What They Don't Tell You About Love

Do you ever feel like you're stuck on a carnival ride? I do. And it's the spinning teacup one.

By this, I mean quite literally that I feel like I'm constantly about to lose whatever small meal I have just managed to consume. I don't always lose it but the feeling is still there. This is not a metaphor for helpless drowning in a sea of deadlines (those days are behind me), nor is it a clever way of saying that I'm going through a post-graduation crisis. This is, in fact, my current life as an expectant mother still stuck in that dreaded first trimester. Saltines, my bed, and netflix are my most loyal friends. Yep, I'm pregnant.

I did not resurrect this blog or start this post to whine about my physical ailments, so I'll spare you some of the more gruesome details and skip to the point. I have never, ever felt like this in my life, and I'm not just talking about the sickness (though the feeling holds true for that as well). Technically, I have never before been so utterly depended on and so needed, yet in actuality, I have never felt more useless. Let's see if I can sort through those contradictions for you.

When I dreamed of having children, somehow, as we do in most dreams, I skipped over the less savory bits. Pregnancy was probably just an exciting nine months where you guessed your baby's gender, delighted in his or her every kick, felt slightly uncomfortable at the end, and voila: Motherhood. This new "occupation" would of course bring with it a sense of worth, a feeling of importance. I mean, you made a baby. Yeah, it would be difficult at times, but in the end, it was a real vocation, something you were created for, a path to heaven.

Well, my view of the end-goal hasn't changed much, but my understanding of the journey has and I'm pretty sure it's only the beginning. As I've been confined to my bed or a chair at the kitchen table most days for sheer fear of vomiting, my extroverted personality has teamed up with my sense of worth for a series of revolts.

"If you don't get out of this house today, you are useless," 

"How are you going to make friends if you don't get a job?"

"Well, there goes another day of writing thank you notes at the kitchen table. Remember when you had a real life?"

At first I was tempted to believe these statements. It's true, I haven't gotten out much since the sickness set in. I haven't made many friends. I haven't gotten a job. I haven't even really finished setting up our new house. But everything changed when we had our first ultrasound last week. At the technician's cheerful pronouncement, "Yep, there's a baby in there!" all worries of self became background noise. There, on the screen in black and white was a little human with tiny arms and legs waving and a strong heartbeat that I could see pulsing away.

Yeah, remember when my "real life" consisted of writing papers that one person would read and grade only to be forgotten in my file folder forever? Remember when I could go shopping for clothes with friends? Remember when I worked at a cash register all day, taking people's money for plastic merchandise? Those were the days.

The days before there was a life inside of me.

I have since realized that the reason I felt so useless is because outwardly I am not doing much. Inwardly, however, God is doing miracles and I get to be His vessel. Is that a waste of my life? I think not.

It hit me tonight that, like it or not, I am being taught how to love selflessly. There is no physical part of me that is profiting from this baby, nor can I really control anything in this situation beyond my attitude. Yet, as my body is being offered up for me, so can my heart also learn to sacrifice. Sometimes, it turns out, we are drawn into something bigger than ourselves, and apparently that's when we truly learn to love.

My own efforts at love are feeble, limited by my humanity, but when united with God, they can help to create and nourish life itself. Though it took my present condition to see it, I don't think this is only a pregnancy thing either. We all have the capacity to be an instrument in creating beauty on this earth. It's simply a matter of forgetting ourselves and submitting our wills to a higher purpose. His purpose.

See what they don't tell you about love is sometimes there are situations beyond your control, when you don't feel like you can do much of anything. But that's generally when God is doing the most.

Austria Journal 10~Vienna Revisited and The Land of My Fathers

Bratislava!

Hypothetically, a free weekend to explore Europe is something people dream about. Before my semester in Gaming, when posed with the question of where to go, the scene of my consideration might be described as one not far removed from that of a dog drooling over a bone. ‘Perhaps Venice,’ I’d think with slightly glazed eyes, ‘or maybe a small town in the heart of Germany,’ I’d drool. Well, I’m wiser now, and slightly worse for the wear, but when it came to our first really free weekend this semester, we (Alex, Mark, and I) had quite the time of it figuring out where to go. It wasn’t really a matter of where we wanted to go, we could easily all agree on Venice, Paris, Spain and a few others, the issue was more along the lines of where we could afford to go without a EuRail as none of us had activated it yet. We researched several possibilities, each more expensive than the last, until finally in desperation, the night before we were to leave, we settled on heading back to Vienna to look around a few places we had missed the last time and to ask at the train station about fares to other nearby cities. Accordingly, we booked a hostel in Vienna and prepared to make the journey, packing anything and everything that might be necessary (young inexperienced travelers that we were).

