Austria in my heart

I have long been planning to go to Sölden, which is considered the Alpine Ibiza. Back in October, I booked 3 apartments for our entire large company, bought tickets and looked forward to the first week of March. When less than a week was left before the trip, it turned out that they didn’t want to let me go on vacation at work, but I managed to persuade the general with difficulty, promising a labor feat upon return. However, you won’t get away from fate; you still couldn’t rest. The husband fell ill with pneumonia on the first day of vacation in Sölden, the child had bronchitis on the second...

The downside of this place is that there is only one pond where you can swim. A small pond by our standards with a sandy beach on the campsite is all there is. In the fall, this is of course completely irrelevant, and yet. It is from this pond that the road starts up to the top of Vorberg Hill - perhaps the most idle peak here, which you can easily climb with small children and even with a stroller along a good sandy road along which characters from children's fairy tales stand. Dwarves are mostly snow white and elves hiding behind trees and stones...

Autumn is the most controversial season. And sadly romantic, and snotty painful, already cool, but there is no snow. It’s not cold yet, but sunbathing is somehow dumb. Rains, leaves, grayness of the sky, wind, trees of fiery colors. I’m used to such an autumn during the time I lived in St. Petersburg. I got used to the very autumn that Yuri Shevchuk sang. Not that I would not love this autumn, but by the will of fate, I spent most of the summer in Moscow, in which I would not have experienced the moral fall...

The military campaign in Italy was progressing successfully - by the end of August, the Russian-Austrian allied forces liberated almost all of Italy and stood on the border with France. And the squadrons of Ushakov and the British Admiral Nelson freed Naples, the possessions of the allies of Austria, from the French. But things were not going so well in northern Europe. The French captured the Netherlands, also owned by the Habsburgs. For their release, troops were urgently transferred from the south...

Everyone knows that in the past, marriages between members of reigning dynasties were conceived solely to strengthen political alliances. In the process of preparing for trips to Europe, I often delve into books, and while reading biographies of princes, princes and emperors, I am amazed at how bizarre zigzags of European politics are. More than once I had a question: did the Romanovs and the Austrian Habsburgs enter into dynastic marriages? The first answer to this question I received, getting acquainted with the history of the tiny North German principality of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel...