grime, grandeur, and giggles

so its been a while since my last post--for which i apologize profusely. as it turns out, while on the camino there is the problem of too much time and not enough internet, here the problem is reversed: not enough time to use the internet when one also is trying to see a whole city in one or two days.

so, with two days still left ahead for me and willy here in salzburg, austria, i thought now would be a good time to start catching everyone up on my travels.

barcelona was incredible...so incredible in fact that willy and i tried to leave and just couldn´t. no, literally. we missed our train. feeling like complete idiots (which i guess we were, since it was very clear on our tickets which train station we had to get to and we went to the wrong station), we went back to antiono and carola´s house, the family friends of anna's where we had been staying. thankfully they not only let us back into their house, but also force fed us ice cream and juice and made sure we were able to get up in time for our early early train to france in the morning. luckily, we actually ended up saving money in the bargain, although we lost one of our two days in paris. if you have been to paris before, you know what i know: one day is not enough. not even close to enough.

however, we made the best of the situation by getting up at 9am with aya (who met us in the train station the previous day) and spending the next fifteen hours seeing as much of paris as we could possibly squeeze into one day, and to be honest, i'm sort of impressed with how much we managed to squeeze in. we explored several neighborhoods, a steeet fair, art musuems, a couple churches, hung out in a park, ate dinner on a backstreet, and ended the day on top of the eiffel tour overlooking the city of lights, giddy with how ridiculously high up in the air we were. if you´ve never been all the way to the top, its worth the 12 euros.

the following day we embarked on a day of train connections to prague, where joanna tanger, bard grad '07 greeted us in the train station. she has been living there for about 8 mos., so we had a "native" praguer who could show us around. our first intro to prague involved a scrounge for change in order to buy our metro tickets. what kind of metro station won't let you buy train tickets without exact change from the ticket counter? prague, apparently.

prague was beautiful--its such a stange mix of eastern and western europe. the buildings are beautiful and unspoiled by war, but then the trams are communist in style, as are the streets and the kiosks. its seems, just every so slightly, grimy and a little bit faded. it has the air a city in decline that is also so alive and vibrant. it was amazing to have an apartment to stay in, not to mention a good friend to show us around and put us up! we spent most of our four days exploring the city and took a side trip to a town about an hour from prague where there is a church decorated entirely from human bones. apparently, the family who owns the estate the church sits on wanted to redecorate the interior of the church in the 19th century and they asked the designer to also get rid of the 20,000 odd skeltons of plague victims that had been buried in the cyrpt several centuries earlier. well, all i can say is that you can't say the guy wasn't resourceful and that the result is surprising less macabre that you might expect, although definitely not entirely creep-free.

four nights of homecooked meals, czech television, and so many adolescent jokes...and then it was off to vienna! if prague was slightly grimy, vienna was grandeur itself. everything in vienna has an air of being calculated to impress, intimidate, and overwhelm you. i have never encountered quite so much gold leaf, white marble, or so many pristine facades in my life--it is an incredible city. we spent the morning in the leopold museum, then headed off to explore the city a bit, including the discovery of several opera related events (these viennese are serious about music). i feel like we barely skimmed the surface of vienna--its really too big and too overwhelming to take in--and we also were overdue for certain activities such as laundry and the purchase of cell phone funds, so we spent some time working that out in less glamourous locations in vienna. rest assured, i'll be back!

now, we are in beautiful mountains salzburg, where i can report that the hills really are alive with the sound of music. we hung out on a mountain in the alps for most of today, having taken the most dazzling (read: terrifying) cable car ride up the side of rather craggy mountain top. we couldn't even believe where we were. the views were, in a word, astounding. mind blowing. ridiculous. it was sensational. we ate lunch on the edge of a cliff, drank the bottle of wine we found in willy's locker at our fabulous hostel, entertained the ravens who seemed to flock around us (or our food, more likely), before heading back down. willy and i are planning on spending another two days here, which is good because this city is actually the prettiest and quantiest place we've been to so far and without question also the most scenic. we are now figuring out what do post-budapest...visit willy's friends in bregenz? return to berlin? go elsewhere in germany? part ways?

there are only ten days left...remarkable that our time here is almost gone! i am looking forward to being home again soon, but there are no alps in western mass, and that, to me, seems most unfortunate.