Österreich and Barcelona

Let’s just say that my next trip didn’t start out as smoothly as it could have. I set my alarm for 5AM so that I could get everything ready to leave by 5:30AM. Tim walked into my room at 5:27AM to wake me up. I was so rushed that I left the house without the cell phone and didn’t realize it until it was too late. But that was the only thing I forgot – I guess it could have been worse. I got to the airport, slept on the flight (since I had only gotten one hour of sleep the night before), and arrived in Zürich, Switzerland. I bought a train ticket to Dornbirn, Austria (Össtereich in German), where my friend Amanda (a friend of my roommate at UVA) was living/studying for the semester, grabbed some breakfast, and boarded the train when it arrived. However, there was one slight problem. I didn’t realize that the train ticket I bought contained a connection on it. Since this was my first trip on a train in Europe, at least without a large group of people going to the same place as me, I assumed that there was just a 15-minute scheduled stop in Bregenz, one of the cities along the way. So, since I was completely exhausted, I set an alarm for about 10 minutes before I was supposed to arrive in Dornbirn and went to sleep on the train. I woke up and looked out the window, waiting for my stop. I noticed that the terrain was getting flatter, and not mountainous, which seemed a little strange, but I didn’t think too much of it. A little while later I looked at my watch and noticed that we were at least 10 minutes behind schedule (which doesn’t really happen) or I did something wrong. After several trips up and down the train looking for the conductors, I finally found them and was informed that I was a “long way away” from Dornbirn, should have switched trains earlier, and was now back in Germany. Great!! They were kind enough to use their computers to re-route me and tell me exactly where to go. So, I got off the train in Memmingen, Germany, bought a new ticket, and took three trains to get back to Dornbirn, which got me there approximately 3 hours after I told Amanda I would arrive. That would have been alright had I brought the cell phone with me, but remember, I forgot it!! So, I had to make a quick call from a pay phone around noon (already an hour after I should have arrived) to tell Amanda when my new ETA was. I felt really badly because I think she waited for a while!

Anyways, I made myself stay awake for each of the train rides, which was very difficult, and finally arrived in Dornbirn. Amanda met me on the platform with two beers in hand. Yay! She said she thought I’d need it. And it’s alright to walk around with a beer in the streets there, as I think it is in most of Europe. So we drank the beers and walked through Dornbirn to her apartment to drop off my stuff. Then we headed back out for a quick tour, saw her school, and grabbed pasta for dinner at Spar, the grocery store. We went over to her friend Katie’s apartment, where we cooked dinner and looked at pictures of all their trips around Europe. I eventually had to take a nap because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, but afterwards we went out to the Christmas Market in the center of Dornbirn, where everyone was drinking Glühwein, and then went to Mr. John’s (pronounced "Jones"), their favorite bar in town. We hung out at Mr. John’s for a while, eating, drinking, and meeting a lot of other people from her program, and then went home to sleep.

The next morning was supposed to be an early one, but we slept in an hour longer than we meant to. We got up, grabbed all our gear, and caught a train a little before 9AM out to St. Anton, a great mountain a little more than an hour out of Dornbirn. I went skiing and Amanda went snowboarding. I was thrilled to be skiing in the Alps – first time!! (Jenny is likely going on a school ski/board trip to Austria in the spring!) The weather could have been slightly more cooperative, but it was still great! There was a lot of powder skiing, at least a lot more than I am used to. My legs felt dead after the first run. You can’t tell how big these mountains are until you realize how long it takes to get down them. The sky was clear for about one hour all day, which is when I took my pictures. Other than that, we were either inundated with fog and clouds, or blinding snow. At times it was scary because you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you. It’s kind of crucial to know what’s coming when you’re flying down a mountain on a board or skis. At the end of the day, as the weather conditions got worse, and my legs became useless, we went in for “after-ski.” The Austrians tend to spend hours in a bar after a full day on the mountain. Amanda and I each got a glass of Glühwein, listened to some really old American songs, and hopped the train back to Dornbirn.

Once we were back in town we hunted down a kebab shop (the only food you can find anywhere in the world, except the U.S.) – for those who don’t know it’s basically a Turkish gyro, it has some type of meat and lettuce/tomato/onion with sauce in a pita). I love them. Then we changed and caught a bus out to Mary and Kaisa’s (Amanda’s Finnish friends). We watched Blades of Glory, the Will Ferrell/Napoleon Dynamite-guy skating movie, then caught the bus back for some much-needed sleep.

