Day 253 Innsbuck Austria

Innsbruck, Austria, is a former winter Olympic site and lovely little town. The golden roof on a house is listed as the current major tourist attraction, but I would disagree. The roof is nice, yes, yet the mountains are the big draw. The weather was perfect when I arrived and I planned on taking a few trams the next morning to the peaks looming over the city. I checked in to a great little hostel that was run out of a café. The room was huge and had a big curved couch and table in front of big bay windows. And as usual, the room came with a few hedonistic Austrailians to keep things interesting. They are great to talk with, but unless you like hangovers from hell, do not go out with them. Same goes for the Irish. I stayed in that evening.

I looked around the city a bit, took some pictures of the golden roof, ate some Austrian pastry, got a hair cut at an Arabic place, and bought groceries to make dinner in the hostel kitchen (spaetzel, speck, sauerbraten, and beer. YUM!). The next morning I woke up to rain…and the forecast was not good. So what to do? I had a great free breakfast (included with the room) at the café and then checked out and hopped a train to Slovenia. Luckily, I met Chad from Canada on the platform to Ljubljana, Slovenia and we became travel buddies for a while. Like most Canadians he was easy to spot; he had about four Canadian flags on his clothes, backpack, and hat. To be fair, he says that his family gave him those things with the flags on them rather than his choosing. The consensus among the travelers I have met is that most Canadians do not want to be mistaken for Americans. It is understandable, who has bad feelings toward Canadians?

Day 245 Vienna Austria

I was thrilled to get off that plane. I had about eight hours to kill in Vienna so I took the train into town to see the Danube. It was raining lightly, and I didn’t take many pictures, nor did I buy anything other than food (Strudel, yum!) Maybe I was too tired, but German seemed to be much more of a foreign language than any others I have run across, except Arabic. In Latin based languages I can figure out some words based on similarity—not German. Since I was only going to be here on a layover, I didn’t study any German and the few words I do know are almost worthless. And they have impossibly long words here that are very intimidating and almost seem silly long. Between the language thing and being exhausted, I felt more helpless than in other countries. I was not in the mood to make an effort to see the sights, which will have to wait for another time. I am flying to Rome now and all I want to do is eat and sleep like the dead.