So you might remember me telling you that we were given German Rail Passes by AJY, and that I used a day to go to Oktoberfest. Well, I have 4 days left, and need to use them by the end of the month, so I need to travel, and fast! Luckily, Annika had a hankering to go to Salzburg. Haleigh, Anne, Annika and I decided to go last weekend.
We left on Friday night, caught a train from Heidelberg to Munich and then were going to take a train from Munich to Salzburg, and get in somewhere around midnight. We caught the train to Munich no problemo, chug chug chuging away (except trains don't run on coal, so there was no actual chugging) but then we stop for a prolonged time in Stuttgart. We hear that we are going to be delayed 10 minutes...then 20...5 which would have been fine, if we had more than 23 minutes between trains. Which we didn't, I'm sure you're surprised to hear. Once we got to Munich, we ran like crazy in case our train was still there, but it was just pulling away. We made haste to the ticket machine, and got our tickets for the next train to Salzburg.
After wandering around the train station for a while, we got nervous we'd miss our train, so we hopped on and found our compartment (awesome!), met a guy named Sam from Boston who was under the impression that four women traveling alone needed his help to get in their compartment, which was nice of him, but unnecessary. We thoroughly enjoyed the compartment, and got to Salzburg at 1:17 in the morning. We got out our GoogleMaps directions, ready to head to the hostel....aaaand realized it would take us an hour and a minute, which was not a big deal, we were just like "well, let's hop to it!"
We got a little lost on the streets of Salzburg, and it ended up taking us about two and a half hours to get to our hostel. We weren't stressed or anything, we were just ready for bed, but the weirdest part was how fine we all were with the fact that we were wandering around, without really knowing where we were going. It was great, I had a blast. We all agreed it was a good thing Megan wasn't there (by her own admission) she would not have dealt with that situation in the same way.
Someone was walking in the door as we got to the hostel, so we didn't have to worry about getting in (which turned out to be our downfall, but we'll get to that in a little bit). Went to the reception desk which was (unsurprisingly) not open. We called the number posted, to no avail. Eventually it was almost 4 and we needed sleep. Since we had no other options, we found a room off the foyer that had a few chairs in it, and we dove right in, Anne and Annika taking the chairs, Haleigh and I taking the marble floor (so warm I almost felt cold). We snuggled down (as much as one can snuggle with marble in a room with motion sensitive lights) and fell asleep.
I managed to sleep for about an hour before I woke up, and saw that Anne and Annika were both awake too. I sat up, the lights flickered on, and we sort of sat there, cold and tired for a little while. Eventually we put on all the clothes we brought with us, Haleigh and I laid our bath towels down to create a buffer between the ice cold marble and us, and drifted off to sleep for a short time. We woke up a little while later and once the reception desk was open, checked in, and the lady asked us "Warum habt ihr die Glocke nicht geklingelt?"- " why didn't you ring the bell?"
Apparently, had we not been able to get in behind the young man walking in at the same time as us, we would have seen a bell that would have rung to her room, and she could have checked us in that night. Well, c'est la vie. We paid for our nights (we still had to pay for the night before, due to their cancellation policy, which was a bummer but understandable), got our linen, came back downstairs to eat breakfast and then jumped in bed for a nap.
Once we woke up from our three hour nap in the hostel, we got ready and explored the city! This consisted of us going to the Altstadt and looking at historical-ey things, like Mozart’s Geburtshaus where we took a picture and moved on (that museum=lame). We also found a Flohmarkt where Haleigh and I bought some rings and then moved onto the Festung. The Festung is the castle, and it’s got quite a hike to get up to the top, something we did gladly instead of paying 10 Euro for the bus thing. We stopped at the world’s largest Amber museum, may or may not have (hint: it happened) purchased a present for Annika’s upcoming birthday, and enjoyed the warmth of the museum before venturing out back into the cold and up the mountain.
We got to the top, and really enjoyed the view of what was directly below us and fog. Look…clouds! It was a chilly day, let me tell you. Something happened to my foot (shocked, aren’t you, Mom?) when I was at the top which made getting down the hill difficult, but we got to see the legit Sound of Music nunnery (it was founded in 714! It’s the oldest continuously running nunnery) which was pretty sweet. After we got to the bottom, we were cold and ready to eat. We remembered we had seen a restaurant earlier that day that had delicious-sounding Kürbiscremesuppe (pumpkin cream soup), and decided to go find it again, which was such a good decision. Annika and I shared a bowl of soup and pumpkin gnocci, which was all really good. The soup was aptly described by Anne as being so good “you want to cry and eat it forever.”
We walked back to our hostel and all got ready for bed, luxurating in the fact that we had beds and heat and a room that was meant for sleeping in! We talked for a while, basically having a sleepover (Anne even French-braided my hair!) and enjoyed going to bed early.