Mark and Alex outside the Hapsburg

The next morning we hurried out to the bus stop well before our arranged time so as not to risk missing our bus and consequently ended up catching an earlier one with several other Franciscan students. Since none of us had traveled by bus or train on our own before, there was a bit of confusion when we arrived at the first train station…and the second one. We managed to make all of our trains however, with only the slight mishap of accidentally not paying for one of them and accidentally buying a ticket for a dog on the other one. I was in a nervous sweat the entire way to Vienna, afraid of everything from being arrested to thousand Euro fines while Mark calmly chuckled across from me. Apparently, he can be quite calm and collected while breaking the law, so keep him in mind for future illegal operations. I, on the other hand, prayed that God would show His mercy to us poor ignorant train hoppers. He did, and by the sheer luck (providence) of getting on that particular train with a bunch of school children, we were never checked and so got to Vienna without spending hardly anything.

Viennese Cakes

Judenplatz on a rainy twilight

Memorial for the Austrian Jews who were killed

The Musikverin

St. Peter's dome

We spent
that afternoon locating and checking into our hostel, exploring the major churches in Vienna: St. Stephen’s Gothic Cathedral, St. Michael’s (a beautiful little church that the palace servants attended), the gorgeously ornate Baroque church St. Peter's, and making our way to the Jewish Quarter of town with the Judenplatz. This had been a special request of mine, after reading about this square as the place where hundreds of Jews were rounded up by the Nazi’s in Hitler’s Anschluss of 1938. Alex wanted to see the apartments of Ceci, a young Hapsburg ruler featured on many posters and paintings throughout the city, so Mark and I made our way over to the artists quarter of the city to find the Musikverin, another part of the city featured in a series of books I once read. This area of town was full of street musicians and performers taking part in some sort of street fair. We spent some time watching them before finding Alex again and heading to find dinner.

Gothic stonework in St. Stephen's

Our stay in the hostel was uneventful, though I did perform several investigations and tests to determine that we were free of bed bugs, and we awoke early the next morning to make our way to the train station, where we learned that it was only 15euro roundtrip to Bratislava. This was perfect, I thought, since I had been thinking about making a visit to Slovakia, the home of three out of my four great-grandparents on my mom’s side. The train ride was only about an hour long, and as we set foot off the train, we realized that this city was very different from the artistic Vienna or picturesque Salzburg. Where Vienna has sparklingly white stone edifices, Bratislava has easter-egg pastel houses, where Salzburg has statues and monuments, Bratislava has graffiti, lots of it. Everywhere you turned there were signs of the recent Communist regime made strikingly visible in the several “symbols of Communism”, oddly shaped monuments throughout town. We had a vague map from the train station and were able to find our way to the touristy part of the city, a few cute little streets lined with shops and bars. Alcohol was very present in Bratislava. Every other restaurant sign proclaimed cheap prices for beer, vodka, and other varieties of hard liquor.

Pastels in Bratislava

I will definitely be going back.

 The diamond in the rough proved to be a small honey shop that we stumbled upon a little before lunch. The owner, a young man in his late 20s, was an excellent salesman and reeled us in bit by bit, but it was worth every penny. First he allowed us to sample as many varieties of the flavored honey as we wanted, ranging from wildflower mountain honey to a creamy hazelnut flavor. As we deliberated over which flavors to buy, he produced several bottles of honey wine, or mead. To seal the deal, he proceeded to let us sample each of these until we were pretty set on buying not only a few jars of the delicious honey, but also several bottles of the sweet drink. Even though we recognized his sale tactics, it was honestly one of the best purchases of the semester thanks to the genuine, natural sweetness of the goods.

They're big into their graffiti there

 We had packed sandwiches from the hostel’s breakfast (a cheap traveler trick for when you don’t want to pay for lunch) but the constant drizzling rain forced us to seek out a small coffee shop for lunch. Surrounded by poofy, feminine colored cushions and a large, Canadian group who felt the need to express in loud tones how much the American economy depends on Canada, we licked ice cream cones and ate slightly squashed sandwiches out of napkins while we planned our next few hours. We had done zero research before the trip, so we pretty much only had our little train station brochure/map to go off of, but it seemed to hit all the highlights. After lunch, we made our way to a few churches which were all locked and closed to the public. Deciding to take a different tack, we climbed up to the fortress on the hill and spent about half an hour taking pictures in the gateway simply because we were sick of walking about in the rain with our overly-packed backpacks. None of us felt particularly like paying to see the inside of the palace, so we wandered about the ramparts a bit before heading down to seek out St. Elizabeth of Hungary’s blue church.