I slept in on Monday (big surprise!) while Amanda went into school. Once I got up we went back over to Mary and Kaisa’s for some home-made Finnish food, meatballs and mashed potatoes. They made enough so that they would have leftovers, but apparently didn’t know who they were having over – we finished it all (2.2 pounds of meat for the meatballs and one large bowl of potatoes). It was very good! During the afternoon we hung out at Amanda’s, looked at pictures, listened to music, and then made tuna melts for dinner. We went back over to Katie’s apartment for Glühwein, cookies, roasted chestnuts, and Christmas music. Katie’s Swedish roommate, Lina, was back in town, so I met her, and the four of us ate up all the goodies. We had gingersnaps with blue cheese. I would never have put those two together before, but it was good. I’ll have to try it again.

The next morning we woke up early to catch a train to Salzburg. We met up with Amanda’s friend Caitlin and went to the train station. We stocked up on snacks and sandwiches for the long train ride. Salzburg isn’t all that far from Dornbirn, but with the connection we would be traveling for about five hours. We arrived in Salzburg and found our hostel. Despite the cold rain we ventured into the Salzburg Altstadt to the Christmas market, which takes the cake for the best Christmas market I have been to. It was massive, had a million different types of foods and decorations, and a live choir singing inside one of the squares. It was everything I had wanted out of a Christmas market. I have some strange obsession with these markets. I remember watching a late-night TV special on Christmas markets in Germany/Austria/Switzerland several years ago and it really stuck with me. I promised myself that I would get to one eventually, so I was extremely happy to be there. I even found a gingerbread man cookie cutter for Mom and Jenny at the market. They had been looking for one all over Düsseldorf and had given up. Thank you Salzburg.

After we had had enough of the Christmas market we walked through some more of the quaint Salzburg streets and found one of the coolest stores in existence – a store filled with THOUSANDS of hand-painted, real eggs. It was a little strange to go directly from Christmas to Easter, but it was truly an amazing store. I think our mouths were hanging open the whole time we walked through it. By this time we were getting very hungry, so we asked the friendly “Egg Lady” where to eat. She recommended Zipfer, a local pub and restaurant. It wound up being really cool because I think we were the only non-locals in there. We were also probably the youngest ones by about 20 years, but that was alright because the food was good. We went back to the hostel afterwards to get out of the freezing rain, grabbed beers, and watched the tail end of Shawshank Redemption before putting in American Pie. I hadn’t seen that one in forever.

The next morning I woke up and Lauren (another friend from Amanda’s program) had joined us, completing our group of four. Amanda and Caitlin had woken up super-early to meet her at the train station – I apparently didn’t hear the alarm (I’m sensing a trend with me not hearing alarms and sleeping a lot). She had had a class to finish and took a night train to meet us. We grabbed breakfast at the hostel and went back into town with Lauren. We passed by the house where Mozart was born and wandered back through the Christmas markets, but couldn’t stay outside for too long due to the cold and rain. We ducked inside a café for hot chocolates and ventured back into the markets to grab lunch before catching our train to Vienna. We got sausages and met an older couple from North Carolina. The wife was actually an alumnus of Caitlin’s school, so they had a bit to talk about. We got our last-minute postcards and souvenirs, grabbed our bags at the hostel, and caught our 4-hour train to Vienna. What we could see out the window was beautiful until the sun went down. We must have gone up in elevation because we were no longer seeing a driving rain, but large snowflakes falling over Austrian villages. We were in a six-person compartment, rather than a regular train seating arrangement. It made me happy because I felt like I was in the Harry Potter books.

By the time we got to Vienna we had gone back down in elevation, so had to walk through the rain to our hostel. We got dinner at a bakery/restaurant down the street, where I had Wiener Schnitzel, in Wien (Wien is the German spelling of Vienna) – I was psyched. Then it was dessert time. I grabbed my usual chocolate croissant and brought it with me to the ice cream shop where everyone else got their dessert. We got back to the hostel, checked out their bar, which was not very lively, and then went to bed so that we could have a full next day in Vienna.

On Thursday we woke up and took the metro into the center of the city. When we emerged from the underground we saw the beautiful Stephansdom, the trademark of Vienna. We spent the morning walking around the city and ducking into shops because it was very cold and windy, but not rainy, which was an improvement. We got lunch in an Italian restaurant, not very unlike Cosetta’s in St. Paul, and it was great. Afterwards, we walked through more of the very historic and beautiful parts of Vienna. I didn’t know quite what to expect in Vienna. I had seen very few pictures, but had heard several times that it was one of the most beautiful European cities. My Lonely Planet guide book begins its entry on Vienna like this . . . “If New York is the ‘Big Apple,’ then Vienna is the big wedding cake.” That didn’t give me any clear expectations either. After seeing the city I assume it means that you get the big-city feeling of New York, yet it is a lot prettier, like icing on the cake? It’s open to interpretation. Anyways, we continued walking through the beautiful buildings and ran across one of Vienna’s Christmas markets in Maria Theresien Platz. We made sure to get some Glühwein and try some of the local goodies. Then we continued on to Vienna’s main shopping street, Mariahilferstrasse, stopping at every chocolate shop in sight along the way. Every European city is overflowing with chocolate shops and bakeries, but Vienna in particular has an overabundance. My favorite was a very fancy shop that made massive marzipan sculptures. We got to watch the chefs in the kitchen and it was pretty impressive. We hung around the city center until dark and saw all of the Christmas decorations – there were tons!!

