The first image is from the Wolfgang See. It is the lake we visited and the second image is the Rauchenhaus or the smoke house.
All week long our main professor, headmistress if you will, Dr. K has been hyping up the field trip we will be taking on Saturday. She keeps telling us to wear good shoes and warm clothes and to have our host familes pack us a lunch, because we will be hiking in the Salzkammergut. This is a region in the Alps near Salzburg. So Sat morning comes and we all make it to the bus at 9am sharp like we are told expecting to go hiking arounds some mountains with lakes at the bottom. One of our other professors is there, she counts to make sure everyone is there and tells us to have a wonderful time and there will be someone to meet us at the first stop. So it is us 25 and our bus driver Eddie. Eddie is the most amazing bus driver ever. Mom he gives the guy we had on the tour with Frau a run for his money. He owns the rode and can drive a bus anywhere anyday. So we make it to the first town and are just hanging out on the bus debating whether we should take our lunch, how long we will be here and where in the world the hill we are hiking is. The woman who is to be our guide for the day turns out to be one of the German teachers at the school. She informs us we will only be at this stop for an hour and to just grab our jackets. We ended up going to a church that is in the Sound of Music and up to a house build ages ago. The cool thing about the house is that it has no chimney and when you light a fire the whole house fills up with smoke. Not sure how that works out for the people living in it though.
On the bus again. The second town we head to is right on a lake, our guide informs us not to eat at the Weissen Rosl, because it is a famous restaraunt and tourist trap and that we need to be back on the bus in 2 hours. By this time we have realized that this is not a hiking trip and that we have been highly missinformed. We are also beginning to wonder if we missed an assignment. None of us could remember hearing about one, but we felt there was something we were suppose to be doing besides just wandering around. The lake was beautiful and we wished we'd had time to take one of the ferries around the lake. The mountains all around were covered by clouds, but be could still see a few of the shorter closer ones.
The last stop of the day brought us to Bad Ischl. This was the summer home of the Emporer and his famous wife Sisi. Only later after talking with my host family did I find out he was a Habsburg. The Habsburg's before WWI were one of the most wealth and prominent families in the area. They owned most of what we know today as Austria, Hungry and the Slovania area. The famous Emperor ruled from the end of the 1800s up until he was defeated in WWI. Not very long ago for Austrian history. Most of the things we have seen have been hundreds of years old not just a few decades.
Overall, the day was nice and relaxing, we just never knew quit what was going on. Our tourguide expected us to have known things about the cities. We didn't know a thing so we just wandered. We were laughing later that we put a lot of trust in these people to just hop on a bus with Eddie.
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