Sunday we decided to go do a few things we had missed on Saturday and then catch a train around 13:30 to head home. First we went out back of our hostel and reenacted the Wizard’s Chess Harry Potter scene with the giant board of chess pieces, and then reenacted “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” in the pitiful gazebo (wooden structure with plastic chairs in it).
We went back into the city and got our Mozartkugeln, tried to see another church (mass was in session, so we weren’t able to though) and went to the gardens where Maria and the children run through singing Do Re Me- a great decision. First of all, we found a garden of statues we all had to pose with, we found a super neat playground, and used continuous shot for us skipping through the covered ways, AND we found a maze like in Harry Potter and reenacted scenes from HP. It was fantastic.
About the park: there was this crazy looking slide we found (we were above it, looking at the gardens, and we saw this crazy looking slide. “that looks so crazy. [pause] that looks dangerous. [pause] let’s go!” We did, and it was quite the adventure to get up it. First of all, there were platforms you had to crawl up, it wasn’t possible to just use a ladder (although there was a particularly useless ladder there, taunting us at it’s potential usefulness, had the architect thought it out), meaning we had to heave our bodies up each level, precariously balancing and grasping at boards and beams to gain some control. Second of all, it got smaller as we climbed up it, a fact we should have realized when we saw it, since it was a triangle frame. It wasn’t exactly built for use by four adult sized women. Whatever, we did it anyway, and it was fine. Since getting up was so difficult, we decided we HAD to leave via the slide (something we weren’t planning on doing, since it was a particularly wet day in Salzburg). Anne didn’t want to slide down it (though she said she’d take pictures of us), but we agreed she’d take too long to get down so we peer pressured her into going first (adulthood at it’s finest).
After the park, we went to Schweedy, a Swedish candy store that opened at one, and we definitely didn’t pick our train based on when it opened, because that would have been silly. Annika was psyched to see some candy she hadn’t seen since Swedish Bible School; we blazed through there and moved it to the Hbf, caught the train, and found a compartment that wasn’t reserved until Munich. When we got to Munich, we tried to find more seats, but were unsuccessful, and spent the next few hours crouching/standing/sitting in the aisle next to the compartments.
All in all, a satisfying weekend, despite the problemos we had initially. We all had a great time, laughed so much everyone knew we were Americans (typisch Amerikanerinnen!) and experienced things that were unexpectedly awesome- a trip full of beautiful mishaps, as Annika would say.
We left on Friday night, caught a train from Heidelberg to Munich and then were going to take a train from Munich to Salzburg, and get in somewhere around midnight. We caught the train to Munich no problemo, chug chug chuging away (except trains don't run on coal, so there was no actual chugging) but then we stop for a prolonged time in Stuttgart. We hear that we are going to be delayed 10 minutes...then 20...5 which would have been fine, if we had more than 23 minutes between trains. Which we didn't, I'm sure you're surprised to hear. Once we got to Munich, we ran like crazy in case our train was still there, but it was just pulling away. We made haste to the ticket machine, and got our tickets for the next train to Salzburg.
After wandering around the train station for a while, we got nervous we'd miss our train, so we hopped on and found our compartment (awesome!), met a guy named Sam from Boston who was under the impression that four women traveling alone needed his help to get in their compartment, which was nice of him, but unnecessary. We thoroughly enjoyed the compartment, and got to Salzburg at 1:17 in the morning. We got out our GoogleMaps directions, ready to head to the hostel....aaaand realized it would take us an hour and a minute, which was not a big deal, we were just like "well, let's hop to it!"
We got a little lost on the streets of Salzburg, and it ended up taking us about two and a half hours to get to our hostel. We weren't stressed or anything, we were just ready for bed, but the weirdest part was how fine we all were with the fact that we were wandering around, without really knowing where we were going. It was great, I had a blast. We all agreed it was a good thing Megan wasn't there (by her own admission) she would not have dealt with that situation in the same way.
Someone was walking in the door as we got to the hostel, so we didn't have to worry about getting in (which turned out to be our downfall, but we'll get to that in a little bit). Went to the reception desk which was (unsurprisingly) not open. We called the number posted, to no avail. Eventually it was almost 4 and we needed sleep. Since we had no other options, we found a room off the foyer that had a few chairs in it, and we dove right in, Anne and Annika taking the chairs, Haleigh and I taking the marble floor (so warm I almost felt cold). We snuggled down (as much as one can snuggle with marble in a room with motion sensitive lights) and fell asleep.
I managed to sleep for about an hour before I woke up, and saw that Anne and Annika were both awake too. I sat up, the lights flickered on, and we sort of sat there, cold and tired for a little while. Eventually we put on all the clothes we brought with us, Haleigh and I laid our bath towels down to create a buffer between the ice cold marble and us, and drifted off to sleep for a short time. We woke up a little while later and once the reception desk was open, checked in, and the lady asked us "Warum habt ihr die Glocke nicht geklingelt?"- " why didn't you ring the bell?"
