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!

"In Hell"

Yep, that’s where we went today, and boy was it beautiful. The small village of Hallstatt located in the lake district of the Austrian Alps. Before you worry too much about my calling this place hell, I’ll tell you the story. So Hallstatt has been a salt mining town since prehistoric times. In the 1800’s, some of the workers nicknamed the canyon that they had to travel through to get to the mines “In hell” because it was so steep and treacherous and people sometimes died while coming down its river carrying salt mining supplies.

We came to Halstatt by bus and train from Salzburg. It was a gorgeous bus ride, but we were pretty tired during it because we got up at 5:30 to be able to maximize our time here. We had a crazy experience when checking out of our Salzburg youth hostel. We came down to the office to check out, and the guy at the front desk was asleep in his chair. We rang the bell. Nothing. We tried talking to him. We rang the bell multiple times. Still nothing. We started yelling, “WAKE UP!” and Wayne picked the bell up and rang it next to his face multiple times. He opened his eyes and just looked at us. We began telling him that we needed to check out now because our bus was leaving soon. He was completely unresponsive. He just looked at us and closed his eyes again. It was bizarre. Finally Wayne got so fed up that he walked behind the desk to the man and picked up a pen and piece of paper and wrote a note saying who we were and that we were checking out. He left it there and finally as we were walking out the door, the dude picked up the note, kinda chuckled and said, “Yeah that’s fine.” Totally weird.

The first thing we did in Hallstatt was ride the ferry across the lake to the town. The train drops you off on the other side of the lake, so a ferry comes to pick you up. It’s totally radical. We then went and found an amazing little café/bakery and got some eggs on ham and some really good bread. By the way, this town is tiny. There is one main road that goes through it, and “main” is really quite an overstatement. The road is like 12 feet wide. And there all these cute houses and shops off to the sides. And then it’s right next to this glassy lake, which is in turn surrounded by gorgeous peaks of the alps. It is unreal.

We next went to the Salt Mine that is above the town. We had a tour and it was really cool. It was annoying though because the lady would speak for like 5 minutes in German, and then follow up with like a few sentences in English. But it was still really awesome to go deep into the mountain side and walk through little caverns and stuff and see how the salt was mined.

Next we hiked up from the mines to the top of Hohe Sieg (which means "high victory"). We peak bagged baby! We got to the very top of a mountain in the alps! It was an incredible view from up there. You could see all of Lake Hallstatt and the various little towns that surround it. Beautiful. Oh, we also saw the largest ant hill I’ve ever seen in my whole life on the hike. Check out the pic.

[technical difficulties.  due to slow internet in our current locale, we are unable to upload photos at this time.  Please check back later.]

By the time we got back down our legs were dead. We went to our hostel, rested for a bit, then went to the beinhaus or bonehouse. It is this house by the church where they have bones and skulls pilled up dating back to the 1700’s. There’s like 1000 skulls stacked neatly just staring you down. They have the names of the person painted on them, along with other symbols. It was kinda creepy, but kinda cool.

Lastly, we had a killer dinner of gourmet pizza and fresh fish and then finished off the day with a few rounds of darts. They have a sweet electronic dartboard here at the hostel. It’s bomb.

I’m gonna zonk.

Peace be with.

-N.

Quote of the day: from the jovial, mustachioed guy who runs our hostel and the pizzeria downstairs. Every time we said thank you to him, he responded: “My welcome.” He also brought out three shots of brandy to our table after dinner, “a gift to you, on the house.” It was such a warm gesture that we felt bad declining. So we drank them. Just kidding.

Half Shakespeare.

Oh, guys, awesome day, very little time. 

Residenz Museum: the old palace from the 1500’s to the 1900’s of the ruling family of Bavaria.  Collection of four centuries’ worth of amassed opulence.

Neue Pinakothek:  collection of art from the 19^th century, including Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Klimt, and lots lots more.  Really rad. 

Pizza.  Train to Salzburg.  We’re getting up early tomorrow so we’re just going to bed.  Besides, people go to bed early here.

Quote of the day comes from a worker at the Residenz Museum in Munich.  He walked up to Nate and started speaking German, then realized Nate was understanding nothing and said, “English? (Nate nods.)  Okay.  You must follow these . . .” he trailed off, gesturing to the arrow signs, then continued emphatically: “Follow them at every day.”  Then he asked, apparently in reference to his own English, “Is this good?”  Nate, of course, said Yes, yes.  The man pointed to his name tag.  “Half Shakespeare.  Half Robert.”

-W is the new X.

--Here, we’ll do a code this time, since the town we’re going to tomorrow might be hard to find by description alone.  Its name is:

Gzkkrszss.

Or something like that.  The key to decoding it is in this blog post.

Just so you know, the answer should rhyme with “ball snot.”

We HEART Munich.

