Trip to Tappenkarsee part 1

In early September I had the opportunity to go hiking in the mountains and stay in a Hütte in Tappenkarsee.

It was a beautiful outing, but a pretty steep climb to get up the mountain.

Iwill mostly just post pictures, because you can't take a bad picture of Austrian mountains if the weather is nice.

 

These are pictures I took while we were still in the bus.

Sometimes the fog just rises suddenly.  Here is a castle near Salzburg that is completely smog.

The Austrian countryside is exactly as picturesque as the movies make it seem.

 

Finally we arrived at the starting point of our hike.

So we started our hike and the first part was pretty gradual.

We saw some astoundingly beautiful scenery.

 

 

I am amazed that there are so many different colors and textures in the Austrian woods.

 

I was able to get the whole of this spider web in this shot.

Fog can arise at any time and it did at this cute little hut on the way.

The patterns of the wood in the hut were really pretty.

This rock had  marks as if done by an artist.

After we started to climb we got to see water falls.

In this shot you can see how far we have come. That lake in the background is the same one in the sixth picture up above where we got off the bus.

I took lots of pictures of plants and wildflowers too.

 

It was also the week that the cows were being brought down to the valley from the tops of the mountains. One has to get out of the way when they are coming down the trail.

This is the hut that we stayed in.

I just loved the texture of these clumps of heath.

This was our room in the Hütte.

As the sun set, you could see the lake out our room window.

Here is the same shot in the morning.

 

And here are different cows coming down from the top of the mountain.

There go the cows by our little Hütte.

 

I'll leave the first part of this blog with this shot of the mountains.

Salzburg Photos

These are some images of Salzburg that I took the first week or so I was here. We climbed one of the smaller mountains and got a very nice view of the city.

Of course it wouldn't all fit in one photo, so I took quite a few.

This is a lovely wall near the cloister.

 

I wanted to take this picture to remind myself that Salzburg is more than just the old part of the city.

This is an office building that I really like. It has this coppery-colored metal screen sheath on it to keep it cool in Summer and warm in winter. It positively glows when the sun hits it.

 

This is a sign in the kitchen at the University.

Pia and I ate at this little place, but we sat outside.  I had a nice soup.

Here is a view of the fortress from the University plaza.

 

This is the actual University.

 

This is a view  of the fortress from the rooftop of the University.

 

This guy comes and entertains the tourists at various busy places.

And this is a little decco building  that I pass by sometimes. It is not grandly elegant, but I appreciate the jugendstil touches.

 

The mountains go all around the city.

This was coffee with Pia and Gerhard.

 

On the way to Salzburg

I flew Aer Lingus from Ireland to Munich. It was a short flight and I was surprised to learn that you had to pay for most of your drinks (even mineral water). (I think coffee was free.)  It was an uneventful leg of my trip and soon enough I was getting on the train to get from Munich to Salzburg. The landscape was very familiar, but I can never resist taking pictures out of the train window.

We passed a lovely lake most likely Chiemsee.

Soon enough you could recognize the region by the famous onion domes on the churches and of course the ever-present mountains.

 

I'm always interested in the people on the train around me. They seem to try hard to be inconspicuous, even when their demeanor or dress screams for attention.  

 

When I got into Salzburg, my friends Pia and Jim met me at the train station and then we decided to go get something to eat.  We chose a little place called Shrimps which wasn't far from our new apartment, but they were severely understaffed  and it took FOREVER to get our food. Jim never did get his.  What I got was great (or maybe I was just so hungry by the time I got it that anything would have been like Manna from heaven, but it was visually pretty too.)

 

So afterwards we went to a little metal bar and Jim got to drink his dinner.

 

 

On the way home we experienced the most torrential rainstorm! It was funny and miserably cold at the same time.

Over the next couple of days we met with the teachers for the study abroad program and tried to square away program details. Here is our Art teacher at Cafe Fingerlos.

Here is a German teacher at the cafe near the train station.

I also had the tremendous pleasure of meeting with one of my old students, who is now married and living in the region (while working on her Masters thesis.)



We spent the afternoon together and had coffee.

 

I had an Esterhazy Schnitten, something I love very much, but it tasted off and little did I know, but I was coming down with one of the worst colds I have had in my adult life.

 

Luckily we took advantage of the day and walked around salzburg, visiting the Mirabell gardens and reviewing old times.

 

Here's the fortress that dominates the valley in the background of the Mirabell gardens.

 

 

It took us a while to find them, but eventually we also managed to get to the garden with the stone statues of dwarves. (There was construction that prevented us from following the usual path.)

 

It was an absilutely stunning day, to be followed alas by the depths of sickness, which really got me off on the worng foot in terms of preparing for the arrival of the students.