Our hotel room was really great but a little quirky. The shower had three temperatures: really hot, scalding hot, and face-melting hot. We never figured that one out. When we opened the cabinet that held the TV, the door would hit the bed so that you couldn't see inside. Jake had to take the door off its hinges so that we could watch it. Oh, and there were no English channels, so we got to watch America's favorites, such as Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs, and How I Met Your Mother, with German dubs, and don't forget Germany's Big Brother. So entertaining. Despite its quirks, we really enjoyed our stay. With a balcony view like this, how could we not?
A couple of pictures from around town.
In our hotel room, we found this Book of Mormon in the night stand.
A previous guest had left it in our room with her testimony inside. It was from the year 2000! That book had been there for 11 years, so Jake and I decided to add our testimony in German. Maybe someone will take it some day. We were so excited to find it.
Ahh, how I miss this creamy, dreamy drink, aptly named Hazelnut Dream. Seriously, they sell everything in a hazelnut flavor in Europe, which is a practice that I whole-heartedly believe we should adopt in America immediately. This creamy, hazelnut-flavored milk was truly a dream, while it is now merely a dream.
One of our adventures near St. Johann was the Hallein salt mine. They make you wear these stylish outfits to protect your clothes. Mine was so huge, and Jake's was really wide and really short. We looked ridiculous so fabulous.
The salt mine was sooo much fun. First of all, our tour guide was tri-lingual. What? Yes, he spoke German, English, and Italian. His accent was so strong, though, that I couldn't tell when he had transitioned from German to English. All of a sudden, I would hear a word I recognized, and I would realize he had been speaking English for several minutes. When he told us how they "weberized" the water, I thought I was learning some new science word. Then Jake leaned over to me and whispered, "He means vaporized." Odd word choice, seeing as no alien weapons were involved.
Part of the tour was a boat ride through a cavern in the mine. They turn on colored lights to reflect off the salt in the ceiling. It sounds beautiful, but mostly it just reminded us of the creepy boat scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We did really enjoy the slides, though. When the mine was still active, the workers would slide down these wooden slides to get to different parts of the mine. They let you slide down them, and it is so fun. You can get going pretty fast on those things. One of the slides even crosses the border from Austria into Germany, which is kind of cool. They take a picture of you on the slide and try to sell it to you, but Jake and I didn't want to pay for it. So imagine that Jake and I are in the picture below, which I found on the internet.
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| via mariusescu |
Another great adventure we had near St. Johann was our hike to the Liechtensteinklamm (Liechtensteinklamm Gorge or Klamm for short). It turned out to be much more of a hike than we had anticipated. We walked 3 miles up and back, and if you add that to the hike inside the gorge, we walked a total of 7 miles that day. It was worth it - the gorge was beautiful. Hence the excessive number of pictures below.
I'm on the boardwalk in this one.
Jake and I asked someone to take our picture in front of the waterfall at the end of the hike up through the gorge.
On our last night in Europe, we slept in a hotel near the airport in Frankfurt. We had spent the entire day traveling to Frankfurt from St. Johann, so we really only had time to eat dinner, repack our chocolate stash, and go to sleep. Since the hotel was out near the airport in a sort of warehouse district, there weren't many dining options. So we ended up eating dinner in the hotel's Mexican restaurant. Mexican food in Germany? This sounded really weird, and we did not have high hopes, but it was really good. It was one of the better Mexican restaurants I've been to in my life. We were pleasantly surprised.
My next surprise was in the morning. I came out of the bathroom after getting ready for another day of traveling only to discover that the only shirts Jake and I had saved for this day were identical - our Harvard shirts. I put a cardigan on and figured no one would notice. Our British flight attendant nicknamed us Mr. and Mrs. Hahvahd. Whelp, what can you do?
It's hard to believe, but these posts do not contain even close to all of the photos that we took, so please ask us to see the rest sometime. We had such a great time in Europe, and we are so grateful for the opportunity we were given to go.
