Sky Blue, Grass Green

Still we find ourselves in Salzburg. We came here with the intention of staying for 17 hours, that was 8 days ago. The hostels slogan is even Easy To Find, Hard To Leave. We did infact try to leave a few days ago:

We arose quite early and finally made it to the kitchen for the Austrian breakfast that we had heard so much about but had consistently failed to be awake for. After the usual packing and checking out we head off to the nearby train station for the 3 hour journey to Vienna, with our ultimate destination being Krakow in Poland where we both very keen to see the infamous Auchwitz. Vienna has 2 main train stations: Westbahnhof and Südbahnhof. The train from Salzburg arrived into Westbahnhof so we had to get a U-Bahn train into the centre of Vienna and then a taxi to Südbahnhof from there because we didnt have enough time to wait for the connecting train. So we arrived with minutes to spare at Südbahnhof and booked our tickets to Poland. The train was a terrible thing, after the luxuries of Germany and Austria the realities of East Europe can be hard to adjust to. Anyway our train that was meant to be taking us to Poland instead took us to Slovakia, a completely different country.

So we arrived in Slovakia. No one spoke much English and no one could explain to us why our train had gone to the comlpletely wrong place. After a bit of discussion and realizing it was going to be quite difficult to get to Poland from where we were, we got on a train and went back to Vienna, reversed the Westbahnhof/Südbahnhof situation described above, and then got on a train back to Salzburg. So after 12 hours of travel we were exactly where we started.

A reason why we didn't persist in heading east was the fact that we have decided to go back to Southern Germany to stay for an extended amount of time. The plan is to swap the Melbourne rain for some German sunshine and work days for the World Cup. I am planning to continue in my endeavours to learn a bit of German with the help and Anja who is studying to be a language teacher. Kristian is coming too. At the moment we are planning to approach each day as it comes and not make any plans that could be considered concrete. The longest we will stay is until straight after the World Cup, but perhaps our stay will be much shorter than that. Pudd is planning to commit to atleast 2 weeks to see how things go, which is a good idea.

The World Cup starts in early June and lasts for a month meaning Germany is going to be fairly crazy for that whole time. Personally I couldnt more excited about the prospect of being in Germany for the first World Cup that Australia has been inlvolved since the 1970's. The tickets of course are gone but each town will have masssive screens to watch the matches so we will head to where ever that is with an esky full of beer and hearts full of hope for the Socceroo boys.

I am also happy to report that finally I have finished Bill Clintons autobiography, all 969 pages of it. I first started reading it about 18 months ago so I'm glad to have finally gotten to the end. I thoroughly enjoyed and have now moved onto The Motorcycle Diaries, a book written By Che Guevara detailing a 6 month journey he embarked upon with his best mate when he was 23 years old. In many ways his adventure is similiar to ours but, of course, in many more its not.

In summary, we are staying for longer but can't be sure how long. We will push our flights back to some arbitrary date in the future and then rebook as we see fit at a later point in time. We do miss everyone back home and can't wait to see everyone again, however we are both aware that our lives perhaps may not offer too many more oppurtunities to be free as we are of debt and responsibility, and to have the time and means to soak up the beauty of central Europe.

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