Wet laundry

Well... the night bus to Scotland wasn't too bad. It was only about 9 hours, and I actually did sleep a bit. I arrived at about 8 in the morning on Tuesday and it was pouring rain. I had promised myself that if it was raining I would suck it up and pay for a cab to my hostel instead of trekking with my big pack and 2 tote bags (the second tote bag was to hold all of the things that Kary donated to me upon her departure back to the states) all the way to my hostel. I didn't quite know where the hostel was, but was familiar with the major streets in Edinburgh from memory of my previous stays here. So... for some reason when I got out of the bus station... I just started walking... and never got a cab. It was only about a 5 minute walk (so with a pack on... its about 8-9 minutes), but it was pouring rain. By the time I got in, my pants were soaked up to my knees. Literally. And the tricky part about getting into the hostel at 8, was that I really couldn't check-in to my room until 2. I was freezing and soaking wet, and convinced the nice desk lady to let me upstairs so that I could at least shower and change my clothes (my hair was already soaking wet... realizing for the 3rd time that I forgot to pack an umbrella). After my shower and change, it was about 9, so I only had 5 hours to kill before I could get in my room (5 hours to roam around a drenched city with no umbrella). Anyway- after I junked around on the internet for a while, I mustered up the courage to face the cold rain and I packed all of my dirty laundry (90% of my clothes) into one of the tote bags to set out looking for a laundromat. I figured that was a reasonable thing to do on a rainy day- sit inside and watch clothes tumble in a circle for a few hours. I asked the nice lady at reception where the nearest laundry place was, to which she said that the hostel offers a laundry service for pretty cheap, and that if I dropped it off before noon, it would be back and folded before midnight. I thought about this for a minute, and realized that I wasn't ok with someone doing my laundry (especially because it seriously smelled) and I surely wasn't ok with some backpacker (who probably worked in the laundry room in the hostel so that he could stay free for the night) folding my unmentionables. So I told the lady thank you, played my tote bag off as a enormous purse, and headed out anyway to search on my own for a laundromat. 45 minutes later... soaking wet... I returned to the hostel with my tote bag still fermenting, and handed it over the counter so that some poor backpacker could fold my undies downstairs in the laundry room. By this time I only had one more hour to "waste" before I could check in... so I sat in the common room and read one of the books I picked up. At 2:00 on the dot I got my key, dumped my now empty backpack at the foot of my bed and crashed. I snuggled under the covers and warmed up to a nice long nap. When I woke up, the rain had subsided for a few minutes, so I ran out to the grocery store for some butter and juice and an orange. I came back to make buttered noodles (from the left over pasta I had) for dinner with a nice side of cranberry juice and orange slices.

Since we're speaking of food... this seems like a great opportunity to discuss something that is on my mind. I am very fond of Coca Cola Classic, and having family in Atlanta, I have had the opporutnity to visit the Coke Museum and have a pretty good understanding about its international market. I think I have taken coke for granted in the past, and now I have learned my lesson. When we were in Austria, (not knowing any German) I knew about 3 food-related words: cheese, pastry, and hamburger. Thankfully, Coke is Coke, and I easily could get my point across. Hence, I took a picture of me holding 2 coke cans, expressing my gratitude for coke being a worldwide product that I recognize.

The second food piece that I wanted to mention, is peanut butter. That is one food that I truly can eat everyday. I mean- its so versitle... you can eat it with bread (fresh bread, toasted bread, with jelly, with bananas:) you can eat it with fruits and veggies (celery and apples) you can dip crackers or cookies in it. Really- its a multi-functional food. And its a good mix of sweet and salty. Truly one of my favorite foods. When I was studying abroad in Wales, I had an awful time finding peanut butter. This is more of a jam and scones country, not a PBJ country. Thankfully my amazing family sent me some last time to pull me out of withdrawls. Well- when Kary and I were in Austria, we agreed that we should get peanut butter and use it for the dishes that I mentioned above. Of course every grocery store/convenience store we went into, we would look- but to no avail. UNTIL out of the corner of my eye one day I spotted ONE jar of SKIPPY at the grocery store of the smallest town we had visited! I didn't even look at the price, by merely darted down the aisles of apples, celery, bread and crackers to get a multitude of things to use the peanutbutter with. It traveled with us to France, but we had to leave it behind there before we got on the plane to London. Since I've been up here in Scotland... no such luck on my peanutbutter search. The only place I know that sells either Skippy or Jif in this country is in London at an international foods store (where they also sell different varieties of Oreos:), and I don't plan on returning to London simply for the PB.





