Eastern Styria: Castle Riegersburg and Zotter chocolate

   It's time for the Weekend Update! This Saturda's Ausflug went to eastern Styria, a land of green hills draped with small farms and orchards. The landscape is dominated by the castle Riegersburg, which sits at the tip of an old volcanic outcropping. We took the cable tram up the hill and walked over to the raptor park which is on the hill's lower slope. There was a show with owls, a falconry demonstration, vultures, and the first bald eagle I have seen in five months. Really beautiful birds! The show was completely in German, but I understood more than 80% without a problem- woot!

   After the show we went up to the fotress itself. Riegersburg was one of the border fortifications against Hungarian and Turkish invasions starting in the 13th or 14th centuries. From the 16th to 18th centuries it was the site of several witch hunts and trials. We walked through the Hexenmuseum and I was surprised that the witch phobia was sweeping through the northeastern American colonies at about the same time. Today, the castle is owned by a "von Lichtenstien". Yes, the nephew (or cousin or something like that!) of the royal family in the country of Lichtenstien! The aristocracy is alive and well in Europe!

   Our third and final stop was at the Zotter chocolate factory a few km away. After touring the "edible zoo" (a collection of animals that we eat, built to raise awareness that at one time the meat in your hamburger was alive) we entered the factory, museum, and Genussweg (pleasure path). We sampled cocoa beans, liquid chocolate from 10-100% cocoa, compared different bar chocolates with everything from flowers to yoghurt to green tea to pumpkin seed mixed in, flavored drinking chocolate (stirred into hot milk), chocolate balls rolled around pieces of fruit/nuts/whatever in miniature copper cement mixers, and finally bars where a flavored filling was sandwitched between the chocolate layers. Everyone had a little bit of a chocolate hangover on the way home!