Apparently, had we not been able to get in behind the young man walking in at the same time as us, we would have seen a bell that would have rung to her room, and she could have checked us in that night. Well, c'est la vie. We paid for our nights (we still had to pay for the night before, due to their cancellation policy, which was a bummer but understandable), got our linen, came back downstairs to eat breakfast and then jumped in bed for a nap.
Once we woke up from our three hour nap in the hostel, we got ready and explored the city! This consisted of us going to the Altstadt and looking at historical-ey things, like Mozart’s Geburtshaus where we took a picture and moved on (that museum=lame). We also found a Flohmarkt where Haleigh and I bought some rings and then moved onto the Festung. The Festung is the castle, and it’s got quite a hike to get up to the top, something we did gladly instead of paying 10 Euro for the bus thing. We stopped at the world’s largest Amber museum, may or may not have (hint: it happened) purchased a present for Annika’s upcoming birthday, and enjoyed the warmth of the museum before venturing out back into the cold and up the mountain.
We got to the top, and really enjoyed the view of what was directly below us and fog. Look…clouds! It was a chilly day, let me tell you. Something happened to my foot (shocked, aren’t you, Mom?) when I was at the top which made getting down the hill difficult, but we got to see the legit Sound of Music nunnery (it was founded in 714! It’s the oldest continuously running nunnery) which was pretty sweet. After we got to the bottom, we were cold and ready to eat. We remembered we had seen a restaurant earlier that day that had delicious-sounding Kürbiscremesuppe (pumpkin cream soup), and decided to go find it again, which was such a good decision. Annika and I shared a bowl of soup and pumpkin gnocci, which was all really good. The soup was aptly described by Anne as being so good “you want to cry and eat it forever.”
We walked back to our hostel and all got ready for bed, luxurating in the fact that we had beds and heat and a room that was meant for sleeping in! We talked for a while, basically having a sleepover (Anne even French-braided my hair!) and enjoyed going to bed early.
Sunday we decided to go do a few things we had missed on Saturday and then catch a train around 13:30 to head home. First we went out back of our hostel and reenacted the Wizard’s Chess Harry Potter scene with the giant board of chess pieces, and then reenacted “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” in the pitiful gazebo (wooden structure with plastic chairs in it).
We went back into the city and got our Mozartkugeln, tried to see another church (mass was in session, so we weren’t able to though) and went to the gardens where Maria and the children run through singing Do Re Me- a great decision. First of all, we found a garden of statues we all had to pose with, we found a super neat playground, and used continuous shot for us skipping through the covered ways, AND we found a maze like in Harry Potter and reenacted scenes from HP. It was fantastic.
About the park: there was this crazy looking slide we found (we were above it, looking at the gardens, and we saw this crazy looking slide. “that looks so crazy. [pause] that looks dangerous. [pause] let’s go!” We did, and it was quite the adventure to get up it. First of all, there were platforms you had to crawl up, it wasn’t possible to just use a ladder (although there was a particularly useless ladder there, taunting us at it’s potential usefulness, had the architect thought it out), meaning we had to heave our bodies up each level, precariously balancing and grasping at boards and beams to gain some control. Second of all, it got smaller as we climbed up it, a fact we should have realized when we saw it, since it was a triangle frame. It wasn’t exactly built for use by four adult sized women. Whatever, we did it anyway, and it was fine. Since getting up was so difficult, we decided we HAD to leave via the slide (something we weren’t planning on doing, since it was a particularly wet day in Salzburg). Anne didn’t want to slide down it (though she said she’d take pictures of us), but we agreed she’d take too long to get down so we peer pressured her into going first (adulthood at it’s finest).
After the park, we went to Schweedy, a Swedish candy store that opened at one, and we definitely didn’t pick our train based on when it opened, because that would have been silly. Annika was psyched to see some candy she hadn’t seen since Swedish Bible School; we blazed through there and moved it to the Hbf, caught the train, and found a compartment that wasn’t reserved until Munich. When we got to Munich, we tried to find more seats, but were unsuccessful, and spent the next few hours crouching/standing/sitting in the aisle next to the compartments.
All in all, a satisfying weekend, despite the problemos we had initially. We all had a great time, laughed so much everyone knew we were Americans (typisch Amerikanerinnen!) and experienced things that were unexpectedly awesome- a trip full of beautiful mishaps, as Annika would say.
adulthood at it's (sic) finest= awesome
ReplyDeleteSalzburg is beautiful. I wanted to relive it on your blog but there were no pictures! That's it. I want my money back.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chris "Never-gonna-post-a-comment-first-again" Korn -- need pictures.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning on having a "salzburg through photos" post because I needed to wait on everyone having their pictures up- I didn't get coverage of all that happened.
ReplyDeleteOk, clearly, you have died--when do we get more posts? They do not have to be book length, nor even novella length,a paragraph every now and then would be fine.
ReplyDelete