The Rest of Austria; or, Eurocup 101

Many apologies for the lack of blogging, we plan to catch up tonight! Currently, we are in Prague (Praha to the locals), and are having a lovely time in the last city on our trip - CRAZY!!

Let me take you all out there in internet world back a few days. After our time in Vienna, we hopped a train to Salzburg, which is about a three-four hour trip. The last twenty minutes were thrilling, however, as we got to glimpse the Austrian Alps! As Jen would say, get it!!

I think we were all a bit bummed because Switzerland didn't work out for us, and we really wanted to see those mountains. But the Austrian Alps are gorgeous none the less, so our need for mountains was clearly met.

We got to our hostel a bit late at night, because we all needed to do laundry, really, really badly. I mean really badly, folks. Jen and I had a bit of a disaster in Amalfi - we both tried to hand wash a good portion of our clothes, but it stayed kind of wet and humid while we were there, thus our clothes never got dry. Ew. My handy Rick Steve's book told us about this place called the "Bubblepoint" in Salzburg, which had laundry AND internet! What a deal! So we began our time there, smelling much better indeed.

Our hostel was a bit out of the center of the city, but was not really as much of a hostel as it was a budget hotel. Lap of luxury for us! Comfortable beds, cute bathroom with a nice big shower, and yes, you guessed it, a TV!! We got more CNN time in which was just lovely. We were all a bit hungry, and were pointed in the direction of a late night Greek restaurant, enjoyed the fare there, then had a good night's sleep.

We began our only full day in Salzburg with our usual "let's wander and see what we happen upon". This usually works well for us, as we happened upon a cute produce market, and a gorgeous cathedral with a very interesting and historical graveyard behind it. We learned that in Austria, you rent your gravesite. So, if your sons and daughters and grandchildren and whatnot decide to quit making payments on your grave after you pass, they actually exhume your body and bury you in more of a mass grave kind of thing. Then, they rent the spot out to the next person. A bit morbid, but we found it interesting!

Then, it was castle time. We took the funicular up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress, which sits atop a cliff overlooking Salzburg. It was built in 1077 by Archbishop Gebhard, and then updated by a whole lot of other Archbishops. While wandering the fortress grounds, we came upon a big statue of a bull. A unique story about the fortress, when under siege once upon a time, the people inside the fortress were starving. One day, they let out their only bull to graze. Then, they were very clever. They next day, they painted the bull black (it was originally white), let it out again, to cause the enemy to believe they had plenty of food and could last in the fortress for a long time. This caused the enemy to give up and retreat. Kind of cute, right?

I can't remember if this has been mentioned before, but we again ran into the Eurocup Football celebrations. One of the main squares in Salzburg was taken over by beer tents, a stage, and lots of big posters. I was a little peeved when I found the famous statue of one of my favorite (and craziest) composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was surrounded by said beer tents and big Eurocup signs. Why you gotta ruin my photograph, Eurocup?

After some more wandering, shopping, coffee-drinking, and more ethnic food for dinner, it was back to our lovely hotel, where we simply rested and planned our next day's adventure.

We were going to go straight from Salzburg to Munich, but decided, hey, why not check out Innsbruck? It was in our original plan, and was a feasible day trip, so we hopped a train the next morning to Innsbruck. We arrive in Innsbruck on a train with many, many young people in Football gear, chanting and drinking and having a wonderful time. We didn't think much of it, because we were used to this by now, as we were well aware most of the Eurocup games are going on in Austria and Switzerland. But upon arrival, we quickly decipher that that day, Spain would be playing Sweden in Innsbruck. Let the awesome/ridiculousness begin.

To figure out what to do in Innsbruck, as we really hadn't planned anything, and because we expected to arrive in a cozy and quaint mountain town, I found the local tourist information, asked the gentleman what to do if you only had six hours in Innsbruck, and he looked at me bleakly. Football had taken over, and I was informed that Austria is not for Football. The flatter countries are better suited. Apparently he was not amused at the Eurocup. So, after a little advice from him and a map, we wandered.

The main road of Salzburg was PACKED with Spanish supporters and Swedish supporters. There was lots of chanting, song-singing, crazy wig-wearing, and beer drinking. We got some good photos of the insanity, and decided we were hungry, and McDonalds was cheap and familiar. We were probably the only people in that packed McDonalds who were not there because of football. We had a very fun experience of hearing the Spanish chant their little football tune, then the Swedes immediately reply with theirs, and so on and so forth.

After more wandering and some shopping, we needed to head back to the train station. Well, this took a bit longer than anticipated, because the game was about to start. Thus, a parade of thousands of Swedes was in our path. I have never seen so much blonde hair, tall figures, and chisled cheekbones in my life!!! They were surely excited, however. Literally folks, I am not kidding when I say, thousands of Swedes. It was awesome. We almost missed our train, but made it, and were safely, and more quietly on our way to Munich.

We keep running into these random events, which I think makes our experience rather fun and unique. I will let my compadres discuss our next few days' events in Munich and our crazy trip to Prague. We fly back in less than 48 hours...and can't even believe it!