Today was full to the brim.  We had breakfast at the hostel, and get this:  we ran into Jorge and Natasha, some really simpatico Uruguayans who Wayne met in London.  Then we went to the hauptbahnhof and took a train and a bus to Dachau.

Dachau was the first concentration camp in Germany, built in 1933.  It was a heavy, somber place.  Even the weather seemed to parallel the sadness embodied in the camp.  Tiny raindrops hung suspended in the air, rendering an umbrella pointless.  The sky was masked with solemn grey clouds.  The museum was very educational; we especially enjoyed the information about the years leading up to Hitler’s reign.  We were silent as we walked around the camp, contemplating the intense suffering that occurred there.  Several beautiful memorial buildings, structures, and sculptures now exist in Dachau.  My favorite was a long row of beautiful flower wreaths.

Next we went to the Deutches-Museum, which was bomb.  We had barely over two hours there, but we could have used twenty!  It’s overflowing with cool exhibits.  We were happy with the way we spent our time.  The planes and boats were my favorite.  A worker saw Wayne taking a picture of the first German U-boat, and we thought he was going to reprimand us, but he glanced around and told Wayne to climb over the barrier and actually get in the U-boat and ride the missile like a horse so we could get THAT on camera.  Germans are pretty rad.

We took the S-bahn to the BMW headquarters, were we bummed around BMW-welt for a while.  The museum had closed, but we still got to browse around an awesome huge building full of awesome BMWs. 

By this time we were pretty tired, so we decided to go to a movie.  We got our tickets, then went up the street to get some Doner Kebabs for dinner.  They were about seven hundred times better than the Hofbrauhaus fare last night. 

So this is a shout-out to my roomies:  guess what movie I went to, in Germany, with my two older brothers??  LAST SONG!!  Yep.  That’s right.  No worries, it was in English.  There we were, totally digging some good ol’ Miley Cyrus after a long day.  Seriously, we loved it.  I was crying, like, actual tears rolling down my face.   I miss you girls!

Quote of the day, by Wayne, after noticing that we could see the old-school projector up in the projection room of the tiny theater where we saw the flick: “I feel like I just walked into the 1960s . . . with Miley Cyrus.”

-A

--Okay, boys, tomorrow we will take a train to the birthplace of Mozart.  In fact, it’s in a different country, although they speak German there.  The first four letters of this city’s name are also in our last name, and its remaining four letters are the word that means “castle” in German.

Dachau.

In the U-bahn station.

At BMW World.

This is where we got Döner Kebabs.

This movie was trite, predictable, and manipulative.  And I unabashedly loved it.

-W.

Munich loves you.

That's the city's official motto, and I must say the feeling is mutual.  I just love this place.  I just feel great in this place.  Don't be surprised if we stay here more days.

Munich.  Debbie brought us to the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof and by noon we were on a train to Munich.  It was sad to say goodbye to the Burts and Chester.  (I don't know what it is about this trip, but all of a sudden I really feel like I could love having a dog.  And you know I've never really felt like that before.  It's  . . . magical.)

The train toward Munich was packed with youths, and we asked some of them what the big deal was, and they said they'd just gotten out of school; they go to university in Ulm and commute home.  Some nice kids told us some of the best sights to see in Munich.

I just can't tell you how much I love Munich.  We didn't even really do anything today-- most of the purportedly AWESOME museums were closing down by the time we got here, so we just walked to the main square (Marienplatz) and watched the tourists watch the clock tower play.  There was this great accordion/clarinet duo playing in the platz.

We took the U-bahn to the English Gardens, Munich's Central Park but bigger, and walked around.  They're great, they feel just unmanicured enough.  And there is a place where a stream comes into the park from under the road and somehow creates this perpetual wave, where surfers come and ride back and forth across the stream.  Way cool.

Next we went to the Hofbräunhaus, a fabled traditional beer hall.  Somehow, though, we ended up in the part of the building with all the Japanese tourists.  They loved the lederhosen-clad brass band and the awful singer and the alpenhorn players.  Heck, who am I kidding: we did too.  The alpenhorners were actually, legitimately incredible.  I ordered a non-alcoholic beer, and I didn't love it.  There was a buffet of pigs' feet and pork roast and knodel and other assorted Bavarian foods.  Overall, it was an experience.

Still, I love Munich.  Down the street from our hostel is an international phone calls shop where all these African guys hang out, in the store, outside it, down the street-- it's like this gathering place for African guys, just hanging out and chatting with one another, and, presumably, their loved ones a continent away.  Way cool.

Wir lieben Ihr.  I think that means we love you.  I don't know about anything in German for sure because every time I feel confident enough to say a phrase from our phrasebook to a German, they just respond to me in English without missing a beat. Except the AWESOME accordion player from the Marienplatz who we saw there AGAIN as we walked home under twilight.  Just sitting there playing Ave Maria and Toccata and Fugue on the most incredible accordion I've ever seen.  We tried talking to him in English-- no go.  I spent a few minutes wrestling in my mind before I could say something to say to him in German, but he just kind of smiled and kept playing, as if to say amiably, Hey, I'm Here To Play My Accordion, Not Give You A Cultural Experience.

