TRAVELIN

Dear friends,

It has been a week since I've written. I apologize for the lack of news and am grateful for the emails you continue to send; I love to hear updates from home and will respond as soon as I can.

When we found out that classes at Karoly Gaspar had been pushed back an extra week, all nineteen of us flipped open our Lonely Planet travel books and started furiously planning last minute trips. Most of us left in a rush after Hungarian class on Wednesday, hurriedly zipping bulging backpacks, shoving extra money in our jeans pockets, stuffing apples and sandwiches in our jackets.

Sam, Elizabeth Wright, Liz Yeager, and I got on a 1:30 train headed for Salzburg, Austria--the set of The Sound of Music and the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I napped for two hours as we barreled through the Hungarian countryside; when I woke up, we were just crossing the border into Austria.

As we journeyed further into the country, the green hills rushed up around us, surprising us with quiet magnificence, swallowing our little train as it chug-chugged through villages that can only be described in words such as "quaint, lovely, gabled, fabled..." We passed sloping cornfields crowned--not with white farmhouses--but with yellow Austrian cottages laden with vines and topped with red-tiled roofs. Sigh. I couldn't have asked for a better welcome.

We hissed into Hauptbahnhof and easily found our hostel--the Youth and Family Guesthouse, Salzburg. After dropping our backpacks on bunks in room 223, we stumbled out into the twisting cobblestone streets of Old Town Salzburg (Altstadt). We found a statue of Mozart, peered in dark shop windows, admired the fortress Festung Hohensalzburg at the top of the hill, and strolled along the river Salzach.

The evening air was warm and pleasant and every light along the river seemed to be winking hello; Salzburg was tipping its hat in friendly greeting, and we couldn't wait to get to know it.

(Expect many more postings on Salzburg in the next day or two.)