Vienna Markets, episode 1. In which we celebrate Christmas before Thanksgiving.

I began this blog a few weeks ago by dialing it back to one of our first fleamarketing vacations and now I think it will be fun to jump ahead to one of the most recent.  And it all kind of started in the same manner.
We were watching some travel program on TV...

This time we got it stuck in our heads that it would be fun to go to Vienna for that city's famous Christmas markets.  Never been to Vienna, don't know German, never had schnitzel (is there a schnitzel-loaf?!).  I can't remember the program, but it was probably Travel Channel we were watching this time.  I do remember seeing Vienna (specifically the Freud Museum and Mozarthaus) featured recently on The Amazing Race (one of our guiltiest pleasures since season one) and the ensuing casual exchange of remarks with Mari including, "Looks awesome," "We should go some day," and the ever-popular, "Put it on our list."  The travel doc currently on air featured Christmas markets (an entire market devoted solely to Christmas and its collectable accoutrements?!) so Mari and I exchanged our usual look (Warning!  Danger, Will Robinson!) that foretold of an impending journey:  a beautiful European city, a beautiful time of year, (beautifully adventuresome wife) and beautifully hand-crafted fleamarketing!

Now, I realize (every moment of every day) how blessed I am to have a supportive wife who shares my yen for travel and also how fortunate we are to have the opportunities to travel as often as we do.  I never take anything in our collections-cluttered life for granted and that's why I also enjoy the opportunity to share our experiences to hopefully inspire your travels and your collecting.  

Vienna posed a new challenge for us.  Mari grew up on English and Spanish and still has that sexy high-school-French working for her and I grew up on English and Portuguese and have that ambiguously New-York-inflected-high-school-Spanish (now modulated by along-the-border-Mexican-Spanish), but neither of us knows German except for the first 10 numerals I learned in 6th grade from the only male teacher at St. Teresa's in Sleepy Hollow (still North Tarrytown at the time) and a few choice expletives we learned from Mari's dad who was stationed in Germany as an impressionable young man.

In other words,

we didn't know Scheiße.

Don't ever let a language barrier be a barrier to travel.  A few lessons on the excellent free app, Duolingo, boosted our confidence a bit, but we hoped most vendors would still be able to communicate with a couple of friendly (and eager to shop) Americans.  Almost every vendor of the hundreds we met on our Christmas Market adventure spoke English or made a great effort to meet us halfway.

Our selfie above is at the entrance to the main market, The Wiener Christkindlmarkt at Rathausplatz (the Vienna City Hall Christmas Market), which is the market featured on the travel program we saw.  The city hall building reminded me of Cinderella's castle and was even more picture perfect in person.  These next two photos are glitteringly-enticing samples of the hundreds of colorful and lovingly-adorned booths of local and homemade goodies and crafts available to browse and purchase (many more festive photos to come in future posts).

Wait.  I'm jumping ahead.  There was still a list to be made and official travel guru services to be serviced.  But since I jumped ahead already, to the right is a sneak peak at the first of eight markets we marketed during our Christmas-before-Thanksgiving visit.

Christkindlmarkt.at/Wiener-Christkindl was one of the most useful and enjoyably browsable sites before visiting the actual sights of the markets.

Since we have always loved spending Christmas with Mari's family and our niece and nephews, we decided to visit the Christmas markets during our Thanksgiving holiday since we are fortunate enough to have the entire school week off.  The Christmas markets in Vienna seem to start in early to mid-November, so Thanksgiving was a perfect opportunity for Christmas (and flea!) market travel.  Perfect, as long as you are willing to exchange your traditional turkey-laced Thanksgiving for local (non-turkey) Viennese favorites. Needless to say, a couple of (really early) early-bird Luby's Luann turkey platters later and bags packed (remember the bubble wrap!), we were off on our first overseas Thanksgiving Christmasmarketing adventure.

More on our treasured hand-crafted finds and our first schnitzel next time.