Wednesday, August 14, 2002

 
Okee dokee. I'm leaving Salzburg in a couple of hours, heading towards Vienna. Salzburg has turned out to be surprisingly pretty and surprisingly unflooded, though you can see the aftereffects of the previous flooding in the debris on the banks of the river. My hostel and the train station are in the more modern parts of town, whereas most of the touristlike action is a short walk walk away in the old city. Yesterday I got here around 3pm, checked into my hostel and had a wander down the Linzer Gasse towards the old city. The old city is just a great big bag of prettiness, all curlicues and wrought iron and ancient buildings. I started out at the Dom (that's right, every damn city has a dom), the old church in the middle of the city. Eventually, after tiring of flat ground, I attempted the steep climb up the hill to the Hohensalzburg Fortress, a medieval fortress overlooking the city. Well, for once, I failed utterly. Or more importantly, my shoes failed me utterly. No grip on a steep gravel road, so I ended up quitting very close to the bottom and hopping on the funicular, which zoomed me to the top in moments.

The climb would totally have been worth it, though, as the fortress was beyond gorgeous, with all sorts of neat displays and poky corners. Most of the huge complex is completely free, but I paid a little extra and got into the museum, which featured a wicked a display of wooden stick figures with medieval armour and weapons attacking a great big horde of tourists. I also got to check out the torture rooms and the kitchens and the smithy, and learn a little about the history of the place. The Prince Archbishop (how funny is this title--I guess this is why they all had mistresses instead of wives. Schloss Mirabelle, a palace whose grounds were used in the Sound of Music, was built for the mistress of one of the Prince Archbishops) had it built in 1077, and subsequent Prince Archbishops had expanded it and turned it into the great big maze it is now. Fabulous.

I did walk down, just because I felt so guilty about not walking up. After coming back down to earth, I headed to the Mozartplatz, where, you guessed it, there's a great big statue of Mozart. After this, I did a mini tour of the local churches, of which there are many, including the Church of the Holy Trinity, Franciscan Church, and the Collegiate Church. Eventually, I went to the St. Peter's Cemetary. I arrived there too late for the catacombs, but the cemetary itself is pretty spectacular, with old gravestones, and crypts, and wrought iron and flowers and vines climbing everywhere.

Last night, I hung out with some girls from Korea in my hostel, and today, I came here. I'm off to the Catacombs in a minute, followed by a short trip to the Residenz museum (they have one of those here too) to see how the other half used to live. After that, I'm off to Vienna.
posted by Alleen at 11:01:57 AM

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

 
Here I am writing these epic blog entries finally, to no response from you guys. Where are the comments, you big sucky bums?

I'm in Salzburg right now and it's very nice here. I think if I had more money, I would appreciate it a lot more.

Still, it's stopped raining and that's what counts.

I'm paying for the Internet by the minute here, so this is all you get. More later. Maybe.
posted by Alleen at 9:09:42 PM

 
So, I'm still in Munich right now, wrestling with a keyboard with a sticky space bar at the easyEverything again (which is conveniently close to my hostel and the train station. I'm actually leaving here in an hour or so to head for Salzburg, Austria. Not really sure why, since it doesn't look like party central, but it is on the way to Vienna and it seems a waste to skip it. I've spent the past few days trying to appreciate beer and failing utterly. I have the slight excuse that my genetics doesn't really support the enjoyment of beer; it's not exactly a traditional Armenian drink. On the other hand, maybe I just suck.

So shortly after my last post, I went back to my hostel and had a nap. I then proceeded to the world's most famous beer house, the HofBrauHaus, with one of my roommates, Diana, a nutty California girl. If you like beer and hearty German food (vegetarians might want to avoid this like the plague) and the companionship of several drunk people speaking many languages, then this is the place for you. I, to my own surprise and the surprise of probably everyone reading this, managed to choke down a whole litre of beer. Why? Because it only comes in litres.

The next day, Diana and I decided to do a bike tour of Munich, with much trepidation on my part. Sure, I ride my bike all the time at home, but Munich is nothing like the polite drivers of the almost trafficless Den Haag.

Still, it all turned out okay. Mike's Bike Tours is apparently the beer-drinking tour of Munich, which suited me fine, since it meant we had to make a lot of stops. Four hours on a bike is hard on the ass.

The tour started off at the HofBrauHaus, where I chowed down on cucumber-potato salad, some excellent mushroom soup and a slab of processed meat that I couldn't bring myself to swallow. After this, the tour got going and we ended up seeing a lot of buildings that I wouldn't normally have found in the city, including the Altes Rathaus, the Gothic Neues Rathaus (featuring the world famous Glockenspiel, basically an enormous and more elaborate cuckoo clock), Theatinerkirche St. Kajetan (a Baroque church built in honour of the extreme fertility of a Bavarian king and his wife), the Feldherrnhalle (a tribute to two field generals and Bavaria itself), Max Joseph Platz, the National Theatre, the Hofgarten (with the Temple of Diana in the middle and the Bayerische Staatskanzle to the side-- the Bayerische Staatskanzle is the most obvious example of the post-WWII rebuilding of Munich with the remains of a 19th century military museum in the middle and two modern, glass-topped wings at each side).

