Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Willkommen nach Salzburg! (via London/Munich)


The morning after Picadilly Circus, we took a tour of London. I hopped on a bus (a coach actually) filled with a lot of kids destined for Paris. Sightseeing brough us to statues and buildings, soldiers and Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Parliment and Big Ben, St. Paul's Cathedral (unfortunately, there was no feeding of the birds - forget tuppence, it'd probably be £5 a bag considering how expensive London is) Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and Covent Square. 

A few of us stumbled away from the bus after the tour in search of food (being starved has become a regular occurance, nay reality, ever since my flight to London). After munching on a "pasty" (short a) and exchanging money in the lingere section of a department store (awk), we set off to find the British Museum. We found it an hour later and popped in for a bit, but honestly, museums not being my thing, I sat down after a while. My feet were mad at me. 

I split off from the group on the underground, returned to my room, blogged to you lovely folks about my previous night, shut my eyes for a bit, woke up to some cartoon blaring next door, got panicky that I wouldn't be able to meet up with anyone else from the group for dinner, decided to go write a postcard in the park, and found the post office closed. Luckily, people started trickling back into the hotel after their free evening and finally Kristin, Jeff and I made our way to an Indian buffet (I checked Mom, it is "eat as much as you'd like". Sounds better than "all you can eat" huh?) 

Afterwards, I had to make good on my promise to Dave to try to visit his bars. Jeff agreed to come along with me and we rode the underground to Putney Bridge to find The Bricklayers Arms. After getting lost a few times, we finally found the place. And Dave, let me tell you...you are going to be so depressed that you weren't there. Not only were you right about the "who the hell are you?" stares we'd get upon entering, but you weren't kidding about it being one of a kind. Jeff and I just happened to stumble upon one of two annual beer festivals held outside. Roughly 30 beers were on tap, all of them I'd never heard of, and although some kegs were already kicked (we got there around 10pm) the guy pouring never led us in the wrong direction. 

We each had two and somewhere around the second we decided it was a good idea to stay up the whole night, rather than get a few hours sleep before our 5:15 departure for Heathrow. Idiotic? Maybe. Worth every step? Definitely. 

And so began our walk back to the hotel. Since our map of London was of no use (Putney Bridge was too far South) it never made its way out of the hotel. My sense of direction was "go up" (North, for those of you who know I always have a mental map in my head) and Jeff's was, "go East". So we did both. We walked past bars and people, closed shops and cars; we were all over the place really. Our second good idea came in the form of a bottle of white wine purchased about 1/3 of the way into the walk. The nice man in the liquor store even uncorked it for us! We forgot cups though, so you can imagine how classy we looked. Every now and then we'd stop and ask for directions, and most people would laugh when we said Hyde Park. I guess we weren't too close...

Around 3:30am we decided to call it quits. 5 minutes from our destination by taxi, we paid the man (in Pounds and Euros) and I crawled into bed at 4am. 

Zombie-like, I dragged myself to the bus a mere hour and a quarter later and was in and out of sleep en route to Heathrow. After a small breakfast of granola, yogurt and OJ, I boarded the flight to Munich where I slept uncomfortably for an hour. Upon arrival, we were met by another bus and a 3 hour ride (including traffic) to Salzburg. Our dorming information was handed out. All I wanted was food, and I could barely savor my Mozartkugel (a small chocolate that Salzburg is famous for) as it was my lunch. Finally we arrived. 

My new roommate Ja (who is from Thailand and goes to school in Wisconsin) and I got into a taxi, and I tried to say our address to the taxi driver. Linzergasse 41 bitte. Through my fatigue, it didn't sound so good and so I had to pass the paper up to the front of the car and point at the address. Yeesh. We checked into our building, which is actually a dorm as well as a youth hostel, and I barely managed to unpack. My shower refreshed me, and I was quite excited to use Ja's blow dryer as my hair has suffered since my first shower in London. I plugged it in, hit the switch and bam! Out goes the power. Greeeeat. Dinner was a blur, I could barely eat without feeling nauseated and I didn't talk much. I wearily came back to the room and fell asleep at 8pm. It was fantastic.

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