Fortresses, Fussball, Palaces, Mountains...sweet

Ok so we didn’t really try to conquer Fortress Hohenwerfen—apparently it wasn’t within the “scope” of the program. Although I don’t know what the point of studying abroad in Europe is if you’re not going to try to conquer something, especially in a German-speaking country. I’ll give you the story that might be slightly closer to the reality of that trip. We took a bus about 45 minutes south of Salzburg up into the Alps (I mean the REAL Alps—snow, ice caves, Nazi war criminal refugees, and all). It’s really cool that you can travel just a few miles outside the city and it’s nothing but rolling farmland, woods, and mountains—all very quaint and beautiful. Hohenwerfen is on a hill overlooking a valley. It just happens to be the same fortress where the Nazis’ secret headquarters was filmed in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!! It also in real life was used by the Nazi SS officers. Like the Salzburg fortress Hohensalzburg, it’s about 1000 years old and has some really sweet medieval weapons and torture devices inside. The best part was the view from the fortress though:

 View from the bell tower of Hohenwerfen

Later that week, we went to watch the Salzburg Red Bulls play (real) football! I think I started to feel truly integrated with the culture when I was yelling and singing ridiculous phrases in German with hundreds of other people nonstop for the whole game. Apparently standing for an entire game is not only constrained to college football. The Red Bulls (named thus because Salzburg is home to the energy drink…cool, eh?) played the Graz Sturm…home to none other than the mighty Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course Salzburg pounded them, 2-1, and I chanted *clap clap clap* “SALZBURG”, making my arms like bull horns, with the whole rest of the crowd in victory. Awesome. Europeans really define themselves by their football teams, and they will even admit it to you. For example, my Austrian culture teacher told me that Austrians didn’t really feel like Austrians (because they had been a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and later Nazi Germany) until Austria finally beat Germany in the Eurocup semifinals in the 70s, and then they were really proud of their country.

On Friday, September 19, our whole group went to tour Schoss (castle) Hellbrunn, the summer resort of the Archduke of Salzburg back in the 1500s. It was beautiful and amazing, not just because of the impressive Renaissance art and architecture but also because the Archduke was apparently a trickster and he had a whole garden of trick fountains. Basically, you are walking around what appears to just be a statues and little gazebos full of art, and then the guide turns a hidden lever and you are assaulted from all sides by jets of water hidden in the ground and in the walls. The water pressure apparently comes from an underground spring, and the Duke even used it to power this little water figurines that move, which as an engineer I find pretty impressive for the 16^th century. Our Alpine tour guide Andreas also took a smaller group of us up into the hills to this stage cut out of the cliff where apparently for the last hundred years operas have been and are still occasionally held. Andreas demonstrated its acoustics to us with an entrancing rendition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, auf Deutsch of course. This is a group of us getting owned by one of the trick fountains: 

I'm the one in the black jacket on the left of the table

I know what you’re thinking at this point. Great, Scott, you went and watched people run around with a ball, pretended you were a medieval warrior, and played in water fountains—real cool. Well, this is where my tale becomes a ballad of adventure and greatness…the very next day—Saturday, September 20, 2008—I scaled the soaring cliffs of the mighty Untersberg. 6,469 feet of sheer adrenaline and terror were conquered that day by three young, unsuspecting lads. The conquistadors were Seth, his 7 foot tall German friend Florian, and myself. It took us about 6 hours total to climb it and come down, and it definitely was a very trying experience—physically, mentally, and spiritually (as I contemplated the consequences of slipping off of the narrow rocky precipice upon which I carefully tread). We passed plaques all along the way of people that had died climbing it. My knee had started hurting on top of that, like somebody was jabbing a dagger in the joint, which really didn’t help the experience. However, as we climbed up through the fog and the clouds, I couldn’t help feeling like we were entering the Misty Mountains and that goblin attacks were inevitable, which really improved my spirits. Standing on top of this massive landform and looking in the distance to the snow-capped Alps jutting out of the clouds and seeing the Hohensalzburg fortress as a dot on the ground really made it all worth it though. I think I want to be a professional mountain conqueror. 

Unfortunately, Seth does not have the interweb with which he can upload his pictures from Untersberg, so this will have to suffice for now:

 I think this is enough for now, but I have many more tales to relate to you, my lads and lasses. Tschuss!