the hills are alive...!

The highlights of our first day in Austria were the adorable little German-speaking boy that was in the same 6-seat room of the train as us, getting to do laundry (we were both running out of underwear, and Jason had no shirts left to wear!), and ordering pizza into our hotel room once we got there! other than that, it was a pretty uneventful day of train travel and rainyness. no good views out of the train car window, since it was just pouring the whole time!! it had been raining for over 3 days straight (without stopping!) on our trip and we were getting sick of not getting to see the Alps – or much of anything! So our second day in Salzburg, Austria, we were very happy to peek out the window and see some blue sky!! We spent the day walking around and seeing the city (Mozart’s birthplace and residence are here, and a couple of cool castles/fortresses). We went on quite a hike up to one of the castles, and looked at the other one (and drew it) from afar… It was a very relaxing day, without any real time constraints or sights we felt like we “couldn’t miss” – felt like a vacation!! We thought of Jenna as we ordered our “Spaghetti eiz” – vanilla ice cream in noodle shapes, with strawberry sauce on top to make it look like spaghetti (did that every work out, jen?), had pretzels and cheese-filled sausages, and more ice cream… We ended the evening with a “Mozart dinner concert”, which was WAY too expensive, but it’s his hometown – we had to! ;) Next on the schedule? a 35-hour train trip to Athens via Budapest and Beograd!

[internet connection has been super-sketchy, so we're posting the blogue with no pictures for now - we'll try to add more later! also, that's why we're DAYS behind on our posts! we'll update as soon as we can!]