The title of this email may be a little misleading, as most of this day was taken up by my trip to Salzburg - i.e., by the process of getting there. I got up a little later than I should have, tired and confused. I left the hotel in which I was staying with barely enough time to make it to the train station and onto the train that I was taking. I went to Strasbourg without incident, got to Stuttgart with some incident, and spent most of my time sleeping on the train from Stuttgart to Salzburg. The scenery as the train approached Salzburg was spectacular: the nearby hills, thickly carpeted with green, rose to low-lying mountains lost in tangles of cloud and mist. I was reminded, coming in to Salzburg, of having approached it from the opposite direction, the south, and seen it as salvation coming from the ravages of Slovenia. The towns leading up to it each had at least one of the churches that I love so much. I consider it strange that I find them so attractive, as it turns out that we have plenty of churches back home, but I suppose that the ones here are more architecturally impressive. Salzburg itself, in all of aesthetic glory, unfolded before our eyes as we pulled into its train station, a sort of crescendo to the last few minutes of the train ride (of which I saw too little; I wish that I had been awake to see more of it!).
I should relate the incident to which I referred before continuing to describe Salzburg itself, as I have little to say in this email and do not want to keep you hanging. At some point or other, either a few days ago (but, alas, after I left the Freiburg train station) or this morning, I noticed that the itinerary that the railway personnel had printed for me in Freiburg differed, at least outwardly, from my railway ticket: the railway ticket covered trips from Nancy to Strasbourg, Strasbourg to Offenburg, and Offenburg to Salzburg, while the itinerary had me going, instead, from Strasbourg to Stuttgart and Stuttgart to Salzburg. I decided not to worry too much about it as I took the train to Strasbourg, figuring that I could deal with it when the time arose, but, when I got off at Strasbourg, I only had seven or so minutes to transfer trains. I figured that I would incur big enough delays to miss the train from Strasbourg to Stuttgart if I showed the railway personnel my ticket and asked why it differed from my itinerary, so I decided to step on to the train to Stuttgart and explain the issue when the ticket collectors came to see my ticket inside the train. As it turned out, they were unimpressed with my ticket, explaining, saying to one another, using a crude French swear word, that the railway personnel in Freiburg had screwed up my ticket. They let me make the trip to Stuttgart as an exception, and, when I got to the train station in Stuttgart, the railway personnel there told me that I would have no problem getting to Salzburg with my extant ticket. I expect that the cause of confusion was that my railway ticket was made to cover a distance rather than a particular city-to-city connection, though the ticket might honestly have been misprinted. By a "distance," I mean a certain stretch of railway track rather than particular stops. Let us say, for example, that a ticket covers all regional German trains between Offenburg and Stuttgart. With such a ticket, one can legitimately take any number of different regional trains along that stretch of track, as one is not bound to follow any specific route. It might have been that my ticket was supposed to generally cover rail travel between a city close to the border with France, Offenburg, and Salzburg, but, given that we did not cross through Offenburg itself, I expect that it was a misprint in this case.
Enough about the particulars of railway travel! My trip to Salzburg went fine, and I found my hostel without difficulty thanks to a Google map that was, for once, accurate. I was very glad to get hear, as I immediately felt that it was an excellent hostel (I have since discovered that the bathrooms are subpar and the WiFi connection is weak - no matter.). I do not know exactly what it is that clearly distinguishes good from bad hostels, but it must be some combination of the alacrity with which new guests are greeted (at the check-in desk), the apparent level of organization of different rooms in the hostel, the number of services offered, the degree to which hostel personnel are willing to inform one about the city in which one is staying, and a certain intangible vibrance that some hostels lack. This hostel immediately appeared to be at the top of the spectrum of all of the aforementioned measures; while I waited for a long time to get checked in, as a giant group of students had just arrived, the man working at the desk offered me a ton of information about Salzburg, the nearby ice caves at Werfen (sp?), Austrian cuisine, the German language, and a pleasant-sounding walk that I could take through the nearby hills. I went upstairs, got drawn into a conversation with a woman in the bunk below me who had been sick all day with a hangover, and finally made it out of the door of the hostel at 6:00 PM, later than I had wanted to leave.