Roommate Besties

St. Elizabeth's

                St. Elizabeth’s really was blue. I’ve never seen a church like it before or since, though we were unable to explore it fully because a wedding was going on inside. Finally, we decided it was about time to make our way back to the train station as we had several long rides ahead of us. It was an uphill trudge through the rain with our bags heavier than ever upon our backs, but we made it and I bought a Slovak sausage from a vendor at the station, which was nice. Our ride back to Vienna was uneventful and we managed to catch an earlier train towards Gaming than we had hoped, this time paying the proper amount. Our conductor was quite friendly and explained to us at which stops we would have to switch trains. We were a little confused by his directions but got off at St. Polten as he suggested and looked for the next train to Pochlorn. Alas, this train did not leave for another hour. Well, no matter, we thought. We could just look around for some more food while we waited. As the time for the train drew near, however, we realized that the sign had “nicht something” written underneath our train number. We asked a few people what this meant and discovered that the train we were expecting to take would not be traveling out of St. Polten that night. Slightly annoyed and exhausted, we checked for the next train at the information booth and found that it would not run until about 9pm, which meant we wouldn’t catch the last train from Pochlorn to Scheibbs (where we catch the bus to Gaming). Afraid we might have to spend the night in Pochlorn but helpless to do anything about it, we bought more food and sat around looking forlorn as swarms of strange-looking teenagers milled about the station. They had evidently just participated in some sort of huge event that included being coated in large amounts of colored chalk, which simply added to their rather loud, annoying presence and the peculiarity of our predicament. We were so fortunate as to board our train an hour or so later with a bunch of them, but when we embarked at Pochlorn, every human in sight quickly disappeared to their homes and warm beds. We alone were left in the empty train station with only the promise of the sparse Sunday morning train schedule linking us to Gaming and our vacant beds. Despite our exhaustion, I was all for walking (we had googlemapped directions at McDonalds in St. Polten just in case), but Alex pointed out that by the time we got there, it would be the same time as if we took the train.

Queens of the castle

We decided to walk about the town just in case there was a restaurant or hotel open but in the typical small-town Europe style, everything had closed hours ago. Only bars remained open. We located the least sketchy looking bar and began staggering our drinks so as to spend as much of the night as possible there without spending a fortune or getting drunk. Alex calmly requested Earl Grey tea, to which the bar tender laughed, but at least she was not in danger of getting drunk. Mark searched out every hotel in the area, while we sat and drank, but to no avail and we finally decided to walk back to the station and spend the rest of the night there. We took turns waiting up, which meant that Mark basically stayed awake the whole time while we slept fitfully on our backpacks, hoping we wouldn’t get some sort of dreadful disease from the train station seats. After several false alarms when trains that were supposed to come (on a regular week-day schedule we later discovered) did not arrive, and several hours of an obnoxious girl smoking inside the station and giving us all sore throats, our train finally came and we boarded it utterly spent and rather disheveled. I have never been happier to board a train, and the smell of breakfast at the Kartause was pure heaven. Likewise, our beds were waiting and I spent a good portion of the day sleeping blissfully under my very own duvet with my head on a cushy pillow.

Bratislavan Fortress Gate

                Though this unfortunate ending rather marred our overall experience, it could not be denied that we learned a lot from this trip. Not only had we figured out the complicated mix of trains and hostels, but we had seen two cities successfully and kept our overall expenses under $100, which was a lot better than most people that first weekend. It’s a trip I look back on with a mixture of fondness at the thought of our naïve traveler’s sense and bitterness at the remembrance of the dehydrated, sore throat feeling of that night in Pochlorn. Never again will I pass through that station without shuddering, but never again will I fail to check and double-check a Saturday evening train schedule. In the end, however, I’m left with a sweet memento of the journey in our Slovak honey, of which I have several, beautiful, full jars.