We then decided that it was time to warm up and get dinner, so we took the train back out to our hostel. We had dinner at a local pub just around the corner. I had goulash for the first time and I loved it. It also happened to be “Dixie Night,” so we sat in a very German pub, eating very German food, and listening to live New Orleans Jazz music. It was a strange contrast. Afterwards we decided to check out the bar scene in Vienna. The hostel recommended the Mozart Stube, but when we walked in all of the customers were men in their sixties, or older, so we quickly left. We tried another hostel recommendation, but didn’t like it, and finally got to their third recommendation, Café Europa, which was much more our speed. It was a trendy café down a side street that we never would have found on our own. It was perfect for us though because there was a lot of good people-watching, which entertained us for the whole night.

Friday was another early day. We rode the Strassenbahn (street-car) to the nearest bus depot and caught a bus to Bratislava, Slovakia from there. We were planning on flying RyanAir to Barcelona, the low-cost airline, so the airport was a ways away and in a different country in this case. But we were psyched to go to Slovakia, not because we necessarily had heard good tourist reviews about it or anything, but when else were we going to be in Slovakia? We were also excited to get a quick look at Bratislava since we had heard it was the “Twin City” to Vienna. From the views we got of Bratislava from the bus, we were at a loss for how anyone could call it even a distant cousin to Vienna. It looked depressed and run-down, and there was graffiti everywhere. The two cities aren’t even physically close. They are about a one-hour drive apart, not just a few miles like Minneapolis and St. Paul. Needless to say, we were glad we hadn’t set aside an afternoon for Bratislava.

We arrived at the airport, checked-in, and got some fairly cheap food, one of the good things about Slovakia. We boarded the plane and were excited to be leaving cold, cloudy weather for a while. The flight path to Barcelona went directly over the Alps, all covered in snow. It was cool to see. We also got a great view of the Spanish coastline and countryside on our way in. Once we were in Spain we had to grab a packed bus to get into Barcelona. We sat behind a group of four, not particularly bright, American guys. So we got to listen to an hour and a half of them arguing over what languages they spoke in what European countries. One of them is still probably very adamant that they speak Flemish in Switzerland. The conversation would have been more understandable had they not already been studying in Austria for the whole semester. We were happy to get away from their conversation as soon as the bus arrived in Barcelona (only to find that they were staying at the same hostel as us!). We took the metro and walked down Las Ramblas, the major pedestrian street in Barcelona, to get to our hostel. Our hostel probably couldn’t have been in a better location. We were right on Placa Reial, a beautiful square (in the picture) just off of Las Ramblas. We were in walking distance to everything in Barcelona! This hostel also had a much more upbeat atmosphere than some of the others we had been in, but they made you pay for the good atmosphere and location.

We settled into our room and went down to the main floor for happy hour and dinner. The dinner was alright, but not enough food, so we went out for a tapas tour of our neighborhood. We tried things like patatas bravas, croquettes, shrimp and of course, sangria (the Spanish, fruity wine drink). After a good night out we went home and slept well.

Once we woke up on Saturday we took to the streets (in lighter jackets, which was a welcome change - it was probably in the 50s, in mid-December!). We walked along Las Ramblas towards the harbour, checking out the open-air art and street markets. We walked around the edge of the harbour, looking at fish in the water and looking back at the beautiful buildings of Barcelona. We eventually wound up at the beach!! It was definitely too cold to go sun-bathing, but there was a small group of people out surfing in wet suits. We made a pit-stop at Spar, where I bought a jar of olives, and then we continued our walk around the city, eating olives. We went through the entire day without a map and turned down whichever street looked the most interesting when we came to an intersection. We never truly knew where we were, but were also never lost since we weren’t trying to be anywhere. We walked through parks, saw the Arc De Triomf, and stepped into shops along the way. A large portion of the shopping we did was window-shopping because we were out at siesta (the time when most stores close down for lunch). On our way back to Placa Reial we passed a wide array of street performers and stopped at the large food market off of Las Ramblas. It had fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, candy, and pretty much anything else you could want. Everything was the best and biggest I had ever seen. I got a pineapple already cut up for €1.50. Not bad. I kinda wished I had had a kitchen to use so I could get some of the seafood, too.

