Jono's Travels

Hey guys,

As I'm a couple of weeks behind on the blog and have a really busy end to my trip I don't reckon I'll continue to update this blog. Thanks a bunch for reading - it was a lot of fun to have one of these for my own for awhile!

Cheers,

Jonathan

Sorry about my lack of bloggin' lately - been really busy lately but will have some updates up in a few days!

A little background is needed for this entry I think. When I was in Australia I lived with a girl named Julia for a few months. Julia was a music major and absolutely adored the sound of music. She tried to make me watch it a bunch of times but I constantly wormed out of it. Soooo I find it really ironic that I'm now in those very same hillls that Maria von Trapp ran - those hills that are alive with the sound of music!

Ok that was corny, I promise I'll try to keep the sound of music quotes out of this entry. On our first day in Salzburg Jill, Kristen and I just went on a self-guided walking tour around the town. Salzburg is in a basin of some sort formed when a couple lakes from the ice-age dried up. At least thats the gist that I got - really though all that matters is that its in a valley, with green rolling hills nearby and the alps in the background. Unfortunately when we were about as far away from our hostel as we planned on going it started to pour down on us. So we busted out the ponchoes, umbrellas and hoodies and trudged back to the hostel. Early night that night as we all needed some good shuteye after Munich.

The morning of the second day marked a big occasion - my first time watching the sound of music. I actually really liked it - guess I should have listened to Julia all those times (Sorry Julez!). It was a feel-good movie, with a bunch of unintentionally hilarious parts in it to boot. After watching it Jill (an avid sound of music fan) got a glint in her eye and took off on the sound of music tour while me and Kristen explored the local fortress. The fortress was interesting as it was the seat of arch-bishops governing over Salzburg from 1400-1800 (roughly - please don't wikipedia me on this trevor!) and had never been taken by force - only willingly surrended to napoleon on his jaunt through europe. After heading back to the hostel and meeting up with Jill we went to another beergarden for the night. This one had 2L steins and a crazy friendly group of swiss-germans in it. The swiss-germans seemed to take a liking to us backpackers and brought us over for a traditional snuff snorting ritual of sorts. At the time I wasn't 100% sure what it was but there was a couple of grandmas beside me doing it so I figured it had to be ok!

On our last day we took an organized tour to the nearby icecaves. They are the largest discovered icecave in the world (I think) - it took over 1km to walk to the back of them. The formations were really impressive, as was the ride there through the alps. Plus we had a wicked funny aussie tourguide that played Akon on the ride there as his wife was into it. Sorry no photos from inside the caves though - it wasn't allowed.

At this point I'm splitting up with Jill and Kristen - they head to Croatia and the Dalmation coast while I continue up to Vienna. I had a great time travelling with these girls and will be sad to see them go.

Stealing the ladders from my hostel

Jill and I hamming it up in the Mirabell gardens

Jill with the Romanian woman who taught her to make Hungarian sweetbread

View of old-town salzburg from the fortress

Traditional Austrian hat complete with not-so-traditional tourist

Jill, me and Kristen at the biergarten

Group from hostel

Prost dass die gurten nicht verrost! (cheers so you're throat won't go rusty)

Snuff ritual with the swiss-germans

Salzburg at night

Entrance to the ice caves -that's Jill and Kristen in the foreground

Some wannabe-thug showing that the icecaves were cold (surprise)

Kristen and Jill with the castle at Wurfen in the background

I guess if the past week was time to relax and take care of my body, my 4 days in Munich were there to bring it all down. Here I met up with Jill and Kristen, my roommate from the past year and a friend from UBC respectively. It was great to see some familiar faces and I had a blast with these girls for the past 4 days.

We stayed in a place called Euro Youth hostel. On the first day I just wandered around the streets of Munich. Think lots of churches, wide flowing streets and a good amount of greenery. That night I actually ran into the same group of girls I had met up with in the Cinque Terre. After meeting up with a group of brazilian fellows and Andrea, a great girl from Ottawa, at the hostel pub we took off to the Hofbräuhaus. The Hofbräuhaus is Munich's most famous beer garden complete with a traditional German band, lots of liederhosen, and steins filled with a litre of beer each. Had the brilliant idea to go running through fountains on the way there - we were worried that the fountain might be turned off on the way back. This made for a very wet and very cold beer garden experience but I still had a great time. On the plus side I even managed to catch the first period of the Ottawa vs Anaheim game on the way back before hitting the hay.