Traveling buddies

Austria Journal 9-Vienna pt 2

Note from the Author: This post will be short and sweet so we can move on to more recent trips. I had to post it though, because I'm sure you were all dying to know how the rest of the Vienna excursion went. Actually, the slight streak of OCD in me is simply suffering and demands that I make sure these entries are complete...even if it takes me the next 3 years to finish. 

The second day in Vienna, we attended mass at the Minoritenkirche, a beautiful church not far from the Habsburg Palace. Afterwards, Mark and I had to go to the Kunsthistoriches (Vienna Art Museum) with our Art Class to do an independent study project. The museum was fascinating. It’s funny, I used to hate museums, particularly art museums, but I’ve since come to really appreciate them, and this one proved to be no exception. From Roman sculptures to Renoir, the museum was filled to the bursting with treasures. We spent several hours wandering around, snapping pictures and studying particular works for our independent studies (or in my case, falling asleep in front of our work…the couches were too comfortable). I analyzed a work entitled ‘Madonna of the Rosary,’ by an Italian painter named Caravaggio, in which the Blessed Mother is depicted bestowing the rosary on St. Dominic, who in turn, gives it to the people. It was a beautiful piece and if you would like to know more, you can read my paper. :P

Our Lady of the Rosary

Impressive sculpture of the battle between the centaurs and Lapiths

          So engrossing was the art museum, that we quickly lost track of time, not emerging until around lunchtime. Mark and I and a few friends discovered a small festival on the green across from the Habsburg Palace. We got tasty traditional German food and decided to go see the Schonbrunn Palace next. Located a little outside the city, this palace was the Hapsburg family's summer residence and, according to our fellow students that had visited the day before, it had beautiful gardens. Alas, we only experienced about 2 minutes within those gardens, as the trip to the palace took a lot longer than expected and we realized along the way that we had forgotten to buy our vorteil cards (passes that make all trains in Austria half price) that we needed to purchase at a specific train station in Vienna. Because of this, we hurried back to the metro after snapping a few pictures.Ah well, another day, Vienna.

Schonbrunn Palace

 The last hour of our trip was a little stressful as we rushed round via metro trying to get our vorteils, stop at a grocery store for food, and make it to the bus on time. We weaved through throngs of people gathered to see or participate in a Muslim protest march (that was interesting) but finally made it safely back to the bus where we exchanged stories and pictures with our other friends. Among these was Alex, who had gone to see the Royal treasury and glowed with details of her fun day in the city. The drive home was uneventful and relatively restful. Vienna was over. The school had successfully prepared us to travel overnight and now the next weekend was up to us.

Schonbrunn Gardens

Gazebo in the gardens

Stay tuned for "The First Free Weekend" to hear about our journey back to Vienna and somewhere else exciting!

          

Austria Journal 8- Vienna pt 1

St. Stephen's Gothic cathedral

 The day began bright and early with a quick shower and breakfast before boarding the university buses. It was a brisk morning, but at our travel meeting the night before, Mr. Pipp (the jolly student life director) had promised us sunshine for our first overnight trip with the school. The ride was long, a few hours, and we arrived in Vienna well-rested. Or, at least I did. I have the wonderful ability to sleep anywhere and everywhere, both a blessing and a curse really, as this extends but is not limited to class, Mass, on top of my school books, and well, you get the picture.

     Vienna, on first observation (thankfully an observation I slept through) appeared to be filled with somewhat scandalous lingerie adds. This of course, did not set quite the tone for our day that we had been hoping, but the sight of church spires and the opera house somewhat alleviated our initial feelings of distrust. Fortunately, the ads seemed to decrease within the central part of the city. 
     The bus dropped us off by the opera house, and we made our way to a Franciscan church containing the crypt of the entire Hapsburg family. In case you are, as was I, completely ignorant of that which is Hapsburg, they basically are/were the ruling family of the Ostro-Hungarian Empire. It is from this line of royalty that Empress Maria Teresa of Austria comes, as well as her daughter Marie Antoinette (perhaps you’ve heard of her?) This church, the burial spot of kings, also forms the end of the Hapsburg burial procession. There is a nice little tradition connected with it that when the procession arrives at the doors, an old friar will answer the knock and ask who it is. The attendant names the royal dead with all of his or her titles, to which the friar replies, “I don’t know him/her.” This process is repeated until the attendant finally says, “This is so-and-so, a poor sinner in need of God’s mercy.”  I’m paraphrasing. Then the friar replies “Come in and welcome,” and the royal body is placed below in the crypt.