After at least 4 solid hours of walking we wound up back at the hostel, where I took a nap. Inconveniently, I had woken up on Saturday morning with a sore throat and a cold, so I was a little out of it. Amanda, Caitlin, and Lauren hung out downstairs for happy hour, then came and woke me up once I had slept long enough. We went back out into the city for dinner. We went back to one of the restaurants we had visited the night before for tapas. We had burgers, Spanish omelets, a million different types of potatoes, etc. Then we decided to take advantage of the free flamenco show for hostel guests at a nearby club. We got a jug of sangria and enjoyed the live music and dancing. It was actually a lot more impressive than I was expecting – the music at least, not necessarily the dancing. Flamenco guitar looks so complicated and sounds sooo cool. And the singers were amazingly talented as well. After the show we went back out to try and find some of the legendary Barcelona nightlife, but had a serious lack of luck. Apparently Saturday night isn’t a big deal in Spain? We were also very tired of walking, so eventually gave up and went to bed.

Sunday seems to be the day to be out in Barcelona. We woke up and started walking again, past more street perrformers. Can you guess which dog is real? We did a TON of walking in Barcelona, but it never got old because there was so much to see. We grabbed food at the Pita House. I tried falafel and it was good, but I still don’t really know what it is. The best part about the Pita House though was the American-sized Coke they give you!! It was significantly more than one gulp, which is what you get in most other European establishments. We walked through the multitude of open-air markets – stamp collecting, art, jewelry, antiques, flowers, and pets. Haven’t you always wanted a pet turkey or pigeon? After seeing the markets, we took off on another trek to see La Sagrada Familia, the extremely modern church that has become a symbol of Barcelona. It was designed by Antoni Gaudi, Construction began in 1882 and it is still not exceptionally close to being complete. There are also a few other very unique buildings around Barcelona that were designed by the same guy, i.e. Casa Batllo. Once we got back to our side of town I took a nap again in the hopes that it would make me feel better, while the other three found something to occupy themselves with.

I joined Amanda, Caitlin, and Lauren again to go out for dinner. We went on a mission to find paella, because we wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if we left Spain without having some, at least Amanda and I couldn’t. Paella is the very Spanish seafood and rice dish – really good! We started out by taking some of the smaller streets off of Las Ramblas. It seems that we finally picked the right time of day to go onto these streets. Late at night and early in the morning all of the shops on these streets are boarded up, covered in graffiti, and deserted. It’s very creepy. But when they are open and people are everywhere it is great!! We discovered the true, old Gothic quarter, which we thought we had already seen, but had been mistaken. There were more shops in these tiny side streets than I have ever seen in one place. And enough people to fill them all. We wished we had discovered the Gothic Quarter earlier, because we probably would have spent more time there. But at least we got to see it. We continued to look for paella, which was more difficult to find than we would have thought. Eventually we found a place that served it. The restaurant was pretty dead when we walked in because it was around 5/6PM, which is in-between meal time for the Spaniards. Spanish people START going out for dinner around 9/10PM.

We enjoyed the great food at dinner and then went back to the Gothic quarter for dessert. Caitlin and Lauren got waffles with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. It looked great, but Amanda and I couldn’t stomach it after all of the paella. We had made it back to the Gothic quarter as all of the shops were closing, and it started to get creepy back there again, so we walked with the dessert. We got back to the hostel and I started to pack up all of my stuff for the early morning I knew was coming. Caitlin and Lauren went for one more nighttime walk around our side of Barcelona and then we all tried to sleep. Tried being the key word. There was an extremely loud group of boys on our floor who stayed up until 3AM yelling at each other, went out to bars for two hours, and then came back in around 5AM, yelling and screaming again. All in all I think I got about one hour of sleep. I had to be up at 5:30AM, when it was still dark and people were still out for the night, to get the train to the airport (which wound up being a little more difficult than I had originally thought). I asked three different people about how to take the train to the airport and I got three completely different answers, some of which was in Spanish, which I don’t understand. I wound up catching two trains, walking a good ways, and hoping that I was headed for the correct Barcelona airport. Luckily, I made it to the right airport and in plenty of time. I had the easy trip home – just grab a plane to Düsseldorf and I was there by noon. Amanda, Caitlin, and Lauren left the hostel about one hour after me and had to retrace all of our previous steps – bus to Barcelona airport, fly to Bratislava, bus to Vienna, 8-hour train from Vienna to Dornbirn. They got home in the early hours of the next day. They were traveling for almost 24 hours non-stop. I wasn’t jealous.