Harrison's Travels.....

The Mirabelle Gardens at the Mirabelle Palace are not the most ornate or beautiful gardens that we've seen on our trip to Austria, however, the palace is significant in the history of Salzburg.   It was built by Wolf Deitrich von Reitenau for his mistress, Solomae, whom he loved dearly.  von Reitenau was a powerful man whose fortune was made with the salt mines that we visited Wednesday.  The Gardens are still beautiful although simple, and we worth visiting.  Several areas in the Mirabelle Gardens were used in the filming of The Sound Of Music movie.  There is an upper garden with 13 statues of dwarves. No one is certain as to the significance of the statues, but they are cute anyway.

 

Two of the students who were on the Study Abroad with us last year, Sylvia Timothy and Meredith Morris joined us at the Gardens as well as our friend Christian Weisbacher who is from a little town on the border of Germany and Austria but attended and graduated from SUU.  We had a good time seeing them and they spent the rest of the day with us.

 

After touring the Gardens, we went across the river to the inner city, the Innenstadt, and had lunch.  After lunch we went back to the other side of the river and into a hotel where we took the elevator to the top of the building for a magnificent view of the city as well as delicious desserts.

 

Colton left us after lunch to go the Salzburg airport to pick up his father who had come to join him.  They will travel to Germany and back to Vienna together before going back to the states.

 

On Friday, it was a pretty relaxed day.  Kim, Jim and I took one of the Sound of Music bus tours.   We were taken to many of the sites that were used in the filming of the movie such as the house by the lake, the real house of the von Trapp family, the Nonberg Abby that is still in use and the St. Michael's church where Maria and the Captain were married (in the movie).   The gazebo was built just for the movie and then donated to the city of Salzburg.  It was open to the public and while the publice can still look at it from the outside, they have locked it so that visitors cannot go in.  The reason?  An 82 year old woman was trying to jump from bench to bench like Liesle and Rolf did in the movie when she slipped and broke her hip.  Now the gazebo is locked up tight.

 

Friday night we all got together for a farewell dinner at the Kirchenwirt Gasthaus where we are staying in Puch.  The food was delicious and Jim and I bought dessert for everyone; two traditional and original Salzberger Nockerals.  A nockeral is a very large souffle with a current berry sauce that is very good that is famous here in Salzburg.  Sylvia, Meredith and Christian joined us for dessert and almost everyone liked the nockeral.

 

Tomorrow Kim, Katrina and Sara will all leave Salzburg for home and other destinations. Jim and I will leave Salzburg on Sunday afternoon and Colton and his father will leave on Monday for the next part of their trip.

 

Thanks for joining us on our 2009 Study Abroad.  We had great experience this year and hope you enjoyed reading about it.

On Wednesday we all went to Bad Durrenberg to the Salt Mines.  Sound boring?  It wasn't! The salt mine tour is lots of fun.  We took a bus from the train station and drove high into the Austrian Alps, some of the most beautiful mountains in the world.  When we got inside the entrance we were given white pants and a white shirt to put on over our clothing to keep our clothes from being damaged.  Then we were led to a little train of rails where we rode about 1/2 mile into the mine.  Once we stopped we got off the rails and walked probably another 1/4 mile to a little theatre where there was a short presentation on how the salt mines came to be.  It was originally discovered by the Celts that had settled in that area around 800 B.C.  The salt trade was very important to the area and salt was used as money for hundreds of years.  There were several levels to the mine and we got from one of the upper levels to a lower level by using a hardwood slide about 30 yards long.  It was a steep slide and lots of fun.  Then on to another video showing more of the salt story and another slide that was much longer than the first and still very fun.  After the second slide, we had to cross an underground lake on a pontoon type boat.  The darkness in the cavern was almost tangible until they turned on dimly lit colored lights.  After the boat docked we followed the tracks to another space where we saw the last of the videos describing the history and the characters important to the salt production at the mine.  During the walk through the mine, we passed the borders into Germany and then back into Austria.