          We had Mass in this tradition-filled spot with the bones of kings resting beneath us. After Mass, we opted not to pay to see the crypt, but I’ve heard the tombs are gorgeous, encrusted with jewels and such. Instead, we joined up with Mr. Pipps walking tour of the city (we had him in Salzburg and really enjoyed his sense of humor and jovial presence amongst all the unfamiliarity of a European city).

          As we learned through the tour and the rest of our stay there, Vienna is known for

Polish King Jan III Sobieski, who saved Vienna in 1683 from invading Muslims and discovered coffee all in the same day

Alex in front of the Hapsburg Palace

its culture, especially music. This was apparent in the many red coat-tailed, be-wigged Mozart men that harangued every poor, impressionable tourist that so much as glanced their way. These imposters, who probably couldn’t carry a tune themselves, waved tickets to classical Viennese concerts, emphasizing to the aforementioned tourists that to not attend such an event would be akin to playing the Viennese waltz in 4/4 timing, thereby causing Mozart to roll over in his grave and bringing shame upon all things cultured and good. Likewise, the architecture was refined and only slightly less overbearing, having to it a sort of dignity, brought about partly by Gothic influence, partly by the touch of time. Our tour made its way down the main shopping drag, past the grounds and buildings of the Hapsburg Palace (their winter residence), near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, a massive gothic structure whose spires have pointed heavenward for centuries.

          Our tour ended at an old pub for lunch. Descending to the basement, a large beer hall, and down another flight to the second basement and a room full of tables, we glimpsed stones even older than St. Stephen's. The cellars date back to the 12^th century, and it was here, beneath arches that had supported the groaning beer hall tables above for nine centuries, that we were served our first real Wiener schnitzel (the mensa had served us something like it, but that doesn’t really count). Along with that, we ate soup, vinegar-soaked potato salad, and delicious apple strudel. Mark didn’t like the Wiener schnitzel (big surprise), but I did.

slightly blurry picture of the ancient
 restaurant basement

          We checked into our hostels after lunch and were then on our own to explore the city for the night. The hostels weren’t as bad as I expected, and Alex and I shared with two of our friends, Mary Grace and Evelyn, so we were at least in good company. Honestly, we hardly stopped there long enough to tell if the place was clean or not before rushing off to discover the Viennese metro system and figure out how to get into the standing room section of the opera. Along the way, we did end up talking to one of the red-coated fellows—several of them in fact—but one in particular chatted with us for a while, somehow managed to compliment everyone except Mark, and got about as close as anyone could have gotten to convincing us to buy concert tickets. We didn’t, however, and soon were in the queue to purchase 4 euro tickets to a legit opera in the opera house in Vienna. Granted, they were standing room spots, so by the end, our backs and feet were killing us, but it was, nonetheless, an opera. La Traviata, to be exact. I had seen this in Dayton a few years back (I mostly just remember that I couldn’t stop coughing and that I sounded more likely to die than the tragic heroine), but the acting in this production far surpassed the other. The set, on the other hand, certainly did not. In fact, it was really weird and lame. Actually, I have yet to see a show with a set that really surpasses those of the Schuster Center.

Inside the Vienna Operhouse 

Alex, Me, and Evelyn after the opera!

          The opera set the tone for the night, in more ways than one. On the one hand, it was exciting and fancy and fun to go out at night, dressed up, to a big opera house and experience such a show; on the other hand, standing in such a constricted space for 2 ½ hours brought misery upon my back for the rest of the night and the following day. That wasn’t enough to ruin a fun night, though. We ate dinner at a little café in St. Stephansplatz, the three of us (Mark, Alex, and me) but met up with some other opera-going friends for a bit after. Later, after walking most of the group back to the hostels, Mark, Katrina, Courtney, Caitlin, and I went out again, but by then most things were closed and we just made a brief stop at McDonald's before dragging ourselves through the maze of metro stops back to our hostels.

          Now, as this is the first recording of overnight stays, it must be made clear that I have a deathly fear of bedbugs. The others make fun of me for it, but I will not sleep in a hostel bed without first examining every inch of it multiple times, including various “surprise checks” throughout the night…just trying to catch the bugs off their guard! That night, about halfway through the night, I dreamt a bedbug was biting my knee. I actually felt the itch! Gasping, I leapt out of bed, and rushed to the light of the bathroom where I discovered no bug, no bite…no, not even an itch. Nevertheless, I still made sure to doubly investigate the scene of the illusory crime. Sure enough, no bugs. Mary Grace enjoyed relating this story the next morning, however, dramatizing my gasp just a bit. I’ll admit, since there was not actually a bedbug involved, it was funny...to be continued.

