We stayed in the Landhaus Prasch on Zollstraße, a small walk from the bus stop. I recall that we were attracted by their promise of "Sauna – Swimmingpool – Whirlpool", which of course we didn't bother using. Shortly after arriving, a drunken Simon, with whom I was sharing a room, had to be restrained from throwing a chair off our balcony in a rock-star tantrum.
After "freshening up" (read: watching MTV for five minutes), we thought we'd hit town for a leisurely meal, before heading back for an early night in anticipation of the next day's activities. We quickly realised that there is basically only one street where anything is happening: Städtle.
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do" – the same applies in Vaduz, so we went to a pizzeria and had some good-quality fare alongside some extreme wheat beer. It was around about this point that, by pure luck, we caught sight of a policeman walking Liechtenstein's legendary one and only police dog – I leapt to my feet and took a picture, but sadly the animal was too far away for the flash, so I am unable to post a photograph with the caption "Walking with beast". There's not much for a policeman to do in this town, as was evident from the way he zealously told off some bloke for parking in the wrong place, even though there were no other cars in sight.
The next morning I opened the curtains to be greeted by a rather pleasing view, which I attempt to replicate here with the use of four murky prints, some cut-and-paste and some dodgy smudging. Still, you get the idea.
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If you look carefully in the top right, you can just about see the castle nestling in the mountainside which overlooks Vaduz. Having come all this way, we thought we'd better put in a token amount of sightseeing before getting into the drinking, so we made it our business to find a path and walk up to it. On the way we passed a video shop and all "busted out" at a poster for the film Chicken Run, which, it transpires, was translated into German as the amusingly rhymed Hennen Rennen.
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The castle is actually only about a quarter of the way up the Alp in question, but it was still pretty knackering, especially for someone whose idea of exercise is walking from one pub to another during the course of an afternoon. The views of Vaduz itself, and across the valley to the Rhine and "some other Alps", were pretty spectacular, but of course the castle – the only thing which you could vaguely count as having potential as a tourist attraction – is closed to visitors, because Prince Hans-Adam II lives there (when not busy trying to patent Basmati Rice).
To compensate for this, we re-enacted a scene from The Sound of Music (the film, rather than the Tramlink forfeit round, that is):
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Actually, to be fair, Vaduz also boasts an art museum, and – of course – a postage stamp museum of world renown. With only a limited amount of time, it was a shame we couldn't check out the art gallery, but who could resist the allure of a postage stamp museum? Having noticed that it was right next to the Postbus stop, we resolved to pay it a visit on Sunday morning before heading home.
In any event, having investigated the castle, had a brief wander around in some woods (which had a fantastic smell of wild garlic), and taken an unnecessary amount of very similar pictures of the castle (which I have kindly spared you), we decided that we were ready to take on Vaduz and see what its pubs had to offer.