Jane Eyre Mad Libs (and Italy).

Annie invented an awesome game, where I’m Mr. Adjective, Nate is Mr. Noun, and she reads a passage from Jane Eyre leaving blanks in the appropriate places and pointing at one or the other of us to fill them in.  AWESOME.

We’re back in civilization.  We’ve been having trouble finding good internet access for the last few days, so I’m sorry if you’ve gone into withdrawal from our blog but just imagine us here in ignorance about the NBA playoffs.  Anyway, we’re back, for now at least, and so I’ve just put up the posts we wrote from the last couple days but couldn’t upload.

Mmm.  We’re sitting in the lobby of the youth hostel in Salzburg we stayed in two nights ago, because it’s the only place we knew where we could get Wi Fi and kill a couple hours until our train.  This is what happened: From Munich we went to Salzburg, but got there at night and just went to bed, after I walked around the city which is totally dead after about nine o’clock.  The next morning we got up early and got on a train to Hallstatt, a little town in the Austrian lake country which is GORGEOUS.  Then we came back to Salzburg this morning, sightsaw during the day, and went to a concert at night.  The thing is, we need to get to Italy by tomorrow, so we bought overnight train tickets, but the train doesn’t leave until 1:30 am, and as mentioned earlier, our options for filling up that time is limited.  So we’re in the lobby of the hostel we stayed in two days ago, blogging. 

So want to hear some of the highlights of today besides the aforementioned JEML?  We saw almost everything Rick Steves recommends highly in Salzburg.  We walked through a pretty old graveyard, poked our heads in the Cathedral, went into the cave-crypt  (by the way, I forgot to bring my student ID on this trip, but so far every place has accepted my British Library card without any questions.  Rad.) where Mozart’s sister and Haydn’s brother are buried.  Salzburg has this going for it: big green hills all around the center of town, that make for nice places to look down on the city from or dig crypts into.  We discovered (thanks to jovial Hallstatt hostel man) an Austrian soft drink called Almdudler that is incredible, kind of like a ginger ale/lemonade with more spices in it.  We drank some up at the Hohensalzburg schloss on one of the hills overlooking town and talked to a Mexican lady who came to Heidelberg ten years ago to go to university and married a Salzburger guy she met there.  Rad.  We walked around the castle but to be honest we’re a little castled out by now.  Cool weapons though.  And there were some cool musical instruments, like this weird funky-looking tuba.

Anne and Nate before we hiked up to the Hohensalzburg.

Speaking of music, I will let Annie tell you about the rest of our Salzburg experience.  Chau.

-W.

After that Schloss we headed to the Schloss Mirabel, the location of the concert for which we had bought tickets.  We were skeptical as to what kind of concert this would be – a touristy show based on the fact that Mozart happened to be born in this town, or a legitimate concert.  We were not disappointed.  The quartet had only been playing for thirty seconds when I leaned over to Wayne and said, “this is the real thing.”  Our favorite of their three works was the first, a string quartet.  They also did a violin concerto and a piano concerto.  After the concert I went back stage and asked Luz Leskowitz, the founder of the group, what type of violin he played.  It was a Stradivarius from 1707!

The overnight train to Florence was fun.  We shared a six-person sleeper car with an Austrian couple who didn’t speak a word of English.  It was awesome to see Wayne effectively communicate with them.  He’s picked up quite a bit of German! 

But that won’t help us anymore because now we are in a land where people speak ITALIAN!  Florence is really beautiful.  After dumping our stuff at the youth hostel, we went to attraction #1: the Duomo.  We waited in line to climb the millions of stairs to the top, but it was all worth it.  The view of this Renaissance city from up there was breathtaking.  After a pizza lunch we went to the open market.  The prices here are far better than anywhere we’ve been yet.  Other than that we mainly just walked all over this town.  We saw a beautiful sunset from a hill overlooking the city. 

This city is probably more overrun with tourists than our previous stops.  We are glad we didn’t come at the height of tourist season!

Quote of the Day:  As we walked back to our hostel we were talking about the various “David” sculptures, by Donatello, Michelangelo, and … we couldn’t remember who sculpted the other one …  “Oh Bernini!”, I said exuberantly.  An apron-wearing man popped out of the restaurant we were just passing and said, “You want a Panini??”, holding out some empty plates as if to invite us in.  It was great.

Wayne in front of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, one of the first Renaissance pieces of architecture, I think.

We went up onto the top of that dome.  Want proof?  

Florence. Is. Beautiful.  So are Nate and Annie. This is atop the dome of Florence's iconic cathedral.  And that's Giotto's bell tower on the right.

-- all right sleuths.  I guess we already gave away that we're in Florence right now, and we will be tomorrow, so we'll have to leave a trickier problem to solve.  Here it is.

How many steps did we climb to get to the top of Florence's cathedral?

To find the answer, first you have to figure out some important dates from our trip.  Wikipedia might be helpful here.

1.  The year that Florence Cathedral's dome was structurally completed.  

2.  The year Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born.

3.  The year Coby will turn 29.

All right, got that?  Now, I've gotta tell you, we've been looking at all these Renaissance buildings, and in the Renaissance people were crazy about Roman Numerals.  So your next step is to write down the three years you found above in Roman numerals.

Cool?  Now:  look at all the letters of those Roman numerals and add up how many times each letter appears:  the number of M's, D's, C's, L's, X's, V's, and I's you see.  Does that make sense?  For example, there should be 2 V's.

The answer-- the number of steps we climbed-- is a three-digit number.  Its three digits are:

{number of total M's} {number of total X's} {number of total I's}.

Good luck!