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Who would have thought that the first stamp in either of my passports would have been from the tiny country of Liechtenstein? But it was. Although you don't need to present any documentation when entering the country from Switzerland, you can pay 3 Franks at the tourist center to get a stamp for your passport (which is the only place in the world to obtain the Liechtenstein stamp). So I paid 6 Franks and got both my Portuguese and Canadian passports stamped. Despite previous international trips these were the first stamps in either passport :D
The country of Liechtenstein is very small (population of approx. 33,000), so you can imagine that the capital of Vaduz isn't very large. In fact, you can apparently jog end-to-end in 5 minutes. This, of course, did not happen as we had many stops to make along the way. The first was lunch at a little restaurant where Teree and Robyn sampled the local bratwurst and I stuck with the less adventurous pasta pomodoro (which was very good). We then headed to Hokellerei, the reigning Prince's winery, at the Eastern edge of the city, but got distracted along the route by an interesting "wind chime" building (as the girls described it). It ended up being the "Arts and Communication Centre", but it looked like it had a trail that ran around the building, and had pieces of 2x4 hanging from the track. It was definitely an odd building.
We finally made it to the winery, after finding out that Robyn does have navigational skills, but apparently only if there is wine at the end. The winery was beautiful and set in an old red building with vineyards all around. Approximately, 90% of the wines produced from this vineyard are pinot noir (the other 10% are unoaked Chardonnay), but the Prince does own wineries and vineyards in Austria, which produces other varietals. We sampled the wine (obviously) and were pleasantly surprised by the taste of Grappa we sampled at the end. After purchasing a couple bottles of wine we headed out to climb the mountain and look at the castle (Schloss Vaduz), which is the main residence of the reigning Prince. Although the castle isn't open to the public we'd been told the views of the city were spectacular. However, finding the path that led to the castle proved to be more difficult than we'd thought as we essentially walked the entire parameter of the city before finding the right one. Once we did finally reach the castle we were not disappointed.
Having walked through all of the city in a matter of hours we grabbed a seat at a cafe and enjoyed a cappucino.
All in all this impromtu day trip to Liechtenstin proved to be very entertaining and well worth the 1.5 hour commute.
As for the rest of the night, we're having a relatively low-key dinner and, of course, some wine :)
Tomorrow we plan on sightseeing in Zurich and maybe do a little more shopping....
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