Hike to Mariazell

Gruß euch!

Friday morning I began my AMAZING hike to Mariazell from Graz, which lasted until Monday night. I met the other 5 members of our hiking group (Peter & Sabine (husband and wife, leaders of the trip), Maria, Andrea (two very nice women) and Lisa (Peter's 19 year old daughter)). I took a bus out to Fuß der Leber which is about 35 minutes outside of the center of Graz at the foot of a hill which was the beginning of our hike.

The hike to Mariazell is a very common hike that people in Austria do. Many people make it a point to undertake this hike at least once in their lives. (peter has done it 22 times!). It is also an important pilgrimage for many people, where they pray along the way. So we saw many many crosses along the trail. In german this pilgrimage is called a "Wallfahrt".

The first day was pretty intense. We started our hike at 7am and hiked all day until about 7:30 pm when we reached our guest house. Needless to say, the hike was beautiful and we hiked a bit with head lamps for the last couple of hours since it was dark, which was a new and fun experience. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves...

We passed by a lot of cows because in Austria it seems like there are a lot more small local farms that provide mostly milk to nearby villages. Cows are cuuuuutee!! These small farms are called Bio Farms.

We also passed by this house which was crazy about garden gnomes.

We also crossed over a water fall by way of quite a few little bridges. It was called Kessel Fall. I do not understand this picture.

On the first day we also saw quite a few of these sweet salamanders.

The only times we stopped were once in the morning for a small snack and drink, once in the afternoon for a drink, and once for lunch where we had soup. This was a cute little sheep near the window where we ate.

Those nuts in front of the sheep are called "Kastanien" which are very very very popular in austria. There are so many street vendors here in Graz that sell these roasted chestnuts ( i have yet to try them though, but i hear they are delicious.)

The trail was marked with the Austrian Flag.

This structure was pretty interesting to me. Hunters climb up to the top to have better aim.

By the time we got to the guest house I was quite exhausted. I am sure that this is the longest day of hiking I have ever undertaken. It made the down time that much more relaxing though. We had an amazing meal of delicious austrian salad (potato salad, lentils, tomatoes, garlic, beets, lettuce, and the traditional pumpkin seed oil dressing) and everyone else had wiener schnitzel, but I had some zucchini pasta. I learned an austrian song that you sing when you toast each other before you drink"

"Ein Prost, ein Prost, ein Prösterchen Prost

Wir leben nur einmal.

Ein Prost, ein Prost, ein Prösterchen Prost

Wir leben nur einmal.

Wir leben nur ein einziges Mal,

vielleicht ist es das letztes Mal.

Ein Prost, ein Prost, ein Prösterchen Prost

Wir leben nur einmal."

If you translated this it would be:

"a cheers, a cheers, a little cheers,

we only live once.

a cheers, a cheers, a little cheers,

we only live once.

We live only one time,

maybe it is the last time,

a cheers, a cheers, a little cheers,

we only live once."

The owner of the guest house was soooo nice and talkative with us. He also plays the styrian accordion, which is different from a normal accordion with keys.

He was really good. He had quite a heavy styrian accent thought, which made him hard to understand. It seemed like the further we went into the mountains, the thicker peoples' accents were. It was really fun to listen to though and try to understand. The people I traveled with also had thicker styrian dialects than the teachers that I work with (who speak more of the german variant that I learned in school). I definitely picked up on some of their pronunciations, like saying "yo" instead of "ja" and "na" instead of "nein". also, I spent my whole life thinking that the song where they sing "Danke Shaane" was wrong, since in high german it's pronounced shoon (sp. schön), but actually in the styrian dialect (at least the styrians i was traveling with) said shaane! Blew my mind.

Anywho the guest house was really decorated. Here is one of the walls.

Those pictures still crack me up. Here is the bar room:

Peter started playing the washboard with Rudi (the owner/accordian player)

And I even joined in with this weird clapper instrument thing!

