I began my combined Salzburg/Munich trip by serving the noon Mass with Bishop Andreas Laun, auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg. He gave an excellent homily commenting on the anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, reiterating the Church's firm insistence on protecting all people.
The University paid for lunch at the Sternbrau, which included soup, some type of meat, rice and vegetables. For once I was able to finish a meal without getting sick, and I was actually hungry afterwards (if you know me personally, you'll no doubt be shocked by this.) After that, we had a short walking tour (i.e., pointing out Mozart's house, and a couple major churches) and then we were given about two hours to explore the city on our own before we had to check into the youth hostel.
As my guidebook had warned, Salzburg was extremely tourist-oriented so I tried looking for some of the more unique/less commercialized sights. Conveniently enough, our walking tour ended outside a cemetery with quite a few ancient and/or famous graves in it. We went in to check it out and saw a few interesting ones, note the marker from 830 AD:
Even more interesting were the catacombs built into the cliff face looking down on the cemetery. Admittance was only 1 Euro, so we paid up and walked through the low-roofed tunnels. We certainly weren't disappointed, seeing the remains of an ancient church, as well as a marble dated 400 AD.
After that, our group split up stereotypically: most of the girls went shopping, while the guys went exploring. At the time, it seemed like an excellent idea to walk up the giant hill to reach the castle. If you've ever seen pictures of Salzburg, this fortress is always the main focus because of its impressive appearance. Anyway, it took about 15 minutes to find the stairs leading up the hill, and the same amount of time to walk up them. I got some nice panorama shots of Salzburg from the top, but we didn't actually go into the fortress because it costs 6.50 Euros, and it was getting close to check-in time. Thus, we settled for posing in front of its walls before descending back to the street level.
At this point, our group re-formed and immediately split up again between those who had opted for the concert (and the 16 Euro fee) and those who hadn't. Being in the latter group, I had an entire evening open for experiencing the local culture of Salzburg. My friend and I began our adventure with a stop at the Kebap stand. Kebaps (not to be confused with kebabs) are Turkish food popular in Austria; it's basically a giant sandwich full of various kinds of meat. My friend ordered a kebap and I ordered a Kasekrainer, which turned out to be a giant sausage with cheese mixed throughout. With dinner taken care of, we wandered back to the historic part of Salzburg trying to find any non-tourist (read: absurdly overpriced) shops. We failed in that endeavor, but we spent some time browsing an Austrian bookstore. The evening really began when we stopped in at the Shamrock Cafe, home of 40 different kinds of whiskey.
I made the mistake of ordering a Guinness, and soon realized how superior Austrian beer is to other types. Anyway, the Shamrock was really chill, it's staffed by Irishmen and although it was empty when we visited at 5, it gets pretty packed when the live music starts at 9 PM. After a quick drink, we walked out to the river to check out the view from the bridge. As promised, it was pretty impressive, so I posed for a typical tourist shot:
Since we had already walked so far, we decided to cross the bridge and try to find a cafe or any other heated place to sit down and relax in. We spotted the sign for the Stein Terrasse in front of the Hotel Stein, so we went in to investigate. We soon found out that the cafe was on the top floor of the hotel, offering an amazing view of the city. I ordered an expensive cup of hot chocolate by way of an entrance fee and took the following shots:
Surprisingly, even on the opposite side of the river we managed to run into two other students from our University. They joined up with us and we decided to cross back in search of the building with the star of david on it depicted above. We were intrigued by this sign of Judaism in an area where there obviously aren't many Jewish people. The word below the star, "Brau," means brewery, so we were wondering if that meant there was some kind of Jewish brewery or a hotel or something (many of the old brewery buildings have been replaced by hotels). At any rate, all the stores were closed, so this seemed as promising a pastime as any other. We wandered around for a while, but we couldn't see the sign from the street, but it was getting cold so we stood around a "Heisse Maroni" stand. The stand turned out to be selling a type of roasted nuts, and an Austrian man standing by it started talking to us in extremely good English. He told us a story about how his father had lived off these kinds of nuts during WWII, and then he started telling us about how he worked for/owned a company that had found the cure to cancer, using some miracle system he had gotten from Greece. He went on about how the pharmaceutical companies control the governments and all the "medical men."
We asked him what his cure was, but instead of answering our question he started explaining cancer along the following lines: cells are not just biological entities, they are also mini-power plants (he said you can measure the current they produce at about 10 mW across the cell). When those power plants start running out of fuel, it calls all the other cells in a similar state and that's what a tumor is. He also mentioned something about how cells explode when they run out of energy...Yeah. At this point, one of us asked about the Star of David building, he told us it probably had nothing to do with the buildings current function. We asked him again what his cure was, so instead he gave us a history of how he's been blacklisted by the medical community and how the FDA banned his product because of 'rumors' of the deaths of three patients. After about ten minutes of history, we asked him a third time what his cure was, and he finally told us that they use magnetic induction to re-power the dying cells. After a while we managed to conclude this conversation and got away. After a very interesting and amusing day, I made my way back to the hostel and climbed into bed. And I'll tell you one thing, taking your boots off after nine hours of walking is an amazing feeling.
Lastly, here are some shots of our surprisingly clean hostel room:
