems to be the newest thing to make walls and towers of wire cages filled with rocks. Generally I don't get the point, but this one fascinated me. The tower is filled with different kinds of rocks, and each one is labeled. As we hiked up the path we met up with big chunks of the various rocks with explanations of what kind of rock it is, where it can be found near the park, and how it was created. In case you are wondering, most of the rocks we saw are metamorphized sedimentary rocks. The explanations are in German, Hungarian, and English.

This area was once under an ocean, and some of the rocks include fossil shells. For those of you learning German, a local joke:

Wir haben Muscheln gesucht am Alpenostrand.
(We looked for shells on the ______.)

The joke is that Alpen-ost-rand is the standard word for the eastern end of the Alps. As you saw above, this is the Eastern end of the mountains. Normally you would look for shells on a 'Strand', a beach. If you divide the word differently you get the Alpeno-strand, a favorite holiday destination for Viennese who cannot afford an expensive vacation. ('Balkonia' is another.)