Heres a video of rudi playing a traditional styrian song on the accordian.

The next day we woke up and had breakfast and started our hike about 9am. We walked through more beautiful countryside and forests.

We even saw the mountain that we were going to hike to the next day from afar. Behold:

Yes, we hiked up that mountain on the third day. It is called the "hohe Veitsch".

We also saw more crosses, like this one.

Notice the snow! It was around the second day that we got up high enough to see a lot of snow. We didn't hike through much snow until the third day though, when we went up the hohe veitsch.

The second day was the only day where the weather wasn't that great. It rained a bit, but not too much and was kind of cold. But i was prepared clothing-wise so it didn't really matter.

That night we stayed in another guest house. We had good austrian food and good austrian hospitality once again. The whole fire department from neighboring Wartburg was there too celebrating one of the members' 70th birthday. That was a trip! They were so talkative and jolly. There were 3 at our table and 2 of them just kept telling joke after joke after joke for hours.

Everyone was laughing really hard but I couldn't really understand the jokes. Mostly because I couldn't understand what they were saying most of the time, and even when I did understand part of the joke, thats not enough because you really need to understand everything to get a joke. But I still had fun (even though at times I felt really left out and frustrated). I could tell everyone else was having a good time, though and that made me happy. Peter even ordered me a birthday cake, which was so nice. We all shared it. More accordian was played (by many different people actually, it is a common traditional styrian instrument to play)

and there was lots of dancing. This is Andrea dancing with one of the fire men.

It was really nice that Lisa (the 19 year old) was on the trip. I enjoyed talking to her and it was nice to have someone my age around.

The third day was when the hike started getting really really beautiful, as if it wasn't beautiful already. We hiked much higher up and stopped and had lunch here. It was so pretty.

Then we began our long ascent up the hohe veitsch which was strenuous, but well worth it. Here is a sign that looked so small from where we had lunch but from the top was obviously huge.

I am pretty sure its some sort of ski marker for the ski season (we passed through a few ski areas that don't have snow yet).

When we got to the top we were at the lodge that we stayed overnight in. We had a drink and then hiked further up the mountain to the highest point in the veitsch right when the sun was setting. This was my favorite part of our hike. It was seriously so amazing to see the sun setting in the alps here with the snow and the clear clear sky that you could see sooo far away in over so many mountain tops. Awesome...

Here is a short video I took of the surrounding area.

Here is the "Gipfel Kreuz" the cross at the peak of the mountain.

And here's a group photo in front of it.

From left to right: Andrea, Lisa, Maria, Peter, Sabine, Me

At the top of the mountain I learned an Austrian tradition. When you get to the top of the mountain you say "Berg Sieg" (mountain triumph!) and kiss each other on the cheeks as a sign of well wishes and success.

We were lucky to stay in this lodge because usually they close their doors to overnight guests around the beginning of October since it starts getting too cold, but they let us stay there since we made a reservation a month ago. It was a bit more rustic than the other 2 guest houses we stayed in. There was no running water for example.

The next day we hiked down the mountain which was also beautiful.

There was quite a bit of snow on the way down though and this made it hard to walk down, since it was so icy and slippery. I definitely fell a few times, even though I had my hiking poles with me.

Towards the end of the day we were all the way out of the mountains and back down in the valley. We saw more cows! Here is the cow sign & some cute cows:

We had a late lunch at a restaurant and hiked really really fast up a hill to get to Mariazell. We had to get there fast because it was already 4 and the last bus was leaving at 6:15 back to Graz.

We got there and walked through this archway which apparently cleanses you of your sins if you walk through it:

Here is the entrance to Mariazell.

We went into a room where you light a candle in remembrance of loved ones ( I thought of someone special tee hee!)

It was quite hot in that room. Heres peter and sabine lighting their candles from the main candle in the center of the room that you use to light all the little candles.