On the second day it was raining pretty heavily but we decided to make the best of it and took off on a tour of the city. I once again ended up very cold, very wet and quite happy by the end of it. The tour gave a lot of history on the city as well as some interesting local insights. Turns out Munich is such a safe city that the most common crime is bicycle theft and once the police even stole a something from the airport themselves out of boredom. After picking up some ponchoes we took the same group with a few more additions - including Jay and Mike, a couple of fun-loving fellows from Toronto - back to the Hofbräuhaus again.

Third day we went to a contempary art museum in the morning before going to the englischer gardens - the 2nd largest metropolitan park in Europe, complete with Germans surfing the river and nudist sections. Contemporary art was a nice change from the majority of artwork I had been seeing over the past few days and with Andrea being an art history major I was even able to understand one or two of the displays. Unfortunately I didn't run into either of highlights of the englischer gardens but did manage to chow down on some traditional bavarian grub in the beer garden in the park. At night Jill, Kristen, Andrea, her friend Greg, Jay, Mike and I all went on a pub-crawl where we had a really good time and met quite a few characters. The biggest of which was an aussie fellow named shaun - not only did he add a few good aussie words such as 'pissbolt' to our vocab he was carrying around the shards of a tooth that had been broken to send back to his ex-girlfriend stapled to a postcard. Guess you had to be there!

The 4th day was a more somber affair. We went to Dachau, which was the first concentration camp of the nazi regime and the model upon which the other camps were based. While it wasn't a death camp along the lines of auschwitz it was horrifying to see the conditions that the prisoners were faced with. While I had known a little about the concentration camps it was a shocking and surreal experience to visit the grounds in person and something I would recommend to anyone spending time in the area.

Off to Salzburg with Jill and Kristen to take in the soooound of music and run through the hills that are alive. Oh, I've never actually seen the movie.

Jill, Kristen and Mike at Hofbräuhaus

Me and Katie

Jill, Sarah and Andrea

Jill conducting the band

Us with the brazilians

Kristen and Jill chowing down on some German sausages

Giant german pretzel = great pubcrawl grub

3 weeks in and I think the biggest cultural shock I experience may just be going from one keyboard layout to another. After just getting the hang of the Italian layout I'm now bashing my head trying to get used to the Austrian one. Despite the fact that a keyboard is only so big, I still have not been able to find the key for the at symbol. Also the z key and the y key are switched from the positions from which I'm used to - this makes for multiple retypings of any word with either letter

Innsbruck has a certain resort town feel that reminds me of Whistler in a lot of ways. The main town is set in the Austrian alps and along with the surrounding holiday villages has played host to the olympic games twice. The setting is stunning and the surrounding areas make for some great hiking. I had picked this town just for the hiking and was stoked to learn beforehand that there was a mountain club that provided free transportation, guides, and a traditional nightime siesta. This sounded too good to be true to me and it turned out it was... sorta. The program started at the beginning of June and I was there at the end of May, hah.

Deciding that I still had to make the most of the mountains I set off for some independant hiking on my two full day there. It was good to get some activity in and the sights were impressive. I had a bit of a run-in with some of the natural inhabitants on my second day though. On one of the trails I was hiking the path ahead was blocked by a mountain sheep/goat. Since the path was pretty narrow and my knowledge of mountain sheep in the alps is rather limited I decided that trying to get around this fella on a narrow trail with a steeeeep fall wasn't the greatest of ideas and I had to tuck tail and turn around.

The hostel I stayed at was a quaint bed and breakfast - probably the coziest hostel I've ever been. Met some interesting girls from Hong Kong that had all quit their jobs to travel around for awhile, as well as a group of siblings from the states. However I think I might be a little over-relaxed from the past week as I'm feeling restless and looking for to the big city hostels and beer gardens of Munich where I'll be going to next.

Since I've been blogging for the past hour and a half and I've got a pretty severe head rush from all the smoke I'm going to go get some fresh air now!

At the summit of Patsch - one of the ski hills in the area

Blocked by a mountain sheep

Giving said mountain sheep a piece of my mind (trust me, it's there in the background)

Hiking the nordpark on my second day

Alpine hut used by mountaineers