This was followed by a trip into the Englischer Garten, the former hunting grounds of the Dukes of Bavaria, now the biggest park in the whole of Europe. It's clever name derives from the fact that the whole thing is designed as an English garden, albeit an enormous one. The entire complex is manmade, from its minilake to its river, which due to the extreme amounts of rain, was at its highest, providing excellent fun for Munich's few but dedicated surfers. Basically, the Englischer Garten's river is made by damming off part of the Isar River (upon which Munich is built), and directing it underground through to the Garten. The surfers had found the spot where the manmade river emerged from the underground and were surfing the resulting waves. It was a pretty trippy sight in a land-locked city.

We also made a stop at the Chinesischer Turm, a large beer garden in the Englischer Garten, so called because of it's large Chinese tower, though we didn't make it to the Japanisches Teehaus, probably due to their lack of beer.

That wrapped up the tour, so Diana and I decided to take a culture break and go shopping which ended up a total failure as we were both suffering the aftereffects of the bike ride. We ended up sitting down at the Augustiner Restaurant and Beerhalle and having a pretzel. The evening was ended up with me at the HofBrauHaus with a group of people from my hostel, mostly Americans and Canadians. I managed to avoid drinking beer this time, but did end up chowing down on their enormous pretzels.

Right now, I'm just waiting for the 12:30 to Salzburg and using up the last of my credit at this Internet cafe. I'm hoping to end up in Vienna by tonight, but I'll see how exciting Salzburg turns out to be. If it's just the Sound of Music tour, I'm out of there.


posted by Alleen at 11:28:19 AM

Sunday, August 11, 2002

 
Munich. Third try. The easyEverything internet cafe comes through again, proving yet again that it is neither easy, nor everything. I've tried to start writing this damn thing twice already, the first time being thwarted by a general failure of all the computers (followed by the staff kicking everyone out into the pouring rain for a half hour), while the second was shut down by my computer spontaneously shutting down. I only came in here to kill a half hour and yet here I am, an hour later, still no closer to posting than I was when I got here.

Deep breath. Thinking zen thoughts. Putting up the cone of silence.

I got here last night around 2am and then immediately proceeded to my hotel, the Hotel Westend, where I passed out on the world's most comfortable bed in seconds. Yes, yes, I am economising and staying in hostels. But I got here after the hostel curfew and I couldn't get a night train. Sucky. Still, the Hotel Westend was made worthwhile by the fact that it was only on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors of a building. A building, by the way, which featured a large and bizarre mural captioned with the words 'Ford Uber Alles.' Also, as I mentioned before, my teeny bed in my teeny room was crazy comfortable.

Still, I woke up this morning and immediately checked out. I subsequently checked myself into the 4 you munchen hostel, where I'm sure to be desperately happy for the next two nights. After dumping off the luggage, I went into the old city and hit a couple of museums. The first was the Residenz Museum, a palace formerly belonging to Munich aristocracy (it was all in German, so I have no idea--actually, I just checked. It's the Dukes, Electors, and Kings of Bavaria). The museum is in two parts, the first being the palace itself and the second being the Schatkamers where they keep all the treasures and crown jewels and assorted detritus from sundry residents of the palace. It started out as a whole bunch of heavy jewel-encrusted gold crowns and swords and crosses and house altars and then descended into family knick-knacks, like some Duchess' tea service or someone else's gravy boat, yadda yadda yadda. The crowns were cool, though. They had a couple from 1000 a.d., which were kind of fun. They looked kind of crude and banged up, as if they just kind of figured that the world should be sufficiently impressed by the fact that the king had a fortune in gold and jewels on his head and there was certainly no need to make it aesthetically pleasing. You could kind of see a king wearing them into battle, whereas the later ones didn't have that rock 'n' roll aspect to them.

Anyway, after that I headed into the Residenz itself, which made me even more discontent with my apartment. 10 foot ceilings? Pshaw. From now on, it's at least 20 feet or no go. Also, I have decided that I don't have enough gold and marble in my decorating scheme. And a royal title wouldn't hurt either. The Duke\Elector\King got to sleep on a bed that was behind a gate, on a platform. I wonder if this was also the birthing room, since I hear that in the old days, royalty had to have kids with all interested parties present. Blech.

But hey, it looked like a lot of fun. Nothing beats gigantic halls covered in tapestries and silk hangings and ancestral paintings and furniture that has the royal crest on it for sheer style. With all you can say about minimalist modern furniture, you know that the peasants aren't going to cower in front of a Eames chair. You need a throne, baby, a throne. Though, if this museum is as historically accurate as they seem to be, the Duchess\Electress\Queen had a small IKEA side table by her bedside with a multi-line phone on it.

After I tired of unmitigated splendour, I headed for the Centre for Unusual Museums, where I checked out the Easter Bunny Museum, the Chamberpot Museum, the Pedal Car museum (toys for rich kids--get a mini-Mercedes for your kid to pedal around the palace), the Taxidermy-gone-wrong museum (not what it's really called. It basically consisted of animals put together wrong), the Bourdalou museum (something like a gravy boat, which, as far as I could tell was once used to wash a woman's bits), and the Scent museum. After I got through there, I went back into the pouring rain to check out the marathon being run outside. I ended up watching a group of drummers instead of the marathon runners for like an hour and then I headed back towards the hostel, with some vague idea of getting dry clothes. I ended up watching some Tibetan musicians playing for another half hour and then came here, where I am slowly but surely warming up.

More adventures soon. Hopefully dry ones.
posted by Alleen at 4:24:26 PM

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