Another family trip to Austria joined even by my godparents. The first stop was a baroque abby of Melk. It was the perfect example of how quickly is one able to forget everything he learnt for exams. Ehm... yeah... I though I'd never ever heard about Melk, but when I saw it from a car-window, I realized what it was, I even added it to my list of places, I would love to visit. Ehm.. yeah.

And it is really beautiful. I loved the library the most, because that's just me, but the whole complex of buildings was nicely reconstructed. It was founded in 1089 and given to Benedictine monks by Leopold II. Today's appearence was desinged by Jakob Prandtauer in the early 18th century. It was one of the few Austrain abbeys that managed to survive all the conflicts from Napoleon to the Anschluss of the second World War. After that the school returned to the complex and now it caters to nearly 900 pupils of both sexes.

The second stop was in Krems, which was another tiny city, where there was supposed to be some kind of a festival called Apricot Days, because there are SO MANY apricot trees along the road and one weekend per year they make everything with this fruit, you can imagine.

However, we were really disappointed, because our fantasy is probably wider, even borderless in contrast to the folks of Krems, 'cause we imagined far more apricot stuff to eat, than it was offered. Anyway, we tried the renown apricot dumplings and god, it was so tasty! At least this one was satisfying enough :)

(Btw, I really dislike the english and slovak term for this fruit. In english it's apricot, obviously, in slovak we call it marhuľa. Ugh, it sounds so hard... on the other hand, czech translation meruňka and german term die Marille sound as sweet as the fruit tastes :) )