While I had been planning to take a walk through the hills when I left the hostel, it was too cold and rainy for me to want to do so, and I was starting to get hungry. (Aside: While I complained about the heat in Freiburg just a week ago, it turns out that I do not like rain, either. The only reasonable conclusion that one can draw here is that I do not like any weather, which is probably accurate.) I decided to check out a restaurant that one of the hostel employees had recommended to me - a beerhouse, to be more precise. I will cut this part short, as I want to finish this email, brush my teeth, and go to bed. The food at the beerhouse was exceptional but overpriced - perhaps everything in Salzburg is a little pricier than it is in much of Germany (or, maybe, the hostel worker unwittingly sent me to a pricy restaurant like that idiot in the Frankfurt hostel). I ordered a dish of incredibly-fatty pork, an unequalled dumpling, and a cabbage dish prepared with bacon, which makes all vegetables tastier. The dumpling was unlike any that I have had in my life except in Salzburg last year (While I could swear that my meal last year (at a different café - I know vaguely where) was cheaper and that I got a better meat dish, my memory might be wrong.). Austrian dumplings are like mazzo ball dumplings, only vastly denser and richer with flavor. I do not know how they are made, but I suspect that one cannot get them anywhere except in Austria; I am going to ask for them at every restaurant that I visit along the Danube. The pork chops that I ordered were very flavorful (they though tasted a little like salt marinated in salt, more salt, and worcestshire sauce), and they really teach one to eat around the fat, as failing to do so would cause one to throw out the baby with the bathwater - one would miss all of the meat! Overall, I got decent value for my money, given the quality of the food, but would not want to eat in Austrian restaurants very often.
I should relate the incident to which I referred before continuing to describe Salzburg itself, as I have little to say in this email and do not want to keep you hanging. At some point or other, either a few days ago (but, alas, after I left the Freiburg train station) or this morning, I noticed that the itinerary that the railway personnel had printed for me in Freiburg differed, at least outwardly, from my railway ticket: the railway ticket covered trips from Nancy to Strasbourg, Strasbourg to Offenburg, and Offenburg to Salzburg, while the itinerary had me going, instead, from Strasbourg to Stuttgart and Stuttgart to Salzburg. I decided not to worry too much about it as I took the train to Strasbourg, figuring that I could deal with it when the time arose, but, when I got off at Strasbourg, I only had seven or so minutes to transfer trains. I figured that I would incur big enough delays to miss the train from Strasbourg to Stuttgart if I showed the railway personnel my ticket and asked why it differed from my itinerary, so I decided to step on to the train to Stuttgart and explain the issue when the ticket collectors came to see my ticket inside the train. As it turned out, they were unimpressed with my ticket, explaining, saying to one another, using a crude French swear word, that the railway personnel in Freiburg had screwed up my ticket. They let me make the trip to Stuttgart as an exception, and, when I got to the train station in Stuttgart, the railway personnel there told me that I would have no problem getting to Salzburg with my extant ticket. I expect that the cause of confusion was that my railway ticket was made to cover a distance rather than a particular city-to-city connection, though the ticket might honestly have been misprinted. By a "distance," I mean a certain stretch of railway track rather than particular stops. Let us say, for example, that a ticket covers all regional German trains between Offenburg and Stuttgart. With such a ticket, one can legitimately take any number of different regional trains along that stretch of track, as one is not bound to follow any specific route. It might have been that my ticket was supposed to generally cover rail travel between a city close to the border with France, Offenburg, and Salzburg, but, given that we did not cross through Offenburg itself, I expect that it was a misprint in this case.