We also walked into the Basilica which is beautiful. Here's a pic from the internetz.

And one from the inside:

I would definitely like to come back to Mariazelle some time just for a day trip to explore it for longer, but we didn't have much time this trip.

Overall, my hike was just as awesome as i expected and more! I knew it was going to be naturally beautiful, but i didn't expect how much austrian culture i would experience along the way by way of the guesthouses and my hiking mates, who were also great to be with and were very friendly and accepting of me.

Classic Rock, Czech Ausflug, teaching stories

Hi all!

I forgot to mention that there was a marathon here in Graz the other weekend which I saw the tail end of. There were lots of people running and also live music scattered around.

I stopped to watch one cover band playing, they did classic rock like "Sweet Home Alabama" etc. They weren't that great. But I soon discovered another band also playing classic rock near the Hauptplatz (city center, where the town hall is). They were much better. Here's a short video of the guitarists solo for "Hey Joe":

It's pretty crazy how when they sing they sound american but when they speak they have such heavy Austrian accents. There was a cute little girl dancing to them. Video:

They also played "Sweet Home Alabama". 2 times in one day is 2 times too many to hear that song. I also went out to a bar with the Italian teaching assistant Martina and there was a classic rock cover band there too! I really need to find somewhere that has some good austrian bands....

The day of the marathon I also saw this strange sight, someone surfing in the Mur river from a bridge:

Here's a random building near my house that I like:

Here's one of my teacher's apartment buildings:

So this past weekend I went to the Czech Republic (specifically the city of Cesky Krumlov) with a group of teachers from Leibnitz. They called this trip a "Lehrausflug" which basically means a vacation for teachers. On friday Monika picked me up and we went to the bus station where a private bus for us all picked us up and drove us to Krumlov. The ride there was nice, there was actually quite a bit of snow in the mountains in upper austria, not much in Czech though.

The ride there took about 4.5 hours. (we stopped for about 50 min for a break though). Many of the teachers were drinking beer and champagne the whole ride up, which meant that there was a lot of loud laughing and talking, which was kind of entertaining. I talked to different teachers including one named Pauli who teaches Biology, Physics, and Chemistry (many teachers teach multiple disciplines, not just one like at our schools). When we got there we had dinner at the hotel which was pretty good. For me they had baked cheese with breading, potatoes, and a salad. Then we went out for a beer at a local bar (the beer they had was Eggenberger, a local beer from a brewery we visited on Saturday). Some of the teachers (including Barbara, the teacher I was sharing a room with) went out for more drinks, but I didn't really feel like partying with my teachers, especially since I didn't feel like talking about who i was and where i came from and how i liked austria and so on anymore. My roommate came back at 3am and in the morning told me she had too much to drink. lol.

On Saturday we went on a tour of the city. Heres a couple of teachers on our tour, the one on the left is one of the young english teachers I work with.

Among other buildings, we saw a church:

We also walked by a torture museum which seems to be compulsory in old eastern european cities (remember estonia?) This one was weird though because when I looked into the window I saw this:

Why is a big michael jackson head in the torture museum? Dunno...

The museum was right next to horni street

Tee hee...horni. Oh god, I feel like my students.

Here's the main square:

Here's a local shop with cool flames on the doors. I saw a few shops with flames:

We also visited the Castle and the Baroque theatre in the castle that one of the kings had built. Here's a view from a bridge towards the castle:

It's pretty cool how it is built into the rock like that.

Heres me from one of the castle bridges, behind me the city of Krumlov:

Here's the castles main tower:

The Castle actually has bears on the grounds underneath a bridge (they didn't come out while we were there though). The bear is important for Krumlov because it is the symbol for the Rosenberg family who ruled Krumlov. So we also saw bears around the city in different places like this one guarding someones backyard:

And this one creepin in an old wall painting on a building:

There were some pretty cool wall paintings around the city like this one which reminds me of old alchemical art:

The baroque theatre was the coolest part of the whole trip. There are only 2 in the world (one in krumlov and one in sweden). We watched a video where they showed how the scenery could change from looking like an endless forest to an endless ballroom.