(clearly its been a slow few days since I'm writing about Coke and Peanutbutter)

Photo update

I posted pictures for the previous blogs... so check them out :)

Paris

The journey continues... After arriving in Linz, we quickly realized that we were in the middle of an industrial city. Leave it up to me to navigate my way out of the cranes and cement to the shopping district. We got into Linz at about 2, and our bus didn't depart until 9:45... so we had a good chunk of time to kill. Being the prepared travelers that we are (since the incident at the airport on V-Day), we arrived with our packs about 20 minutes early to the bus stop. Thankfully there was another woman waiting at the station, which more or less assured us that we were in the right place. Her English was a bit broken and clearly some things were lost in translation. She had traveled on this bus before, and told us that one time it didn't come until 11:00 (which we thought she was referring to 10:00 and she just had trouble with English numbers). Well her bus came and left, and the coach driver assured us that the bus to Paris would arrive in "5 minutes." That was at 9:40. At 10:45... our coach FINALLY came... long after the fear, frostbite, runny nose and need for a toilet set in. So- we got on and were on our way just before 11:00pm. Sometime during the the 14 hour journey through the night, we passed through Germany and customs officials came onto our bus for a random search. I was so disorientated from being woken up in a strange place that I was totally clueless as to what was going on, but I was on super search mode for my passport. The officer passed by our seat, not even opening the cover of my passport- which was relieving, but I didn't take a breath for about 4 minutes while he walked up and down the length of the bus. Sometime in the morning, we stopped for a 10 minute break in rural Paris at a truck stop. The police officer at the gas station tried to strike a conversation with me because I was eating a ice cream bar and it was freezing outside... but my limited french vocabulary from high school left me with nothing cohesive to say... so I just shoved it in my mouth to avoid saying something I would regret. :) We finally got into Paris at about 2:00 the next afternoon. I was exhausted, tired, cranky, and smelly. We checked into our "hotel" (this building was a joke... but cheap) and just stretched out on the bed for the first time in 2 days. At dusk we headed out to explore some french sites by night. We went up the Eiffel Tower while it was lit up, then headed back to ground level and over to the Moulin Rouge. We enjoyed the spinning windmill with chocolate crepes in hand... That's French for you! Friday we woke up early and headed out by foot to explore the city. We saw Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre...among others. Friday night, admission to the Louvre was free for students, so we spent some time strolling through the hundreds of galleries in the museum. I got a quick glimpse at the Mona Lisa through the crowds... she's smaller than I expected. Yesterday we bummed around Paris for a bit longer, checking out some local art fairs and local tea/coffee shops. Exhausted, we got to the airport in Paris for our 9:45 flight back to the UK. I am happy to be back in a country in which I can fluently speak its language. Tomorrow I will be taking another night bus up to Scotland to start my job search.

The Moulin Rouge...


This man was playing some beautiful music in front of Norte Dame on Friday. Saturday we went back, and he was playing again... but he had a toupe on! Nonetheless... his music was great.

Festivals and Farms

After our beautiful stay in Hallstatt, we took the train to a larger town called Bad Ischl. Our main objective was to find an internet cafe to figure out how we were going to get out of Austria and to Paris by the end of the week. We checked our packs at the train station and headed out into the town. It was Sunday... enough said. All of the shops and restaurants were closed for the day, but thankfully we found the one and only internet cafe in town, and we were able to reconnect with the outside world and solidify some plans for the week. We decided to stay in Bad Ischl for the night, because we knew we didn't know other towns in the area, and we didn't want to take a train back to Salzburg. We criss crossed that town at least 10 times, and finally found a place to stay for the night. It was out of our normal price range, but we were tired and hungry and didn't have many other options. After fulfilling our primary need: shelter, we started working on fulfilling our secondary need: food. We noticed that everyone in town was starting to come out at about 6:00 and we didn't understand why. They were also all in strange costumes, or had their faces painted. Remembering that we didn't know any German, we decided to make many guesses... Halloween in February? Costume ball? Maybe the people of Bad Ischl always look like this? We returned to our room for the night, but didn't stay long. You see... our room was directly over the bar/restaurant, and all we could hear was laughter, yelling and music blasting through our floor...so we headed down to the bar to check it out. There was one woman in the bar. She was dressed as a mouse. There were about 7 or 8 men at the bar. They all had black paint marks all over their faces. Trying to be discrete, we sat at a table close to the bar and observed for a while. It wasn't long until we struck a conversation with the mouse... who spoke English... and she told us that this is considered the week of the Festival. Apparently many Austrian cities celebrate in their own way, the coming of Lent. Basically it was a 3 day drinking festival that happened before Lent started on Ash Wednesday. So on Sunday night, the whole town was out in costume to drink and 'be bad' before they had to 'be good' during lent. Our conversation with the mouse led to making Friends with the rest of the clientele in the bar (We stuck out like a sore thumb!). The men took it upon themselves to make friends with us and paint our faces. We had a great time drinking with the locals, listening to traditional Austrian music on the jukebox (mixed with a little N'Sync) and trying to hold conversations with people that had no idea what we were talking about. Good news... they knew Chicago as Al Capone, Michael Jordan, and Jazz music.