Austria Journal 7- Book Mountain

The c

One Wednesday afternoon, after cleaning the Mensa after

lunch, Alex hurried me into sporty clothes and down to the Spar where several of our spelunking friends, Katrina, Caitlin, Courtney, Mark, Evelyn, and Rachel were waiting to make the trek up Book Mountain, another one of the mini-mountains that surrounds Gaming. This particular climb actually included a path (as opposed to our spelunking/cliff climbing adventure) and led to a cell tower and a clearing of trees where Franciscan students have carved their names and signed a book for years.

Random uprooted tree. It's absence made a huge bowl in the ground

The path began at a set of metal stairs in some random Gaminginian’s backyard and zigzagged through a series of stations of the cross up to a beautiful scenic overlook where an iron cross perched on a rock jutting out over the picturesque landscape below. We spent a good half hour taking dramatic pictures here, most of which have adorned our facebooks and spurred even mere facebook acquaintances to comment in awe of the sheer natural beauty of it all combined with the powerful symbol of the Cross.

From there we continued on and up through a forest that looked like something straight out of Lord of the Rings. I felt like a hobbit making my way through Fangorn Forest, or Lothlorien, where the trees and terrain made me feel my smallness and insignificance in the face of such long-established parts of creation. We eventually reached a point of some confusion where some of our group decided to climb up the mountainside rather than search for the continuation of the path. I was among the sensible few who preferred to never experience such a climb again, so Mark, Courtney, Caitlin, Rachel, and I backtracked until we discovered a narrow, winding way that climbed steeply upward. This path was even more beautiful than the first and led us through glades of lush green, ethereal beams of sun slanting across the path at perfect angles for really interesting pictures.

 

The last few minutes led us up a quite steep but always climbable way and finally to the clearing where several Franciscan students were employed carving initials and symbols into the already full trees, signing the book, and searching for fellow student’s entries from years gone past. Unfortunately, the book only dated from 2011 because someone had removed the old Franciscan book (Too bad! I would have liked to find Aunt Ali!). We all signed the book and found stones to carve our names into the trees. I carved mine and Andrew’s names into the well-marked bark of one such tree while half of our group went off to find the cell tower that everyone climbs to get a really good view of Gaming.

Mine is the orangeish looking heart

When I finally finished etching my mark into the tree, it was nearing dusk. I ran to the cell tower and climbed about half-way up before being completely overcome by the sheer height of it all. I’m a big wimp. Our more brave friends (Katrina, Mark, and Caitlin) made it all the way to the top and they exclaimed for hours over the beauty of it all. It almost made me wish I had followed their example, but I have yet to overcome this fear of heights enough to embark on such a daring feat.

In our excitement, we lost track of time and soon discovered that it was nearly dark. Not nearly nervous enough, we began the trek down, following the path and praying a rosary along the way. At one point we entered a denser area of the forest and had to depend on someone’s iphone light to find our way. We joined hands and formed a human chain, still praying, until we emerged back at the bottom where the iron cross overlooked the village. Tiny lights sparkled up beneath us and we took a few moments to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over it all before continuing on our way. At this point, someone had the idea of singing (probably me or Courtney) and we all joined in our favorite Les Mis and P&W songs. It turned our fear of the dark into fun and our tentative steps into confident ones and as we neared the bottom, I thought about how God shows us the bigger lessons of life through practical experiences. For instance, when we climbed the mountain to the caves, I learned that you just have to cling to what is concrete in life and keep climbing even through the unstable parts, keeping your eyes on your goal. On this hike, trusting God to guide us through the darkness, became the theme. There were parts of the forest so dark that all we could do was feel the person in front and behind us, but praying and knowing that God was there protecting us helped us to find our way out with the aid of just one tiny light to follow.

We finished off the night with Kebabs from the shop in town. They were so delicious after the exertion of another fun, full day in Gaming.

Austria Journal 6- Salzburg

Mozart's House

After sleeping through the Melk expedition on our first day here, Alex and I were determined not to make the same mistake for the second school outing: Salzburg. The trip was a one day affair, complete with mass, walking tour, and lunch paid for by the school, so we spent significant time the night before planning out all the things we wanted to do while in that ‘Sound of Music’ city.

