Slowing down on these. I might update a lot more tomorrow. Day 5 - Monday, September 23rd - This was the day Tim’s friend Doug showed up at the house. We had a brief introduction but were already prepared to head out to Salzburg, Austria for the day and night. We hopped on the train and sat in some unreserved first-class seats (get an EURail pass, it’s fantastic) and met some “Southern Canadians” as they like to call themselves. Turns out they were from Minnesota so we knew they mostly spoke English. We had a brief chat before we did our own thing. I slipped on my borrow headphones and listened to an audiobook while Carver listened to one of the many podcasts on his iPod. It wasn’t long before we arrived at the train station and immediately walked the wrong direction of our reserved hostel on top of Mönchsberg. Mönchsberg is a hill area in the center of Salzburg that offers amazing views of the surrounding area and our hostel was no exception… Once we got there of course. At this point I discovered my GPS did not use the data network on my phone so CityMaps2Go actually proved to be quite useful in figuring out just where the hell we were. Turns out we took the long way. There’s a driveway up to a hotel on top of the hill with a narrow path for walking once you get to a certain point that lead to our hostel. Sure enough there was a lift, which I’ll get to in a minute. We got to the hostel just in time before it closed at 6 PM so we didn’t need to make any awkward calls. Had a beer and took a few pictures before piling our stuff into the lockers and headed out to the city. Couldn’t head out without taking in the gorgeous view, though. Completely surrounded by mountains and old architecture. The view because even more beautiful as the sun started to set over the mountains and cast long shadows over the city, just as it started to turn all the lights on. There was a nice old lady walking her dogs along the fort walls attached to our hostel that told us about an elevator to get up and down and a festival that was going on near the churches. We thanked her for the information and took the lift down, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have gone. It was a very, very long walk. The lift took us to the exact road we needed to take to get to the churches and the festival. We didn’t do much there, I just stared slack-jawed at the cuties dirndls and we ate some festive foods. I managed to snap a few pictures and a video of the people dancing on the stage before we decided to head back to the lift… which we discovered had closed. This sucked more than you can imagine. It was getting dark and we had to walk all the way around the damn hill again, then up the winding path and through the lightly forested area back to our hostel. By the time we got there the sun had completely gone down but it certainly left us with a glorious view of the lit-up city. When we made it back in, there was a friendly Aussie fellow who needed help opening his phone to change his SIM card but no one had a pin. This was crucial to him because he arrived late, didn’t have his key yet and the staff leaves at 6:00 PM. I said sorry because neither Carver nor I had an object that small on us so we went to our room and checked back on him occasionally. As magnificent as the view was the rooms were god-awful and made me dislike hostels on my first go. Two bunk-beds and four cabinets per room. We didn’t have anyone else staying in the room with us so we watched a few episodes of Archer before finally getting to sleep. Several issues occurred that night. The bunk-beds were made for someone who’s 5 foot nothing, there was late-night construction and multiple insane church bells ringing on through the night so we had to close the windows but when we did that the room heated up so much it was insanely hard to sleep. Managed to get a few good hours in but nothing substantial. It should be enough to get us to the train station tomorrow, though.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 21:51:47 +0000
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