The Men... The Mouse... and The American Girls.


Kary and I with our face paint

We woke up the next morning... laughing about the night we had, and then headed to the Tourist Info point to get some tips as to how to get to Paris. After talking to the nice lady in the office, we decided to stay another 2 nights in Austria... on a farm. It was more or less a home stay with an Austrian family, and they lived on a farm! Our wonderful hostess, Theresa, picked us up all the way in Bad Ischl and drove us to her home in Abersee (about a 20 minute drive). She didn't speak much English, and we didn't speak much German, but we had a great time. She was so funny and tried soo hard to communicate with us. I've learned that a smile goes a long way... and laughter breaks down any language barrier. She had fantastic breakfast for us every morning, eggs and milk straight from the barn. There's nothing like the smell of cows in the morning... and I thought to myself, this is why I love Wisconsin. She was so accommodating and was happy to give us a tour of her farm- cows, pigs, dogs, cats, barns, tractors. At night we could hear her children singing some American songs from down stairs, and even though we didn't know what they were saying... siblings still fight in other countries :)


Our hostess at the farm


The view from our bedroom on the farm


Today we left the farm and took a bus/train/bus/train combination to the city of Linz. We will leave from here tonight at about 10:00 for France by bus. It will be about a 14 hour ride (yikes), but we will wake up in Paris.

The hills are alive...

Our stay in Austria has been absolutely fantastic. After our rough start in London, we've had a great time traveling through the lake district of Austria. We left Salzburg and headed to a small picturesque village called Hallstatt. It is built into the mountainside and faces Hallstatt lake. You can't take a train there, because there simply aren't tunnels through the mountains, so we had to take a train to the other side of the lake and take a ferry across the water. The town was soo tiny, but beautiful. I don't speak a lick of German, which poses a problem getting around town, but our phrasebook got us a room for the night at a nice B&B with a fantastic hostess. She was so helpful and thankfully spoke English. They have one grocery store in town... which was closed, one tourist center... which was closed, and a few restaurants... which were closed for the 'Festival' (more on that later). It was at that point that Kary and I vowed never to travel without snacks for fear of falling over in hunger. Thankfully we found one restaurant open that night and quickly agreed that that was the only way to get fed. The weather was so beautiful, and we walked up and down the waterfront just gazing at the stars after dinner. The sky was so clear and the stars so bright that the only way you could tell where the sky ended and the mountains began was when the stars stopped shining. It was chilly by the time we climbed the steps to our B&B for the night, and we could see our faint breaths rise into the crisp Austrian air.
In the morning, we took one last stroll through town and then boarded the ferry boat to the other side of the lake. As we pushed away from the dock, I took a few pictures of the homes built into the rocks, the famous churches, and the town that is totally nestled in the valley of the Austrian mountains. During the two minute ferry ride to the other side of the mountain, all of the church bells from town began to ring ten o'clock, and their sounds echoed through the valley and the lake and the mountains and I finally got it... 'The hills are alive.'















The town of Hallstatt

Valentine´s Day, Schmalentine´s Day

I now remember all of the reasons that I don't celebrate this holiday. Valentine's day 2007 will definitely enter the history books of one of the worst holidays ever. It all started with a late train. Which led to a missed flight. Which led to Kary's wallet getting stolen. Which led to us sleeping in the Gatwick airport. Which led to a night of no sleep. Which led to a morning of disappointment on the 15th. The cards weren't in our favor on V-Day. Which solidifies why I am meant not to celebrate it. Anyway...after the disaster on the 14th, fate started turning our way, and we got out of the airport and finally into Austria. We've only been here for a day, but we love it. Salzburg is beautiful, and we did all of the city sight-seeing today. We hiked quite a bit, took lots of pictures, tried to figure out how to buy fruit from the grocery store, watched some men play chess on a life size chess board, and I even ate a pretzel the size of my head! Tomorrow we are headed to Hallstatt, which is about 50km south of Salzburg, and supposedly gorgeous.
Really the size of my head... and it almost looks like a heart... but I assure you it was not for Valentine's Day :)

Well on my way...

I am almost (allllmost) packed and ready to go. I am sure that I will think of 8 or 9 more things that I will justify shoving into my backpack before Monday, but as for right now... I'm (almost) ready to go. I decided that a blog might be the way to go this time instead of monthly emails. I will try to keep this site up to date as I start my journey, and you can check at your will. Thank you for all of your love and support thus far. I will write more when I land across the pond.