Where to live?

The most important thing to decide on when finding where we wanted to live was the kids school and an area that spoke English. The areas that seemed to jump out at us the most was Vienna (the capital of Austria), Graz (this is an area where Ben has a cousin) and Salzburg as it was a high tourist area and just looked beautiful. We also wanted to be in a busy city close to all the main attractions, as coming from Cessnock which is a rural town we needed to drive an hour to get everywhere. (an hour to the beach, to Newcastle to the main shopping centre). So to be close to everything is paramount to deciding where would be good to base our lives. I am a water girl and love to be in and around water so when I saw the Salzach River that was a huge attraction for me, we also realised that Salzburg was only 1.5 hours from Hallstat, an adorable town built in to the side of a mountain that epitomised my vision of Austria. In fact we had a photo printed of Hallstat on canvas 5. years ago which has been hanging up in our bedroom and we look at it every morning when we wake up. It is of the lake with the cutest cottages built along side the township. We could just do a day trip there so easily if we lived in Salzburg.

Vieanna was cancelled out as it was quite a large city, it would be further away from Italy (which is also an area we want to travel) and it didn’t have as many of the sights and attractions that we wanted to see, plus we thought it would be colder and snow more.

An area of Austria that interested us was Innusbruck to go skiing and Salzburg is only 2 hours by train so again we could take day trips.

The clincher for our decision was the kids school. After researching a number of schools we found that Salzburg has an international school called Salis International School. The kids don’t have to wear a uniform, they teach in English and we could walk everywhere.

At this stage we don’t know where in Salzburg we want to live but we just know it is in Salzburg.

Salzburg has a castle, ice skating in the park, the most Christmas markets that we can’t wait to experience, really cute shops, museums, can ride a push bike everywhere and heres hoping that most people speak English.

We have purchased a map of Salzburg now and have drawn a 5 km radius from around the kids school in Lehen in a circumumference which is the area we are aiming to move to in Salzburg.