Finishing the weekend

I just realized I didn't finish posting for my trip. We continued on with the tour through the lakes and mountains district, listening to the Sound of Music soundtrack and singing along. Fortunately they're mostly fairly well known songs, so it wasn't to hard to join in on "Do a deer." We spent about an hour in the last village among the lakes where the big church they used for the wedding scene was. Whilst there we had a chance to sample some Austrian cuisine. I learned that it's very similar to Czech Cuisine, seeing as how they were once one country. Still, I enjoyed my cheese strudel, and felt very at one with some of Austria's favorite things.



Our little guide took us back to the Mirabell Gardens and from their we went on our second tour to the Salt mines just outside of Salzburg. We had a nice ride up into the Alps once again. This time we were the only people in the van, so we got some interesting history, and had a chance to see one of the palaces Hitler decided should be his during the occupation. We then made our way to the mines. There are some amazing wooden slides we had to go down, and in order to preserve the quality of our clothing we had to wear some pretty stylin' outfits.

The tour was quite interesting, although I zoned out through some of it. Lots of information about how they leech the salt out of the rocks. I think the most interesting bit was getting to ride in a boat across one of the underground lakes where they are processing the salt. After the tour we returned to our hostel, tired and hungry from a day of traipsing through the Alps. We asked for a recommendation of where to eat, and the guy at the counter sent us on quite a hike. We did get some lovely views along the way, however.

As disappointing as it may seem, upon learning that Czech and Austrian cuisine were so closely related I ended up eating fried cheese for dinner. I just had to see if they could make it as good in Austria as they do in Czech. For the record, it was awfully good. All I can say is, American mozzarella sticks are nowhere near as good as Smazny Syr! After dinner we came back and relaxed for our final night in the hostel.
Sunday morning we were up bright and early, rushing to pack up and see the last couple of sights. Naturally the weather was AMAZING today. We were tempted to stay later in the day, but the early morning train was our cheapest option, and we didn't want to miss it. Besides, I had lesson planning to do because Mondays are my busiest days of the week. We did enjoy watching the sun rising over the Alps, even if we weren't anyplace where we could take good photos of it.
We made our way into Old Town in order to find the birthplace of Mozart. Seeing as how this is his town, we thought we should at least hit up his most famous sights. After wandering almost to the end of the best shopping district in town, I was feeling quite frustrated at not having been able to spot it. We ran across a man who obviously worked in one of the very closed restaurants (not much is open at 7 AM on a Sunday morning) and we asked him if he could tell us how to find the house.
"It's very difficult," he said. "You turn around the way you came, walk about 150 meters, and it's #9 on the right."
come to find out we'd been standing right next to it when Nicole had stopped to tie her shoe. I just thought it was on the other side of the street. Ah well. We got our photos and moved on to the house where he lived. It wasn't nearly as eye catching, so I'm only putting up a photo of the Geburtshaus.


We still had plenty of time to make it back to our train, and proceeded to have a lovely sunny ride back to Czech.