Salzburg

the town of mozart and the sound of music. on our way on eurobus, leaving venice and crossing the boarder to austria and going back to the german language. peter, our bus driver, popped in the sound of music, which we all (well...not all) enjoyed. let's just say there was some singing along.

it was hot in salzburg. i had pants on on the bus and immediatly changed to shorts and was out the door in about 15 minutes. dennis and i decided to take a walk towards the city center and i tried to track down a bank that would let me use my credit card and 2 forms of id to take money out, since i didn't have my pin code for the atm. no luck. jaime and carly m. eventually met up with us and we walked until we found shops and the city center. we stumbled upon a magnificent water fountain and sat next to it, waiting for the wind to pick up and sent drops of water our way. from there we hit up the post office for phone cards and post cards and then we made our way to a square with a small market and lots of people playing chess. there were huge lifesize chess boards and people playing small ones. we even had a piano player over to the side who did requests. jaime and dennis played a huge game of chess and many people came over to watch, which was really neat. i think jaime won...i don't remember. after some more window shopping we made our way back to our hotel for supper. after some food, a group of us got together to "go up the mountain," as there is a big mountain fortress pretty much right in the middle of the city. so dennis, jaime, jill, steph, silus and myself take off and eventually find a funicular up to the mountain, where they happen to be having a mozart concert going on in the castle. it was pretty empty up at the castle, which made it more enjoyable for searching around and enjoying the fantastic views from uptop. it was amazing. eventually steph and i got lost from the group uptop and after about 20 minutes ran into them again. there was a restaurant up there also, so some of the group got drinks and we sat by ourselves, except one other group of 3 guys, looking out over the city, enjoying each others company. eventually the other group looks up at us and asks where we were from. "minnesota" we tell them. "no way! we're from minnesota, too!" what a coincidence that the only other people up there were from minnesota! apparently these 3 guys were playing american football over here (well, really in germany) and 1 of them was coaching young kids too. we ended the night walking down the mountain, instead of taking the funicular, and jaime with his aviator sunglasses, singing top gun songs to us the whole way down. it was so much fun. we also got scared by this statue that looked strickingly real as it sat over in the shadows until jaime threw a coin at it and we were all much better after we heard the coin clank against the metal of the statue. steph also ended up giving jaime a piggy back ride for much of our walk. all in all...it was a pretty fun night.

the next day we woke up and loaded the bus with luggage and then were on our way for our salzburg tour. we saw sights from the sound of music, which causes many re-enactment pictures and we also saw mozarts gebertshaus (birth house) and did a little bit of shopping. some people bought mozart balls but my big buy was my music box that plays edleweiss and has edleweiss on the front of it. i played it a couple of times straight, it's such a pretty song. after a tour of mozart's church, where he was baptised and were he and his father played these magnificent organs (there was 5 organs in the church and the tour guide explained how the back organ, mozarts organ, was so hard to play as it takes 3 seconds for the sound from that organ to reach the other 4 at the front of the church and how the other 4 players had mirrors set up by their music so they could see the rest of the organ players) we were back on the bus. we watched salzburg fade away, drove past the huge abbey where maria got married on the sound of music, and then were on our way to vienna.

Venezia

Venice seems so long ago, but I have to keep going with my updates...Our stay in Venice was pretty interesting. We wake up that morning and walk across the street to the train station where Peter, our bus driver, pays for our tickets to take the train from our town into Venice. The train ride is about 5 minutes, taking us over water into the train station in Venice. We are greeted with the Grand Cannel outside the train station and begin our walk all the way over to the other side of Venice to meet our tour guide. We think that we are being led astray by Peter as we are walking through narrow streets and over funky bridges. Being led like this through strange cities scares us as we are usually left after our tours to find our way back to the hotels. We finally get the the Doge's Palace in Venice, right by the main harbour and at the main square, St. Mark's, which you might recognize from the DeBeer's "A Diamond is Forever" commercial in which the guy and the girl are twirling in this square and he starts yelling "I. LOVE. THIS. WOMAN!" and the girl, embarrassed at him yelling this out, asks him to stop and he said that this will have to do, presents her with a diamond ring, and then she starts whispering, "i love this man, i love this man." so yeah, anyway, that's where i was. our tour that morning was at the doge's palace, where we had a very rude and, well, i have no other way to describe him...non informational? tour guide. he said some pretty off handed and rude comments to some of our members of our group that left us doing a 'did he really just say that?' laugh. and we pretty much learned nothing about the palace or about the doge's because our tour guide was that bad. what we did learn was that carly was mary magdalene and that jaime's new nickname's are machine gun and pedro...and that pedro has 26 kids. interesting. afterwards though, we went to a glass blowing factory and had a demonstration which was the coolest thing i have ever seen. it was absolutely amazing how the glass blower easily molded the glass into a vase. then we went upstairs where they tried to sell their venician glass to us poor college students. it was still quite the experience. returning back to the outdoors of venice, crystal, carly and i walked around venice doing some shopping and eventually we were tracked down by a gandola operator who we paid 90 euros for a ride. he was pretty funny...he ran all over the place just to get his gandola for us...we wanted to yell out to him as he hopped from gandola to gandola to get to his, to calm down...we weren't going anywhere! but we had an amazing gandola ride where we saw the bridge of sighs, casanova's house and marco polo's house. we got to wear our gandola dude's hat and take pictures with him. it was definetly worth the 30 euros i paid. next, the 3 of us, after much confussion, boarded a vaporetto (water bus), which took us out to the island of Lido, where we met much of our group out on the sandy beaches for some fun in the sun. Sand castles were built, sea shells were picked, and let's just say that a bunch of us girls decided that, once we were far out in the Adrianic Sea, that we were far enough away from anyone else so spontananity took place and we went skinny dipping. it was pretty wild. don't worry...suits were put back on shortly afterwards and before we returned back to being able to touch the bottom of the ocean and before shore!

at about 5, we all broke up, heading our separate ways to get back to our hotel. My group (Nic, Crystal, Carly and I) grabbed some gelato (mmmm...ice cream) before finding our water bus. Once we reached the grand cannel, we did some shopping and then boarded the train for the way back. I met up with other people from our group back at the hotel and heard what everyone had been up to that day. Crystal and I ate some wonderful chinese food at a place across the street and then I retreated to my hotel room, turning in early for the night...which didn't last long as jaime came and asked if i wanted to go on a night time gondola ride with a small group. not wanting to turn down an adventure, i went with. grady, fallon, crystal, jaime and i headed back into venice with a time limit...we didn't want to miss the last train back to our hotel. once there we easily found a gondola ride and a reasonable price and where on our way. fallon sang madonna songs the whole ride, hoping that madonna would answer back to her as she has an apartment in the city. many stars do have apartments in the city, as it's one of the most expensive places to live. we sat and joked around and asked our gondola dude questions, but he didn't speak much english. once back on ground, we stopped for our last taste of real italian gelato, which was wonderful. we then retreated to our train, which we had a great deal of fun finding...it might help if we spoke the language...and went back to our hotel, to pack up and get ready to leave for austria the next morning.

gondola rides for the day: 50 euros. or about approx...$65 ish dollars.

don't worry...it was well worth it!