Fun stuff though, this weekend after being too sick to go on the Mariazell hike, we ended up taking a train the next day to Hallstatt, which is a little town situated on the edge of a lake, pushed up against this large mountain. There's a way to drive around the lake to get to wherever you want to go by land, but it's such a large lake with such a large detour that they run a ferry with the train schedule so you can get to Bad Goisern, Obertraun, or Hallstatt, which are all located on the edge of the lake.
Right before we took off for the bus stop to get us to Scheibbs, the first train station, I went into the computer lab to print off a map of how to get to our hostel from Hallstatt, only to discover that we had made a critical error and the hostel was located in Bad Goisern, which was all the way at the north point of the lake, while Hallstatt is on the south-western point.
We had assumed that it was like a seven minute walk to get to our hostel from Hallstatt...turns out that it's actually seven miles. So right as we got on the bus to start our journey, it already looked like there was at least one fiasco waiting to happen.
Hallstatt was just as beautiful as the pictures - it's a quaint little touristy town with a city center that is impossible to miss, just because the place is so small. It's mostly just a tourist town though; a lot of hostels, pizzerias, stores, restaurants, and I'm sort of guessing that even a lot of people who work there commute to get there. There were some residential areas up higher that were fenced off, so I think some people live here, but it's got to be very expensive and also annoying, because taking a ferry and then a train to get to anywhere remotely more civilized would be aggravating.
I didn't even really see a proper grocery store - there was a Spar here, but not enough food in it to make it life-worthy.
Anyway, we wandered around some and met up with Jonah and Bradley briefly. When I was in the computer lab the twins were in there and they gave me Bradley's phone number, but it turns out we didn't need to use it - we saw them just sitting in the city center with a beer, so we went over and said hi.
After that we did some exploring, saw a church that was Lutheran, and then up higher, a church that was Catholic. I just sort of felt like that church was... creepy. The windows were nice, and when the sun comes in everything is pretty, but there were two large decorations behind the altar that looked like golden tri-folds with creepy statues on them. I wasn't sure what the statues were, either - they were all women that looked exactly the same, with huge foreheads, tiny staring eyes, and weird nubby chins.
Everything was also way decorated in gold, and for some reason the combination of gold and nubby-chinned women made me really uncomfortable. Sorry God, but I'm just not okay with that.
After exploring we grabbed dinner at a little restaurant and split a noodle dish that was basically glorified mac 'n' cheese - Clare really wanted to try it though.
After that started the real adventure. We met up with Jonah, Bradley, Catherine and Bridget (two other girls that the boys had run into and then ended up travelling with), who said they were staying a youth hostel in Hallstatt.
It turns out that buses to Bad Goisern stop running at 6. It was 6:15 when we decided to try to get to our hostel. Also, the ferries had stopped running because the trains had stopped running. A nice guy at the Spar seemed to think we were a little bit of dunces, but he was very helpful and started calling a taxi for us, before we decided to ask him if we could use his phone to call our hostel to see if we could cancel our booking for no charge (I was trying to use my phone, but I hadn't gotten the hang of punching in an Austrian number, and if we could use his phone, why use mine?).
Magically, we did get a hold of the hostel, which said we could cancel for no charge if we could do it online. I don't have my phone - I lost it on the bus from Mariazell because I had to move really quickly to accommodate this girl who was really sick, and then I forgot it - so we pulled out Clare's phone (Peggy), and headed off in search of Wifi.
We ended up in a hotel next to the city square and stood in line for quite a bit, and asked the man at the reception desk if we could use the hotel's locked wifi. He was very understanding (I was sort of afraid he wouldn't let us cancel our other hostel unless we ended up booking at this rather expensive hotel), and gave us a voucher to get into the system.
The online site said it would cost us 50 euro to cancel the booking, but when I called the hostel again, the guy on the other end was all, "No no no!! No charge, no problem, just cancel it, no problem, don't worry!" Don't worry and No Problem seem to be favorite phrases used by people trying to help clueless tourists.
So I assume from what he could convey was that the online site (which is general, not hostel-specific) was the one making us think that it would cost, so we cancelled that booking and went and found the other Franciscan group, who then took us up to the Hallstatt hostel, which magically had room.
Things about Hallstatt: after 6:00 the place is dead. Tourists leave, people go back to their individual dwelling places, there isn't any activity. The streetlights come on, and it was raining, so it was actually really beautiful. I think I liked it better that way.
The Franciscan group ended up wandering down to a bar and we all got desserts except for me, I ended up getting liver-dumpling soup, just to be adventurous and to help my sad sore throat. Turns out... I don't think Austrians know what the word dumpling mean; there was just broth and then a large liver meatball sitting in the middle of the soup, I think with some other stuff ground up in it.
Surprise - I really liked it! I guess I don't mind the taste of liver at all.
We had a quiet night in our hostel, and then the next morning we got breakfast at the hostel for free (it was just two semmels - those are the little rolls which are the staple of diets here), and then headed off for mass in the creepy Catholic church.
Turns out we ended up at a confirmation/first communion mass.... it took two hours and the homily was super long, and I understood about zero of it except when he said "Ewigkeit" or "Himmel", which respectively mean "Eternity" and "Heaven".
After that I went up to visit Hallstatt's ossuary. Back before cremation was in style, the citizens of Hallstatt had nowhere to bury their people, because their city is so little. So they'd bury people for fifteen years, dry out their bones, and then stick them in a charnel house to rest in peace. They stopped the tradition after people started getting cremated and there wasn't a real need, but they left the bones there and now you can pay a buck to get in and look at a bunch of dead people.
So following that we grabbed lunch at a little restaurant, then popped onto the train to get back to Gaming. We spent most of our train ride with Bradley and Jonah, because Catherine and Bridget both left earlier that morning. Bradley and Jonah really really really really wanted to play Egyptian Rat Race, except Bradley is an incredibly sore loser and hates when the game isn't going his way, and both of them slap the deck right after they put a card down, and I just don't have the treachery necessary to do that, I guess.
Clare actually held her own with Bradley near the end - Jonah and I just took a break and stared out the window. Jonah's pretty good about dealing with Bradley's inability to not win a game, but I was just sort of tired of it after a bit, and I'm not good at the game anyways.
Coming back was really relaxing, and I had a fun time Skyping and then I got some reading done for today's classes. It's nice to travel, but I'm also looking forward to a week of things being a little more calm before the Poland excursion this week.
Can't believe it's been almost one month since I took off from the United States.
Here's some pictures from our trip!
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| View from the lake facing away from Hallstatt |
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| Clare on the ferry |
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| Hallstatt city square |
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| They sell lots of dirndls around here, but they're all crazy expensive. |
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| This would be Gwendolyn. Clare and I hadn't planned on us not being able to get to our hostel until after we'd explored, so we put everything in my backpack.... .... which made that backpack really big. Which means it was basically child sized. Clare has a thing for giving things old fashioned names |
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| It won't let me upload the large version of this, so I lowered the quality of it a bit so you could see the panoramic view from over the city square. |
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| The charnel house. I felt kind of weird taking a picture of this... |
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| The view from the end of our hostel hallway |
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| What nice girls! |
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