Vienna

Souvenir Sunday – in Vienna

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It’s Souvenir Sunday, the day StuckatTheAirport.com usually looks at fun, inexpensive, locally-themed items you can buy at airports.

But..because I’ve spent the week on a river – the Danube River – on board a Viking River Cruise, this week’s souvenirs come from one of our stops.

In Vienna, the chef for the cruise toured a group of about 15 passengers through a downtown market where stalls were filled with everything from fish and wine and olives to every spice you can imagine

We got to see everything, of course, but also had an opportunity to do some tastings.

Then it was time to shop. Pretty much every stall had small and large packets of nuts, spices and dried fruit for sale. But I only found one shop that this wide and very colorful assortment of sardines – all priced at below $8.

Do you look for fun, unusual and locally-themed souvenir in your travels? If you see something great – especially at an airport – please snap a photo and send it along.

If se feature your souvenir on StuckatTheAirport.com, we’ll send you a travel-themed souvenir.

Museum Monday: more clocks of the world

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Last week, to mark the end of Daylight Saving Time, I put together a list of great places to watch the clock for a story on msnbc.com: How time flies! Where to see the world’s clocks.

Clock forest at American Clock and Watch Museum

The article featured places such the American Clock and Watch Museum in Bristol, Connecticut, which has a ‘clock forest’ (above) filled with dozens of tall cases and wall clocks that strike on the hour.

There wasn’t enough room in the story for all the cool clocks I found, so here are a few more:

St. Peter’s Church (below) in Zurich is the city’s oldest church and has a clock face that’s 28.5 feet; the largest clock face in Europe.

Zurich St. Peter's Church Clocktower

Zurich is also home to Beyer’s Clock and Watch Museum, a collection of more than 500 chronological instruments dating from 1400 B.C. to the present day, everything from sundials, hourglasses and water clocks to a quartz clock accurate to within a thousandth of a second a day and a quartz watch accurate to within a millionth of a second. Here’s a link to a video tour of the Beyer Clock and Watch Museum.

And then there’s Anker Clock, in Vienna, Austria, which was built between 1911 and 1917 and ‘performs’ a twelve-minute animation each day at noon.