The riddle will have to wait until tomorrow.  We'll just be in Munich anyway.  Love.

-W.

Schönaich

Saturday

We slept in.  In fact, we didn’t change out of our pj’s till after noon.  But we got some planning in – that is to say, we actually decided where we are going from here.  It was a good day to sleep in anyway, because most things were shut down due to the fact that Germans take their May Day seriously.  At around 1:30 the three of us took off walking toward the center of Schoenaich, the Burt’s village.  We passed the “schönaich” (beautiful oak) itself on our way to the fest by the May Pole.  The way to celebrate in this land is by eating wurst and, more importantly, drinking beer.  At the little fest in the town, we ordered some wurst and drank some … appleschorle (it’s like apple beer but milder and better.)  The teenage boy who gave us our wurst explained to Wayne what his schweinsteak was: “it’s from the neck of a pig.”  He looked like Zac Efron.

Schönaich’s fest was just a preview of the REAL fest in Stuttgart.  We swung by Claralyn’s soccer game and picked her up on our way.  The fest was like a county fair, but better because it was German.  There were booths and rides – we rode one almost exactly like “Colossus” at Lagoon – and lots of Biergartens.  Apparently people get beer for half the price if they are dressed in their traditional German liederhosen.  The drinking age here is 14!!?!

Sunday

Church with the Burts was nice.  Afterwards we went to Schloss Solitude, which overlooks Stuttgart.  There was this big flock of sheep with a shepherd and sheep dog grazing on the lawn.  Apparently that’s not uncommon around here.

We also visited the Stuttgart rubble heap, where they piled all the debris from WWII.  Now it’s a big grassy hill, but there is still rubble visible at the top, and a great 360-degree view.  We were amazed at how difficult the reconstruction of this country must have been after the war. 

We are currently in the throes of an intense game of Carcasonne with Claralyn and Ben.  It looks like Nate is going to win.

-A

The weekend in Photos

I know we haven't put up photos for a while, so here's the last few days.   ARE YOU READY??

Thursday: Trier, Metz, Ramstein

Trier: The Porta Nigra, a Roman gate.  Check out my beard.

The accident.  Debbie remained so calm.  The cops came so quick.

Cool organ guy in Metz.  Anne asked him to play Bach and he did, from memory.  

Chagall: Adam and Eve in stained glass.  in Metz.

Also in Metz:  the McDonald's has codes on the bathroom doors.

BXPX: the mall in Ramstein US Air Force Base.  The bases are a world unto themselves.

Alsace, France

Outside Haut-Koenigsbourg.  Misty, foggy, medievaly day.

Haut-Koenigsbourg.

Sooooo many halberds.

Can you see it in the background?

Abandoned castle probably somewhere in eastern Gondor.  RAD.

Eating crepes in Riquewihr.  I don't think you can tell, in this photo, how pretty that girl was.

Annie in Riquewihr.  Who cares that it's raining?  There's Debbie on the right.

Riquewihr.  This guy seriously had the stereotypical French laugh.  Spoke no English but he was charming about it.

Schönaich/Stuttgart

Beautiful cemetery in Schönaich, where every grave has flowers PLANTED on it and well cared for.

We found this while wandering around the town.  Go Jazz.

The Fest in the village.  Zac Efron in the background.

Chester, the Burts' dog, who we all completely and totally love.  He's such a good dog.

The Stuttgarter Frülingsfest.  One of the colorful bursts on the wall exclaimed "Be inspired!"

More Fest.  Rollercoasters in the rain = AWESOME.  Also, Claralyn told us there's a big Turkish community in Stuttgart.

Yep.

Sunday in Stuttgart

Here's the Burt family at Schloss Solitude, overlooking Stuttgart.  Claralynn, Ben, Dave, and Debbie.  We love these people.  A lot.

Here's the herd of sheep we found at the top of the hill grazing around the Schloss, plus Ben and Claralyn hanging out with them.

On top of the rubble hill overlooking the city.

At the end of the Mother Of All Carcassonne Games.  The Burts are just fun.  I kind of feel like they're our cousins.

--Tomorrow:  We're leaving the warm nest of the Burts' house and striking out once again into the cold wilderness of independence . . . after Debbie gives us a ride to the train station.  Next we're headed to a city whose name is derived from the German word for "Monks", because it was founded by a group of Benedictine monks in 1158 AD.  More recently, it hosted the Summer Olympics back in the '70s and is home to one of the soccer clubs playing in the finals of this year's European club championships.  It's the host to the headquarters of the BMW car company.  It's gonna be dope.