Amstetten

Amstetten is the most extremely aver­age place in Austria. It’s a largish commuter town in between Linz and Vienna. You have no reas­on to visit it. Its main claim to fame is that Josef Fritzl lived there. I was there to teach in one of the schools as a visit­ing teach­er.

St Wolfgang­skirche, Nieder­ös­ter­reich

While in Kirch­berg-am-Wech­sel we were given a tour of a disused church perched up on the moun­tain­side. It has suffered a lot of misfor­tune over the years (if you can read German there is a wiki­pe­dia article here), it burnt down and was rebuilt twice, and is furnished with all kinds of leftovers from other churches, which makes it more inter­est­ing.

Hermannshöhle

While in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel I also got to go on a tour of Hermannshöhle with anoth­er teach­er. It’s a series of caves inside one of the moun­tains, with lots of stalac­tites and a bat colony. Usually the tours are at set times and only in German, but we got a private tour in English, which was really nice.

Kirch­berg am Wech­sel

Last Summer I spent a week work­ing at the juni­or school in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel, a tiny moun­tain town on the east­ern end of the Alps on the border between Lower Austria and Styria. It is essen­tially one long street between some moun­tains, with “Lower Austria’s finest stalac­tite cave” (more on that later) and a yearly Wittgen­stein fest­iv­al. As moun­tains go, by Austri­an stand­ards they are pretty tame, mostly being below the tree-line. When I said some­thing to the kids about the moun­tains they basic­ally went “what moun­tains?” and when I poin­ted out of the window they went “oh yeah, those, there are much better moun­tains in other places”. Still, I like any kind of moun­tains, and the Wech­sel is still 1,743m high, so it’s hardly a hill. Mountains/​hills and water, that’s what I like. I wouldn’t do well some­where like Kansas.

The hills are alive with torren­tial rain.

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I’m currently in Kirch­berg am Wech­sel, at the east­ern end of the Austri­an Alps for work. I didn’t really have much access to the inter­net last week in Dresden, so I haven’t updated prop­erly. I saw most of the sights, also went to the DDR Museum in Rade­beul and ate a lot of pastry and spätzle.

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