 

Luckily we didn't have to climb out of the mine.  A very long escalator took us to the top, then we were back on to the little rail train and out of the mine.  We were all given minerature packages of salt that came from the mine as a souvenier.

 

Once we were out of the mine and our mine clothes, we went outside and walked up a steep road to an old church on the mountain above the mine.  The climb was very, very steep, but it was worth it.  From the walkway surrounding the church we had a fantastic view of the valley between Bad Durrenberg and Salzburg.  People live there in the little village of Bad Durrenberg, in fact there is a little Kindergarten there.

 

A little Celtic village was at the bottom of the mountain and we poked around it for awhile before catching the bus back to Hallein, our starting point. 

 

After arriving back in Hallein, we found a Chinese restaurant that had very good food so we had a great lunch and then couldn't resist stopping at a little ice cream shop on the way back to the train  It was a great day and everyone had a really good time.

 

  

Getting to Mauthausen from Salzburg is quite an ordeal.  It's an hour and a half train ride from Salzburg to Linz where we change trains to continue on to the very small little village of Mauthausen.  Then we either take a taxi or walk to the camp.  The taxi is better because the walk is a long, steep uphill climb which is brutal in hot weather as last year's group can attest. But our journey doesn't seem too bad when it is compared to how the inmates of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp must have felt on their journey to the Camp.  For some it was the last journey of their lives.

 

We arrived at the stark stone camp at about 11 a.m. on Wednesday.  The first thing we saw was a field where the Russian captives were kept.  The camp is in a beautiful area that makes it hard to imagine the ugliness that was going on behind the stone walls.  Then we moved toward the stairs, or the Todestiege (stairs of death), on which inmates were forced to carry huge blocks of granite on their backs from the quarry below the camp.  There were over 200 steps and unlike the stairs that are there today, they were uneven and some of the steps were as much as 1.5 meters high.  The inmates were shoulder to shoulder as they trudged up the stairs and if one inmate happened to stumble or fall, he would cause those around him and behind him to stumble and fall as well.

 

When our students got to the bottom of the stairs and into the quarry area, they saw that in the quarry are three pools.  One of these pools was used as an amusment for the camp guards.  They would force the inmates to line up single file at the edge of the cliff over the pool. Then the guard would force the inmate at the back to push the man in front of him causing a chain reaction with the inmates falling off the cliff into the pool below.  They were either killed by the fall down or drowned in the pool.

 

After the students climbed back up the stairs, panting and wheezing, we headed into the camp through monuments erected by several nations remembering those who had been incarcerated there.  Then it was through the massive gate into the camp where a very sobering experience awaited them.

 

The first stop in our audio tour was the "Wailing Wall" where new prisoners were forced to stand upon arrival for anywhere from a few hours to a few days, no matter what the weather.  Mauthausen is high and the winters can be severe whereas the summers can be extremely humid and hot. When inmates were taken from the Wailing Wall, they were processed and assigned to overcrowded barracks that were too small for such a large number of men.  Then they began living a nightmare with cruel guards with guns and vicious dogs that were ordered to attack prisoners that displeased the guards; high stone walls with electric barbed wire on top of them; lice, inadequate meals served every couple of days; inadequate clothing; inadequate to non-existent medical care for the illnesses associated with living in such cramped quarters and inhumane doctors that enjoyed doing experiments on living human beings. 

 

The tour included entrance to the gas chamber, the neck-shot room, hanging area and the crematorium ovens as well as a museum that had many graphic photos of the prisoners and camp life as well as a model of the camp.  To wind up the trip, we went into the visitor's center and watched a 45 minute documentary on the camp and it's heartbreaking history.  The documentary included interviews with former inmates, a man who helped supply the camp with food, a woman whose mother sheltered a prisoner that had escaped and an American Marine who helped liberate the camp.

 

This was a very moving experience for all of us and the students said they thought it was an important experience for them take part in.

