Let's Get Moving

An early morning after a late night, but we were greeted with a wonderful breakfast of sausage and pastries, so what really could you say. Plus the coffee was super yummy and strong at the hotel. One of the couples we met talked about the coffee at each meal we had. They had traveled around and had some experience and warned us about the strong way it is brewed in Germany, I say more to love. Anyway, after we had our bags loaded on some guys truck, we jumped onto our bus and headed to Salzburg.

The rain returned for our 2 hour bus trip. It was comforting to look out at the fields and towns that we passed by. We

did stop at a rest stop about half way, but overall the trip was pretty smooth. Our guide from the last few days was with us on the trip that day and she gave us some highlights about the things we were seeing.

Once we got to Salzburg, we started our walking tour as we meandered towards our lunch spot.

As it was raining pretty hard the entire time, the tour was rushed a bit. Apparently, everyone was anxious to get us to our lunch time exactly on time.

The lunch we had was at apparently the oldest restaurant in Europe, the stiftskiller st. peter. This was the first time the entire group on the trip was in one place and we all had lunch together. This was Kathy's favorite meal of the trip. It was a nice fine dining, with Schnitzel, some potatoes and for dessert, yum some strudel.

We, in theory, had more time for the walking tour on the way back to the bus that was to take us to our train station. However, the rain really started pouring and none of the guides were in the mood to give much of a tour. We tried to convince them that we needed to stop at a famous chocolate shop, but they were having none of that. So, we did see a vendor that was selling these "famous" Mozart chocolates and ran from our walking tour, bought the chocolates and ran back to the line. The nice thing about being with an older group, no one is going to rush them. They just wouldn't put up with it.

So we walked through the streets with a brief look at the famous sites of the places Mozart lived and we got to the bus to the train station. The group took over two train cars as we headed to Budapest, a five hour train ride. The train ride was nice and kind of relaxing. Well, it was more relaxing for much of the group as they headed to the Bistro Car to get some drinks. It only took about 3 hours for the group to completely clean out the bar of alcohol. It went like this, the groups kept walking past us to Bistro Car and getting lots of bottles of wine. After an hour or so, they were telling people, "Hey, they out of wine." So they moved to beer, then that was gone, so started buying all the champagne. So, they group had to hold out for the last two hours without any more.

We arrived in Budapest, Hungry about 9:30 that night. We were able to see the city lit up at night, which was very lovely. We arrived at our ship and found our room quickly and went to find our dinner. We had a nice dinner and waited for that guy in the truck we left our luggage with early that morning to show up. He did arrive about an hour after us, so once got our luggage

and did some minor unpacking. Since we were not going anywhere that night we spend sometime on the deck walking around looking at the sites from the top of the ship.

Next, a visit to the city and traveling down river!

Big Trip - Start yourself Bavria

So about 10 years ago, a few weeks after we got engaged, Kath and her father went to on a Reformation tour, ending up at the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany. She came back and declared we had to go again in 2010. Hence, 2010 -we go. Actually it wasn't as simple as that, we looked into how to get more of the trip and looked lots of tours. It is tough to get tickets. Each year they sell about 500,000 tickets, this year over 1 million requests for tickets were received. They do reserve 150,000 tickets for Americans. The key is to book with a hotel in town and they get a package with the room that includes the tickets. To do this, we ran into a promotion with my undergrad degree at the University of Minnesota alum group and hooked up with them.

So we flew to Munich. The flight is long and boring especially when the inflight entertainment system was broken. We had to actually entertain ourselves for the most of it. We got there and met much of the group we would be traveling with on the tour at the airport. Being a small town, we were broken up into several groups. Some people stayed in Oberammergau while some people like us, stayed about 10 minutes away in Garmisher, Germany.

So we got int

o Garmisher and to our hotel and tried to figure o

ut how to stay awake. Our hotel was nice and we had our own balcony. The photo on the left is from our balcony

.

We hung out for that afternoon, trying to figure ways to stay awake. It was our hope to be awake until after dinner that night.

We figured we could easily walk around the town for awhile. So we just started roaming and looking at people and shops and what not.

We ended up stopping at a coffee shop and getting a few things. We were able to use our intensive Italian language training to order two cappuccinos. The town and areas around where we were staying were lovely.

We walked around enough to get lost for a little while, but we managed to get back to the hotel and bothered each enough to stay awake for dinner where we met some of our other tour companions at our hotel. I will say this now and several more times, just some of the nicest folks you will ever met - and darn funny too. But enough of other people, let's focus on us. After dinner, we collapsed and had a great nights sleep.

So, the next day we headed to the play. The play started at 2 in the afternoon, so we h

ad we got to town early around 9 or 10 and did a walking tour of the town. Though it was raining, we

walked through the town and saw some amazing murals. The town is certainly geared for this event every ten years. They h

ad some wonderful shops all ready to go, a

pparently we were

told they have long tradition of woodworking around the area, so the shops had many things to look at and buy.

So after our tour, we had some free time to wander and shop and stuff. We all met up around noon to catch a local bus to get some lunch at another hotel, Hotel Anika for lunch before the play

.

After lunch we headed to the play and we wish we could share some of the sites from the play, but they were not joking around about no pictures. So here is one borrowed from the internet.

You can click on it and make it larger. You can see the choir and the cast the setting for the play. It was all in German, but you know the play and they give you the translation to follow along. The music and singing is pretty awesome. Periodically, the play used still life images, where actors would stage a still life of image from a story in the bible, like this one, (again borrowed)

The people in town make up the cast and musicians. You used to have to have been born in the town to be in it, but they now allow people that are married to someone that was born in town. Plus, the donkey is not from the town, so they are really expanding their tolerance.

There has been quite a bit of acknowledgement about the controversy around the staging of the play. The show has been modified to take into account of the sensitivities of other citizens and their beliefs.

We took a dinner break after the first three hours back at the Hotel Anika, where we dined and enjoyed our evening. We had some time to hang out before heading back

for the last three hours of the play. The end of the play ended around 11:30 pm so we when we got to the hotel, we knew we had a short turn around as we were headed out early the next morning to a couple hour bus ride to Salsburg. More on that in the next post.