Four-day weekends are pretty much what life is all about...

Please note: the main photo server is being weird right now on this website, so if you can't see the pictures, try looking later on; they're working on fixing it.

Anyway, on to the stories:

Austria had their equivalent of the fourth of July on Thursday, Oct. 26th. I was still in Vienna at this point. Unfortunately, I had a 2-hour violin lesson (which was really good, don't get me wrong) during the celebrations, so didn't partake in the parade watching. But apparently some of my friends went and saw the president of Austria and the chancelor and a bunch of other important people.
However, that day, I had fun - some friends of mine showed up at my door and I went out with them and laughed at them while they were eating at Burger King in Vienna of all places (because I'm mean) and then we walked around the main street, and saw an absolutely amazing band of Native Americans playing pan flutes and other wooden flutes... I wish I had a CD. Later that day, I hung out with my friend Joe and watched a couple movies; then, I went to Matt and Eric's house and stayed overnight (as did my friend Alana) because early the next morning, we left from a train station near their apartment to go to...

HEAVEN.

Um, okay. I mean, Hallstatt.

It was unbelievable!!

It was a four-hour train ride from Vienna in the direction toward Salzburg, so you can kind of imagine where it is in Austria. It is a little village in the Alps, with a population of 900 people. We went there without any plans at all, which made it really fun. We looked around for a couple hours for an available room to stay in. The youth hostels were closed for the season, so we were worried we wouldn't find anywhere else cheap. But we went to the tourist info place, and and this nice girl named Theresa working there told us about a 22-Euro a night bed and breakfast, and even called and made reservations for us!

So we went and checked in, and Alana and I shared a room, and Matt and Eric shared the room next to us. In the mornings we were served a very nice breakfast of rolls, salami, cheese, apricot marjoran (sp.?), orange juice, tea and coffee. And of course eating said breakfast with a view of the Alps out the window wasn't too shabby :)

Anyway, on Friday, we walked around, played some giant chess (which you will see in a couple of the pictures), saw a pretty Protestant church, admired the scenery, walked around more, and admired the scenery more. We were playing giant chess when a couple other Americans introduced themselves - Bill and Mary are living in Vienna this semester because Bill is a professor at Webster (an American college in Vienna.) We went out to dinner with them at a restaurant that served pretty exotic stuff (in my opinion) such as deer goulash, broccoli souffle, and dill-sauce-covered fish (which was what I had.) It was the only place open to get food at - the grocery stores were closed every time we walked past and we didn't see any other restaurants really that were open, at least not that night. The restaurant we ended up in was really, really good.

The next day, Saturday, we went for a couple hours on a hike up a mountain, pretty much the thing to do in Hallstatt :) We saw a salamandar, a very, very pretty stream with huge rocks around it to climb on, etc. It was raining, so it was foggy and misty, and the fall leaves combined with that was of course a living postcard.

We then met up with some more friends (Dan and Tara) who had just arrived, and walked around town looking for a place for them to stay, and they also found a cheap bed and breakfast not too far from ours. We then went and climbed a bunch of stairs up to a church with a small cemetery in front. The cemetery is so small that that they had to dig people up after a certain number of years (to make room) and put their bones somewhere else - most of these bones, if it was written in the person's will, were then transferred to the church. Unfortunately we didn't see the skulls, but it were open, we could have paid and gone into the part of the church where all the human skulls are lined up. Anyway, Eric then went off on a hike by himself, and the rest of us played some more giant chess, both games which I lost, and I lamented for awhile. We saw more cool things. Yeah... I really can't do the trip justice with words.

Oh, and Sunday we went to the Hallstatt Museum, where we saw really really interesting things such as OLD (I am talking fourth/fifth century B.C.) mining equiptment and old bones, etc.

After that, we stopped at a store (the only store we saw that was open) and got some food. Now, "food" means this: gummy bears, gummy Coke bottles (of both the sour and regular variety), peanut butter puffs (called "Snips), some pop, and some bars of chocolate. This was going to be our lunch. We took the ferry back to the train station, found out we had to wait another hour for the train, so broke into our lunch stash, and got sugar high. Then we got on the train back to Vienna, with some gummy bears still left :)

It was a VERY good trip. Now for pictures.

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