Life with MK: Salzburg

Yesterday I packed up yet again and left Bled by train en route to Salzburg, Austria! When I got here I had forgotten to look up which bus to take to my hotel (big shocker, it's becoming a trend that I need to stop), so I went to a nearby Internet cafe and got 5 mins of Internet to figure it out. I figured out the bus fare and went to buy some food both to have for lunch and to get change for a bus ticket. Once I was finally on the bus I had a pretty easy time arriving at my hostel and checking in.

The hostel here is good, though there are a lot of middle school aged kids which makes it a bit noisy and rambunctious and hard to meet anyone who's my age. Anyways, you put your luggage in lockers in the hall here, which is actually really nice because you don't have to feel bad about disturbing people and people can't really disturb your sleep too much either! So anyways, after I arrived it started to pour and that made me feel very lazy. I basically sat around in the hostel, booked the tour I took today, and watches the Euro2012 matches while playing on my phone.

Today I got up bright and early to he on a tour to the salt mines just across the border in Germany. It was a pretty cool and interesting tour. We got I go deep into the mountain and see the tunnels, go down two luge/wooden slides, ride a boat across a salty underground lake, and taste how salty the water was from a fountain. It was interesting to see how the mine formed geologically and to learn how they still mine the salt!

After the mines the bus took us to pick up the other half of the group that went to Hitler's Eagles Nest. I got to see it from a distance at least! Once we picked them up we wet for lunch in the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden. I ate with a couple from San Diego and that covered about all the time we had there! We then drove back through the beautiful mountains and arrived back in Salzburg.

From the bus stop I walked back to the hostel and basically passed out I was so tired. I took about an hour nap before heading out to take a self guided walking your of the old town of Salzburg with my trusty Rick Steve's guidebook (Salzburg is included in the Germany book yay).

The waking tour was quite nice and I saw a lot of cool sites including Mozart's birthplace, the cathedral where Mozart was the organist for two years, St. Peters cemetery (which was so crazy beautiful), the open air market, shops, and so much more. I think the coolest fact I learned was that grave sites in Austria are rented and not owned. They send out rent bills every ten years and if the relatives don't pay the tombstone is removed. People at home would absolutely flip if that happened!

After my lively tour I got some grapes for dinner, and ate them along with a delicious cheese covered pretzel I bought while walking. Now I'm back at the hostel watching more Euro2012. Germany is on in 20 minutes and I've decided I'll cheer for Germany (since its the country I'm visiting most on my trip and because of Jutta) and Sweden (since that's where my family is from!). So tonight I'll give a big Go Deutschland and tomorrow it's off to meet up with the cousins, yay!