 

 

 

 

Today was hot and humid again and we also had two girls whose allergies were acting up and making them miserable.  Katrina had a scratchy throat and Sara had itchy eyes.  But they were real troopers and came along and participated in day's activities anyway.  Because of the heat and the girls not feeling well we cut today's tour of Salzburg a little short. 

 

The first stop was on one of the prettiest streets in Salzburg, the Getreidegasse.  On this street is the house where Mozart was born, the Mozarts Geburtshaus, and has beautifully ornate hanging signs, a practice that got it's start in medieval times.

 

Jim also showed the students around other parts of the city and we visited a couple of small little street markets that were fun to poke around in.  One of the little markets included a very large cheese and fresh meat vendor.  There were lots of different types of cheeses and meats and with the hot weather the smells were interesting to say the least. We shared a huge apple pretzel that could easily become addictive that we bought from a street vendor.  Other sights included the cemetery that was the inspiration of the graveyard scene in The Sound Of Music movie.  When we left the cemetery, we went into the castle bakery and some of us bought a fresh, delicious roll with raisins.  The bakery still uses a water wheel to generate the power to grind the wheat into flour. 

 

Of course no European city tour is complete without including a church or two, so we saw the inside of three churches; the Collegian Kirche, the St. Peter's Kirche and the Salzburg Cathedral Dom also called St. Paul's.  Inside St. Paul's is the baptismal font used to baptize Mozart. 

 

No self respecting tourist area in Austria is free of street vendors and musicians and Salzburg is no exception.  We listened to a group outside the Dom playing the accordian, two minerature balalaikas as well as a large one.  I've included a picture of the group so you can see what I'm talking about. 

 

The highlight of the excursion today was to climb to the top of the hill and visit the Borg or castle.  Whenever you see a picture or Salzburg, there will most likely be a picture of this fortress in it, it's quite impressive.  Although it was hot, Jim and the students made the climb to the top in about 15 minutes.  At the castle we took a self guided tour of the interior, went into the museum, a marionette museum (marionette shows are popular here), saw the canons and the castle well. 

 

After our tour around the castle, we went back to the train station where everyone had Doner, a turkish sandwich that everyone loves, and a cold drink.

 

Tomorrow, we will go to Mauthausen, a brutal concentration camp during WWII.

We got to Salzburg on Saturday and it's great to be here where it is so gorgeous.  It is also nice to have wifi at the hotel where we are so that I can update this blog and have been able to add the pictures because the blog is in English now.  Woohooo!

 

Because of the price of the train fare to Prague, we didn't go.  To kind of make it up to the kids, we took them to Bratislava which is in Slovakia. Actually, only the girls went. It's only an hour train ride from Vienna and the ticket was only 14 Euros which was a great deal.  We went on Thursday because the students were out of class for Pfingsten or in English, the Day of Pentacost.  The train was crowded on the way to Bratislava.  I guess lots of families had the same idea as us about getting out of the city on the holiday.  The Austrians and Germans really celebrate their holidays.  Very few stores and restaurants are open.  It's like a Sunday with almost everything closed up.

 

Bratislava was under communist rule for quite awhile but became a democracy again in 1993.  It's taken awhile, but they are slowly rennovating their Old Town which is a very pretty place.  The Castle, however, was somewhat of a disappointement because it was entirely shrouded in scaffolding and plastic while rennovations are being done.  But the weather was nice and the crowds were not too bad.  We showed the girls the St. Martins Cathedral which was where the coronations were held in historic times.  It is said to have the only true example of Baroque architecture in the city.

 

The girls had a good time and it was exciting to be in another country.  Before the European Union, one would get a stamp in their passport when entering each new country.  Now, once you've entered an EU country, there is no need to show your passport again and therefore, do not get a stamp in it with each different country visited

 

The students all went back to class on Friday and then on Sat. we got on the train headed for Salzburg.  After a 3 hour ride through breathtaking beauty we arrived at our destination, a lovely, traditional guest house, the Kirchenwirt.