Enough about the particulars of railway travel! My trip to Salzburg went fine, and I found my hostel without difficulty thanks to a Google map that was, for once, accurate. I was very glad to get hear, as I immediately felt that it was an excellent hostel (I have since discovered that the bathrooms are subpar and the WiFi connection is weak - no matter.). I do not know exactly what it is that clearly distinguishes good from bad hostels, but it must be some combination of the alacrity with which new guests are greeted (at the check-in desk), the apparent level of organization of different rooms in the hostel, the number of services offered, the degree to which hostel personnel are willing to inform one about the city in which one is staying, and a certain intangible vibrance that some hostels lack. This hostel immediately appeared to be at the top of the spectrum of all of the aforementioned measures; while I waited for a long time to get checked in, as a giant group of students had just arrived, the man working at the desk offered me a ton of information about Salzburg, the nearby ice caves at Werfen (sp?), Austrian cuisine, the German language, and a pleasant-sounding walk that I could take through the nearby hills. I went upstairs, got drawn into a conversation with a woman in the bunk below me who had been sick all day with a hangover, and finally made it out of the door of the hostel at 6:00 PM, later than I had wanted to leave.
While I had been planning to take a walk through the hills when I left the hostel, it was too cold and rainy for me to want to do so, and I was starting to get hungry. (Aside: While I complained about the heat in Freiburg just a week ago, it turns out that I do not like rain, either. The only reasonable conclusion that one can draw here is that I do not like any weather, which is probably accurate.) I decided to check out a restaurant that one of the hostel employees had recommended to me - a beerhouse, to be more precise. I will cut this part short, as I want to finish this email, brush my teeth, and go to bed. The food at the beerhouse was exceptional but overpriced - perhaps everything in Salzburg is a little pricier than it is in much of Germany (or, maybe, the hostel worker unwittingly sent me to a pricy restaurant like that idiot in the Frankfurt hostel). I ordered a dish of incredibly-fatty pork, an unequalled dumpling, and a cabbage dish prepared with bacon, which makes all vegetables tastier. The dumpling was unlike any that I have had in my life except in Salzburg last year (While I could swear that my meal last year (at a different café - I know vaguely where) was cheaper and that I got a better meat dish, my memory might be wrong.). Austrian dumplings are like mazzo ball dumplings, only vastly denser and richer with flavor. I do not know how they are made, but I suspect that one cannot get them anywhere except in Austria; I am going to ask for them at every restaurant that I visit along the Danube. The pork chops that I ordered were very flavorful (they though tasted a little like salt marinated in salt, more salt, and worcestshire sauce), and they really teach one to eat around the fat, as failing to do so would cause one to throw out the baby with the bathwater - one would miss all of the meat! Overall, I got decent value for my money, given the quality of the food, but would not want to eat in Austrian restaurants very often.
I will have to keep my final notes brief in order to finish this letter. I am planning to see the famous ice caves at Werfen tomorrow, which cost on the order of 20 Euros but are a unique geographical treasure, as I understand it. (I think of those outreach trips that I do in Arkansas every time I shell out that kind of money. I hope to remake much of the money spent here on expenses unrelated to transport by participating in several outreach trips next year.) I am not going to explore the historic city center of Salzburg, as I have already seen it, and I will probably not have time to make that walk through the hills, though I wish that I could. I should have skipped Luxembourg and spent an extra day in Salzburg, but how was I to know? I am going to try to visit a couple of bakeries tomorrow, as, besides being the most beautiful city that I have ever visited, Salzburg has world-class food. One does not regret a single calorie of the pastries that one consumes here, as one cannot get them anywhere else in the world (as far as I know); this is one of the places in which I was planning to gastronomically indulge. I do not know what my internet access will be like for the next five days, but I hear that the flooding along the Danube has passed, meaning that I will at least be able to make my trip. If I disappear for a few days, then you can await several posts in a row when I make it to Vienna!
Finally, I forgot to mention that French people actually wear their scarves in bizarre and sophisticated ways, including wrapping them backwards around their necks, just like we learned in our French 8 (basic high-school French) class. They also like kissing each other on the cheeks when they greet each other or part ways. Some cultural lessons are dead-on accurate!
Finally, I forgot to mention that French people actually wear their scarves in bizarre and sophisticated ways, including wrapping them backwards around their necks, just like we learned in our French 8 (basic high-school French) class. They also like kissing each other on the cheeks when they greet each other or part ways. Some cultural lessons are dead-on accurate!
This is one of the hills along which I wanted to walk.
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