It’s kind of hard to believe that just last weekend we were wandering around the streets of Vienna, perusing Weihnachtsmarkten, sipping coffee in cafes, and meandering streets that have been trod by over 800 years of Hapsburg royalty. After flying in on Thursday morning, we followed a walking tour around the city, taking us from the Staatsoper, past Hotel Sacher (home of the famous sacher torte!) and up to St Stephen’s cathedral, through a bunch of fancy shopping streets utterly decked out in glittering Christmas lights, and right into the heart of the Hofburg palace. We spent Friday and Saturday seeing some more specific sights, including breakfast at the Naschmarkt; a fantastic Magritte exhibit at the Albertina gallery, housed in one wing of the sprawling Hofburg palace; dinner at a Heurigen (wine garden) on the outskirts of town; a tour of the Silberkammer (Silver Collection), Sisi (a.k.a Empress Elizabeth) Museum, and Kaiserappartements at the Hofburg Palace; and one of three weekly screenings of The Third Man at a tiny theater near our hotel. On Saturday night we secured standing-room tickets for Daphne at the Opera – it was kind of a boring story, but the sets were crazy and the building itself is absolutely gorgeous: a fine way to end our stay in this beautiful city!

This post is a bit delayed, but I guess I needed two weeks to recuperate before I wrote about my two weeks in Italy for work (5 days of which, thankfully, were with Meg). From November 8th to 23rd, I was working for a conference/summit on philanthropy at Villa Serbelloni in the tiny village of Bellagio, which is at the end of a peninsula sticking into Lake Como in Northern Italy. Villa Serbelloni is sprawling estate covering most of the tip of the peninsula and is owned by The Rockefeller Foundation, which was co-presenting the summit. Leave it to me to complain about spending 15 days in a beautiful lakeside Italian village and villa, but to be fair I had to spend most of my time working. Nonetheless, the area was gorgeous and I did have some opportunities to venture out with my camera and explored the town and some of the other towns on the coast of the lake. November is very quiet on Lake Como since it’s really more of a summer destination for tourists. The area actually gets quite cold (it is in the foothills of the Italian Alps), so while it was great not having to deal with mobs of people, it also meant there wasn’t a lot going on and the weather was pretty chilly.
A bunch of us working at the summit pooled our resources and hired a boat for a two-hour tour of the lake one day (and thankfully we didn’t get marooned on a sitcom). Meg joined me for the last few days, which was great. We “hiked” a gorge in the town of Bellano (while it is rather deep, it’s not very big), got to ride on an old school hydrofoil ferry and spent our last day before flying out walking around the middle of Milan, the closest big city. Milan’s cathedral is enormous and one of the biggest and most lavish we’ve seen during our travels (and we went to St. Peter’s last year!). All in all, it was an enjoyable experience (especially since I got paid to be there), but I’m very happy to be settled back in Berlin!