No worries, we didn't fall off the face of the earth, just keeping ourselves busy. The past week was a good week. Last week Tuesday we had a little exchange student party at a local club. Good times and we even ran in to a girl that studied at UWW last fall. Kinda crazy. It was funny hearing her talk about The Downstairs and Pumpers and Mitchells. We still hadn't started class or heard anymore on our internship until we had an interview Thursday with a software company called Moravia-IT or something like that. Who knows what we'll be doing but it looks like we both got the position and start this upcoming Monday (The 30th). I'm so excited! Yah right. Friday we had a couple hours of class, which was a joke, and then Friday night the Spanish students through a Sangria party at the pub across from the dorms. Sangria is strong and after only two glasses I could tell I had been drinking. We woke up Saturday morning and a group of about 50 of us went just outside of Brno to a large park area and took a tour of some beautiful caves. We even got to take an underground boat tour of the underground river and lakes in the caves. We walked around for the better part of the morning and early afternoon. It was absolutely beautiful out and with the leaves changing, made it even nicer. We came back Saturday afternoon and got ready for our 3 day journey to Salzburg, Austria starting Sunday.
Sunday morning Lynsey and I were up at 0300 (wow, is that early) to catch the bus and our 0515 train to Salzburg. I was tired that's for sure. We got to Salzburg around 1230, found our hostel, checked in, dropped our bags and set out to enjoy the perfect October day exploring Salzburg. Trusting Lynseys navigation skills, she led us up a nice size hill in the middle of town only to find the way she was going wasn't the way down. We hiked around through the park atop the hill for a bit before descending in to the city. It is a very nice city and the river running through the middle was so clear and green tinted it was amazing. Every other river in Europe is gross looking but not this one. We had some typical Austrian food for dinner and headed back to our room only to crash before 8pm. Yah, thats how tired we both were.
We were up bright and early Monday morning to take a guided tour to Hitlers Eagle's Nest.
Hitler's Eagles Nest It is actually just over the border in to Germany and the Bavarian Alps. The views from atop were awesome. If you've ever seen Band of Brothers you'll know what I'm talking about. Just to be standing in the same room as Hitler did some 60 years ago is pretty cool. Check out the pics for the 360 degree views. After the tour was over and we were on our way back to Salzburg, the driver dropped the two of us at the base of another mountain, Mt. Untersberg. We took the cable car all the way to the top, some 1776 meters, for some more amazing views. From there we climbed to the next peak and spent a few hours relaxing and taking in the beautiful mountains. When you can seat atop a mountain of that size at the end of October in a t-shirt, ya know it's a nice day out. We headed back down on one of the last cable cars and took a bus back in to town. We explored some more, grabbed some grub from the grocery store, had some sandwiches in the room, watched a little TV and were in bed pretty early again. The three girls staying in the room with us all came in at different times and had no respect for us sleeping so our night of sleep sucked!
We awoke at 0600 Tuesday morning to catch a train further in to the Alps to take a tour of the worlds largest Ice Caves.
Ice CavesFrom the train station, we caught a shuttle that dropped us off half way up the mountain. From there it was a 20 min walk to the cable car that took us up a little further. From there it was another 20 minute walk to the entrance of the caves. The whole time, it was sprinkling pretty good on us, so we were wet and a little chilled by the time we got to the caves. It was us and two other people for the first tour of the morning so that was nice. The caves are at or below freezing all year long so it was a little chilly in there. We got actual lanterns to us for light in the cave and to light up the 700+ stairs we had to climb to get to the top and then the 700+ back to the bottom. We only saw about 1km of the 42km's worth of caves and it was pretty cool. Unlike anything I had ever seen before. Once we were done with the tour, we ventured back down the hill in a nice, steady rain, passing exhausted visitors on their way up, all the way down the mountain. Once back down at "normal" level, we caught the train back to Salzburg and then jumped on an earlier train back to Brno. We got back to our room about 2100 last night, unpacked, cleaned up, watched some Lost and crashed. Its another beautiful day in Brno so who knows what we'll do today!
We miss ya'll back home and appreciate all those who have been reading the blog and keeping up on our journeys. Who knows, we might head somewhere this week for a couple days just to keep us busy. If anybody wants to come visit, it's really cheap over here and we have extra beds in our room for ya to crash on! Hope to hear from ya'll soon. Until next time, ciao!
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