Venice and Salzburg

Paige and I outside the Villa right before we left

Again, I apologize for long gaps between posts. It's so hard to explain how busy we are and what it's like. It will be weird when I'm back in the states and not constantly going or doing something new. Free travel was a great experience. All 34 people here at HUF split up in groups and chose where they wanted to go. My friend Paige Spiller and I were the smallest group. That in itself taught us so much. I told her I think around day 4 or 5 that it hit me that I'd never spent that long with just one person. 24 hours a day, everyday for 6 days. AND under the stress of being in completely different cultures and places that we don't understand. So, considering all that... you'd think it'd be tough to get along but in all honesty we did awesome. Sure we got annoyed and grumpy at points but as a whole we grew closer and learned a lot.

A reacquiring theme we encountered when talking to locals and fellow travelers was that they thought we were crazy for trying to go so many places in such a short amount of time. In general, I agree. There is no way you can truly experience any of the cities we went to in a day. We have Eurail passes though... which is what justified it all in my mind. We were required to buy them for the semester and cost us 7 or 8 hundred dollars. They make it so we can jump on most trains and not need to get any other ticket. We might as well take that opportunity to get a taste of several places.

Venice, Italy

We left for Venice, Italy from Florence at 2:25. We're used to this train station so it was easy to find where we needed to go. The stressful part was when I went to use the ATM right before getting on the train my debt card wouldn't work. I got on the train with a little over 100 euro (not nearly enough to get me through the week) and freakin out a tad. But after making some phone calls to my parents and getting a number for a Regions customer service worker and after losing her once when going through a tunnel we finally got it worked out. Sigh of relief.

We got into Venice around 5:00 (a little later than planned because there was an extra train we had to take that we didn't know about it). We were bubbling with excitement as we walked out of the train station. We'd decided to keep our packs with us the whole time since we'd only be there about 5 hours. When we had bought our map the information worker had point out to us the main attraction which was Piazza de San Marco. I think we enjoyed the walk there, I think, more than the actually Piazza. The streets were much as I had imagined them. Twisted and turned and where tight and crowded at times and then would open up to a square of sorts or a water street/canal. Shops with tons of character were sprinkled everywhere. We saw so many pastry, jewelry, glass, and mask shops. If you veer of the main streets it's pretty easy to get lost, which we did but were pretty quick to fix our mistake.  I was so amused by the doors that just sat above the waters edge.
Once in San Marco Piazza we looked around a bit and then sat to eat the sack dinner the lovely Italian ladies at our villa had made us. It was fun to people watch and look out into the water. Piazza de San Marco has one edge of it that is open to a body of water that I think is called Laguna Veneta. We ran into another group from HUF and chatted with them for a bit and then slowly began to work our way back towards the train station. We stopped to buy postcards and souvenirs. We also took some time to buy some pastries. Paige had a cannoli which is a fried tub shaped pastry filled with flavored cream. When she said she was getting a cannoli I thought she was getting pasta... haha that's the only kind of cannoli I'd heard of. I had some kind of hard meringue pastry that I'd never seen before (which in the picture is the white whip cream looking thing on the second to bottom shelf). After sitting by a canal for a bit and chatting we went to catch our 9:18 train to Salzburg, Austria. On night trains you have the option of getting a bed in a compartment that holds I think 6. That costs extra though so we thought we'd try it without. It worked out pretty nicely. The trains sometimes have compartments of 6 chairs (being from a country that doesn't use trains that much my first thought at this setup was Harry Potter haha). We found an empty one and were able to spread out across 3 seats.

Salzburg, Austria

Paige in part of the Marabell Gardens

So our night train worked out... for the most part. Our mistake was choosing one that arrived in Salzburg at 4 am. While lots of big city train stations are nice and have heating, chairs, shops, and even beds you can rent... this small town train station had non of the above. It was freezing cold, nothing was open and there weren't even chairs in the main part (aka the safe part) of the train station to sit. After wondering around contemplating what to do (we even checked hotel lobbies to see if we could possibility sit in the lobby for a while but they were all closed) we ended up huddled up on the floor in a corner of the train station for about about 3 hours. Once a nearby dinner opened at 7 we went in to have breakfast and get some coffee. We went to check in the information booth and discovered in didn't open until 9. Well, we didn't want to wait around for 2 more hours so we found a free map in one of the hotels and went off to try to find the sites on our own.

Stiegl-Brauwelt Brewery

To make a long story short, we should have gone back at 9 to get more information. We didn't find the best part of town until finally did go back around 11 and were told how to get there. On our own we found Marabell gardens were part of the Sound of Music was filmed but a lot of the stuff (such as the steps where they sang Do, Re, Mi) we wanted to see was gated off for some reason. We went into the birth place of Mozart. We walked around town a bit but many of the shops were closed due to it being a Sunday. When we went back to the info booth we were told about the Stiegl-Brauwelt Brewery. It was kind of the saving grace of the day! It was HUGE and we had the best hamburgers we'd ever had in our lives. The waitress and waiters were dressed in old fashion outfits and were fun. We wish we would have time to take the tour but we had to make it back to the station to catch our 2:10 train to Prague, Czech Republic.

Of our 6 days of travel, I'd say Salzburg was probably our roughest (in rival with only one other day). It wasn't a bad day... we still had fun and got to see some cool things. It probably didn't help that it was a pretty gloomy day with not much sunshine. I think I also had some high expectations for Salzburg. I'd heard LOTS of good things about it from friends that have come to HUF in the past. Most of them went on the Sound of Music tour though... maybe that was our mistake. We'd decided not to do it because while we both like Sound of Music neither of us are huge fans and it was pretty expensive. But we heard from some others in our group that the tour showed a lot of the pretty parts of the area that didn't necessarily have to do with the musical. The train ride from Salzburg to Prague was interesting! Something as simple as their houses were fun to look at because they're so different from ours.


Alright, that's the overview of Venice and Salzburg. More to come. :)

Marabell Gardens