had breakfast courtesy of the Gastehof Hochsteinalm, then headed back down the mountain to be ferried back to the train. it was still really rainy and cold and sad. all day, the views would have been epic had it not been for all the clouds, but i can't complain too much about that because it was still beautiful, just in a less postcardy way.
we caught our next train to Bad Ischl, where we caught a bus (apparently the tracks were broken after this) to Hallstatt.
the views of the mountains were still amazing, but me and a few others got really nauseous in this long, twisty tunnel we went through.
in Hallstatt, we took a tram up a mountain to the salt mines. that was also really cold, especially because were were still very feuscht. i can't believe how long the mines have been in use!!!! this one is the oldest in the world, apparently. we don't have stuff like that in the U.S., at least nothing that the white people didn't mess up. nice going. our tour guide was an austrian stallion who had the capacity to go 40 km/h down the underground slides. he was quite the specimen. i thought too much about being INSIDE of a MOUNTAIN and became uncomfortable with my spacial placement. at the end, we took a little train out of the mountain which just kept going and going in this small tunnel at a slight decline, which was horrifyingly similar to a significant part in House of Leaves (an amazing and truly terrifying book). overall, the tour itself was actually not that great, for some reason, and i don't think i really learned anything about salt. the group was really big, which is not a great thing when you're walking around in a mine, and every time the guide switched to english all the german-speaking people immediately started talking to each other so it was hard to hear. the best part of this was the slides we had to go down to get to other levels of the maze. here's an underground lake, the only photo i took:
descending, still raining, towards food. i am using this word too much in this entry, but i was horrified at how many people are STILL ORDERING in ENGLISH. and not only ordering in english, but not even trying to use german phrases. seriously?? we get more practice ordering food than anything else! anyway, hallstatt is yet another quaint, small town that is also content to just be really scenic. it had these cool terraced houses looking over the lake:
(I just looked up Hallstatt on Wikipedia, and apparently some Chinese real-estate firm intends to build a complete replica of this town somewhere in China. that is...really weird.)
here's devio beating up florian for the last time. what a bully.
as our train pulled back into wien several hours later, i felt exhilarated to be coming back to a place i recognized, but also a little sad to realize that i don't feel entirely comfortable in the place i most consider 'home' right now. i was in a blindingly good mood though! the whole trip basically continued to polarize me towards and against certain people.
No comments:
Post a Comment