Isn't that theatre fucking awesome!!! I loved it.

There were people underneath the stage turning wheels to make this change fast and seamless. It was awesome. We got to see underneath the theatre too. It would be cool to see an actual performance there. After this I went with some of the teachers to see an Egon Schiele exhibit at a museum. He is an important Austrian artist, although I had never heard of him. To me he was more historically interesting than artistically interesting. He was condemned by many because he drew naked pictures of women doing some pretty vulgar stuff and so he was important for transcending certain cultural taboos. He was even put in jail for it. But even so, the pictures weren't that great to me. The museum did have some really cheap posters from older exhibits so i got one for a Mucha exhibit they had back in '98 for 1 euro to hang on my wall! I had about an hour between being done with the museum and going to the Eggenberg brewery so i just chilled and read for a while. The tour of the brewery was mediocre because nothing was really running since it was already 7 pm, but the brewery is hella old so that was cool. We then had dinner at the brewery which was delicious. I had broccoli with cheesy cream sauce and potatoes and salad. and of course beer which was tasty as well. I was pleased with my food on the trip, it was much better than some signs I saw around the city for traditional czech cuisine:

Mmmmm....pork knee!

We left after breakfast on sunday and got back to graz around 4pm, which was when a Sturm Graz vs Wien soccer game was starting. I really want to go to one at some point. There were a lot of police men around the stadium.

I've spent the last few nights doing lesson planning and also waking up really early to take the train to school (about 5:30). The students seem to like when I talk about holidays and play patriotic american songs and talk about the school system. I also did a lesson about gay rights and gay marriage in america with the oldest students (18-19 years old) since Obama just gave a speech to the Human Rights Campaign and there was that march on washington. I thought that it would be interesting for them and they would be willing to discuss the issues but I was overwhelmingly faced with students who seemed to care less. Theres one class i have with mostly all girls and they were interested it seemed, but the classes with boys were like laughing when i said the word "gay" and also many of them said to me that they didn't care either way, and that they werent gay so why should they care? Some of them said that they think don't ask don't tell is valid because they would feel weird being around gay men in the military. Since there wasn't much discussion by the students about this issue I asked them what they would rather talk about with me. One student answered "general things about america, not specific laws" and the teacher said "aren't you planning on being a lawyer?" and he said "yes, but (muffled)." I was suprised, but I guess I can understand tht they would rather talk about sports (like american baseball) and the daily life of a teenager in america than civil rights issues. I felt a bit bad though cuz i don't want to bore my students. Oh well, I think I'll just plan some more games and activities and music lessons, maybe some stuff about prom since they have their Matura Balls coming up and a couple students have asked me what prom is like. Also Austrian National Day is coming up so maybe we could talk about that. Another fun idea maybe would be to show a clip from a german film and have them translate it into english, or have them do some writing activities. Does anyone have any ideas for me?

Last monday I did a lecture on Columbus Day and made a little chart on the board about it. The teacher suggested to her students that they write it down to learn it. They asked her if they could just take a picture of it with their cell phones and she let them. I tried to get out my camera and quickly snap this funny moment. There were a lot more students doing it than this and sorry for the blurriness!

One funny story from teaching for you: I was going around the class asking the students what their names were and what they liked to do, and one student said that he like to sing and I asked him if he sang in a band and he said yes he did, in a punk band. I asked him what his bands name was and he didn't want to tell me but I heard one of the other students say it and it was "Hodenwachstum". Hoden means "testicle" and wachstum means "growth". So I thought that was pretty funny.

Soon to come: I will have pictures of my room and I'll go around Graz and take some pictures of important places/places I like as well as my schools in Leibnitz and Kaindorf. Maybe I'll get some pictures with teachers for you as well!