I had been to Salzburg once before for a brief visit with my family at Christmas time, but the only memories that visit includes are a lot of images of walking through slush, a Native American street band, the lift up the fortress on the hill, and a story about a cow. It’s amazing what the human brain holds on to.

This trip proved distinctly different in that our day there was sunny and warm and much more action-packed. Following our arrival was the school-group portion of events: mass, tour, and lunch, which proved very helpful in getting an idea of the historical and spiritual significance of the city, not to mention helping us appreciate just how tasty German food is (Mark doesn’t really agree, so we’ve decided he has a strictly American palate).

After lunch, which was served in a huge hunting-lodge style hall on the second floor of a restaurant, we started out the self-planned part of our day with the trek up steeply inclined streets to the town fortress. We had learned in our tour that the fortress had never been taken by force and that the only time they had come close was when the defenders were slowly being starved out by an opposing army (I forget who, unfortunately). They were down to their last cow and things were looking desperate until someone devised the plan of promenading it along the battlements, then painting it a different color and repeating the procedure until the attacking soldiers were convinced there was no hope of ever starving out the fortress and gave up (this was the story I remembered from my previous visit).

The fortress

While climbing the hill to the fortress, it was somewhat hard to envision any army having the lung capacity to survive the charge into battle, let alone take the place, which made the stories of its impregnability seem very realistic. The fortress itself was a mish-mash of visitor-accesible spots, but it seemed that there must have been TONS that we weren’t allowed into, because what we saw was somewhat small and the overall structure was huge!

The Dom cathedral's gorgeous architecture and decor

We are the princesses of the castle!

 After ascending stone steps to one tower that was infested with a swarm of large gnat-like insects and where we hurriedly snapped a few squinty-eyed, closed-mouthed shots with the mountainous background, we made our way through a few museum displays on armor, excavations, and medieval torture. At this point, we were all ready to move on to our next planned stop in Salzburg: Nonnburg Abbey.

Maria Elena Von Trapp and Baby Mark Vontrapp
in the Salzburg fortress

Pious Mother Superior Alex turns away small,
petulant child ElenaVon Trapp

It was about this point that I began to discover my somewhat unexpected enjoyment and ease at reading maps. It turns out that my sense of direction isn’t altogether dreadful, either, so I gleefully led Alex and Mark along a stone path on the side of the fortress mountain that led to the abbey rumored to have been the place where the real Maria Von Trapp was a postulant. This rumor was disputed by some travel websites, and we never really found out if it was true, but we did enjoy the peaceful, darkness of the chapel, and after running into a few of our own TOR sisters who told us that the gate to the abbey was the same one where Mother Superior turns away the Von Trapp children in the movie when Maria is “in seclusion,” Alex and I made sure to snap a few pictures there too.

 Asthetic enjoyment at the Mirabell Gardens

Our unicorn went a little crazy...

The rest of the day included stops at the carefully laid out Mirabell gardens by the Mirabell palace, meeting up with some more of our friends, including Fr. Matt (who is just plain awesome, btw), and making our way to the Augustiner beer garden and brewery. This was an especially interesting experience, because not only did the garden seat close to 1000 people (and it was pretty full), nobody appeared to be obnoxiously intoxicated, despite the customary liter sized beer steins easily available for fairly cheap prices. The Europeans just take drinking differently. It truly seems like a cultural practice of fellowship for them, which makes it an enjoyable experience even to those who aren’t drinking (don’t worry, I was).

The Augustine Beer Garden

To order a beer, I had to go up and buy a ticket, then choose a half-liter or liter mug from the shelves and rinse it out in a fountain. Half liter was enough for me, especially when the beer guy generously filled me up, spilling a great deal of foam and beer in the process and thus ensuring that I got my money’s worth. There were several cheap food market stalls where I got sausage and a big pretzel and ta-da, a pretty typical German dinner. Yum.

A bridge full of love

We finished off the night by strolling along the river between tents set up to display a variety of wares (all overpriced) and buying some Mozart kugel: chocolate balls with several different layers of chocolate crème and marzipan inside, an Austrian thing (the Salzburg variety featuring pistachio flavored marzipan). The bus back was quiet as I wrote letters, looked at pictures, and talked about the day, although I heard one bus watched “Taken”…talk about a traumatic introduction to our stay in Europe. Altogether, it was quite the perfect first expedition, helping us look forward to many more to come.

Salzburg, ladies and gentlemen