Advertisement
Published: February 4th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Corbin, Keri, and Clark came over to visit with me during Christmas break, and since Corbin had never been to Europe before, I thought it would be a shame if England were the only country he got to visit. Accordingly, I found us all some cheap plane tickets through Ryan air, and we all went to Salzburg, Austria for a few days.
I will interject here that before leaving for Salzburg, we spent a few days in London. London remains my least favorite European destination (sorry Megan), but we had fun. We went to Buckingham Palace and watched the changing of the guard, went to Piccadilly Circus to look at the flashy lights, and did a few other things that I have done before. I convinced them to go to the Victoria and Albert museum, though, which was new for me. Corbin was kind of reluctant at first, because the V&A is a decorative arts museum, but I think he ended up enjoying it. We looked at a lot of neat old clothes, replicas of a lot of ancient Roman columns (which wasn't a big deal to me as I've seen all the originals), saw neat glassware, etc., etc.. The
description I just gave may not make the V&A sound exciting, but trust me, its worth a visit. Especially as it is free.
Also, I would like to share a huge mistake I made with you guys in case any of ya'll are ever in a situation where you could possibly make the same mistake. so i booked the train reservations that me, clark, keri, and corbin would need to get back to york after salzburg, and i booked them in october b/c i knew if i waited till december they would be outrageously expensive b/c of Christmas. good plan, but when i made the reservations i misread the ryanair itenrary. i swear that it really really looked like the time that we were departing was the time we were arriving in london, and i planned our train tickets for about an hour and a half before we could possibly be at the train station. so during our few days in london we each had to pay $100 to get our train tickets bumped to a later time. i felt awful. but seriously, the itinerary was misleading. everybody else but keri was confused, too.about salzburg now. i have a
few complaints about it, and then i'll get to the rest of it. firstly, december is not a good month for salzburg. it was below freezing the entire time, which made walking around painful after a few minutes. also since it was december, our daylight was really limited so after 5 in the afternoon there wasn't much at all to do. this meant that everyone else would take like 2 hour naps in the evening while i sat around bored. it was lame. and i think we booked too long for this city. we stayed there for four days, and after a couple days we had done about everything there was to do. oh, and there wasn't tons of snow. i was really, really hoping there would be plenty of fresh, powdery snow whlie we were there, but there wasn't. just little bits of snow that had semi-melted and then refroze. bah.
the city center was really cute, though, and the Christkindlmarkt was amazing. The title of this entry refers to a type of delicious treat sold at Germanic Christmas markets. I always get the amaretto flavored kind (i first had one at the christkindlmarkt in munich two years
ago and i have been longing for another ever since), which are filled with marzipan and this crunchy stuff and covered with white chocolate and sprinkles. clark got one that had milk chocolate and almonds in the middle, and it was good too. we also ate lots of delicious sausages, goulash, pretzels, and baked potatoes, as well as various desserts such as marzipan potatoes and mozart balls. let me explain mozart balls. they are these round things filled with marzipan and pistachio creme and covered with chocolate. salzburg is the birthplace of both mozart and mozart balls, and both are marketed very aggressively around town. continuing on the topic of food, we also went to a really awesome beer hall where we sampled traditional austrian food, got some sushi (b/c i hadn't had any in months and was dying for some), and we also got a cheap dinner from the supermarket (the only one in a town of 30,000! crazy!) that turned out to be really good. but mostly we just ate really unhealthy stuff from the Christmas market.
Most of our time was spent walking around town, usually in the market, but we did a couple of other
things. We went up to the medieval fortress and poked around and saw all the stuff in the museum. The museum was surprisingly interesting. It had a lot of really old, decorative furniture in it, a chastity belt (it was creepy), and other stuff that would pertain to life back in the day. Funny story. We came across a statue of a guy with a really, really crazy moustache, and corbin pulled a random fake moustache out of his pocket, making himself look something like the guy. keri and clark were out of the room when corbin put on the stache and were natually quite perplexed when they came back and saw that corbin had suddenly grown an awful lot of facial hair. heh. the views from the top of the fortress were really awesome, too.
we also went to the city catacombs, which were a little disappointing. it was just a few rooms carved into a mountain. i mean, that's impressive, but it wasn't that amazing. went to the local fancy church, too. it was nice, but very cold. Eh, sorry this was a sort of bland entry. I waited too long to write about it. I'll try
to update more regularly in the future.
oh, and you know how i told you guys that we spent hours and hours being bored with nothing to do? well, we found out the night before we left that there was a tv and lots of dvds in a room downstairs. if only we had known that from the beginning, i may have not had to spend so many hours doing nothing while everybody else slept!
and i have another funny story. so, all those heavy, greasy sausages with sourkraut was making the lot of us really really gassy. gross but true. well, one day keri felt like crap so she and clark went back to our hostel room to sleep. corbin and i came back a little later and just sat around, and i tell you what, clark was farting with such regularity that the air never cleared. it was like we had one of those fancy air-freshners that automatically spray fragrance every few minutes in our room, except the fragrance was not at all pleasant.
and, salzburg is where the sound of music was filmed, in case you didn't know.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.059s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0331s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Megan
non-member comment
Yes
How fortunate that Corbin had a fake mustache at just the right moment. But how unfortunate that you all had sooo much gas. This entry reminded me of that scene in Amadeus where Wolfy farts to accent his song on the piano.