The Hike - goals and afterthoughs.

So, the time has come to write down the best parts of my last adventure. My final trombone exam was on May 22nd. A few days later, Jack and I left for Bratislava, and I for Austria and Italy afterward. I was excited and nervous, ready to move and desiring the simple safety and ease of Zoltán utca. I feel I made myself learn a lot, much more than at Easter break. It was also my first CouchSurfing experience, which turned out better than I could have imagined.

So why a hike, anyway? Anyone who knows me knows I love the outdoors. It's hard for me to be completely at ease in the city. Hiking around the backwoods of my house, or Mt. Katahdin or Acadia National Park were always my favorites. But even so, I've never done a multiday trek like this. I think I felt like I had to do this as a rite of passage. Do something difficult to make me believe I have the strength to make my life happen right, or do it to feel like I deserve the easy stuff. The whole time, I felt like I had to challenge myself. For whatever reason, I had to go up against something. The thing that jumped first to my mind were the mountains.

Now that my hike is over, I'm not sure if I actually completed this challenge. During the time walking, I thought about what my purpose for all this was, and tried to firmly identify my goals. One was to get from Bolzano to Cortina d'Ampezzo on my own power. Another was to see the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, also on my own. But looking back, I'm seeing incongruences in the goals and how I set about accomplishing them. First, I hitchhiked to Kastelruth, east of Bolzano and on the tip of my first map - 20 kilometers, roughly. I did it because my maps didn't cover this area, and I knew there weren't many trails here anyway. Those reasons are good, and the hitchhiking was also a new experience for me, but does it count as "under my own power?" I had to have help in the very beginning.

The ideal of getting away from civilization was also really important for me in this. I think the most important part. I wanted a week by myself with no outside human contact. But in practice, I only got a few days of that. There were always rifugios and chairlifts and towns and roads along the way, to remind me i hadn't escaped completely. After a while I felt no qualms about using a road as a trail, or getting a hot coffee at a rifugio after a strenuous hike. A good part of my final day was spent walking alongside a scenic highway.

And all in all, I made really good time. I reached Cortina by the end of day 4, and camped on the outskirts. I officially call that the final day.

Even with the great exercise, long days and amazing views, I think my experience did not fulfill my goals. Every day I met humanity which drew me away from nature - but I let myself be drawn away. I spent what would have been day 5 in a cheap hotel in Cortina resting an aching knee, and abandoned my hike to the Tre Cime the next day altogether, due to snowy trails and bad weaher. I went to Venice instead, which rapidly started draining my wallet, and also my spirits. Thinking about my original hopes for this and comparing them to what happened... I feel disappointed to see how easily I was pushed over. Only four nights on the trail, folowed by a day of gluttony in a hotel watching Lassie, followed by going to Venice and letting the power of my bank account do all the work. I never even shat in the woods, which was kind of a little goal, silly as it sounds.

So I guess I still need to do this challenge. Maybe in August after camp. Sometime soon. I feel pressured by time to do this.

The idea to come to the Dolomites came to my head one day while I was surfing around Google Earth. I wasn't actively looking for a place to go or travel through, but was just "wandering". A few photos from the region caught my eye, and I was instantly set on going. It was just a gut desire.

Planning for this involved a lot of time just sitting at my computer, browsing. Wikipedia gave me historical information about the region, and also geological history of the mountains themselves. I looked up couchsurfers and tried setting up surfs, which turned out to be both more difficult and rewarding than I had thought. I posted messages on a few forums, asking for general travel advice for the places I was going, and more specific information about the mountains, trail conditions and the like for my hike. Responses were always very friendly and came pretty quickly. Google Earth was very helpful for an initial introduction to the landscape, because it gave a 3D image I could explore.

The Alto-Adige region, where Bolzano is, was interesting to me because it used to belong to Austria. Italy took it over in the first world war, and Mussolini began a campaign of Italianization, removing the native Austrians, bringing in more southern Italians and forbidding the German language. But that ultimately failed, and after WWII, deported Austrians were allowed to return. German and Italian were both named official languages. About two thirds of the province are Austrians, and so German is actually the most commonly used language. The area I hiked through also has five regions in which people speak dialects of Ladin, a funny language which is a mix of Swiss Romansh, "Surselvan" (?), and Friulian (from eastern Italy). I didn't spend much time striking up conversations there, but the very nice receptionist at my hostel in Bolzano speaks one of them and gave me a sheet of translations, which I tried learning along the way.

But besides that, I just wanted to walk along the mountains and watch them change over the days.

Stories and events tomorrow.

Back in Budapest

I'm 'home' on Zoltán utca again. Here are some photos. Family moves across country tomorrow, and I fly around the world next week. Wrote a lot on the road, but can't type it all now. Check these out, first :-)

Lots of you sent mail while I was out. I'll get to you all!

6 minutes to post!

Hi everybody!

I hope people haven't stopped reading just because I stopped writing ;-) I'm paying through the nose for internet, so here is a quick update.

Vienna was amazing! I saw graves of tons of great composers, like Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and SCHÖENBERG! Also walked around the Schönbrunn, and hung about the Museum Quarter. Visited the Secession museum to see Klimpt's enormous Beethoven frieze. Had good talks with Darko, my host.

Innsbruck - Also great, not for the city, but for the company. I stayed with a wonderful girl named Valeria, who is totally in love with her boyfriend Johannes, who is finishing a masters in mathematics. She wants to have a family so much, and their love just spreads outwards and infects with joy. She taught me a great austrian dish and I taught her the napkin folding trick Marsha showed me (the Sydney opera house!).

In Bolzano, italy now. The scenery is the most beautiful I've ever seen. Time is up, sorry!

Jesse

Trombone Jury

My final trombone exam was on Friday, marking my last official presence in the academy and the closing of an amazing semester. I had a few hours in the morning for a good warm-up with Balázs, Reni and Eszter - four of us playing in one room is pretty loud. The vizsga began at 2pm with a lottery determining which set of orchestral excerpts each of us had to play. I ended up with the first tetél, the easiest, consisting of the Mozart Tuba Mirum, two Brahms symphony excerpts, the khachaturian Sparticus, Berlioz Hungarian March, Rossini La Gazza Ladra and, of course, Kodaly Zoltán's Arany Janós suite, 2nd movement - Hungarian to the core.

After that, most of the time was just spent waiting. While sitting with my friends, I remembered some of the fun times we've had together over the semester. Balázs and I getting chicken and ice cream at random times of the day, playing duets with Eszter, Reni giving me Hungarian lessons over drinks in Rizsa, Adam drilling me on my curses... There are so many. Each of them has been really important to me.

The exam ended on a dramatic note. After everyone had finished playing and Guszti had signed indexes (grade books the students keep with them), Eszter stayed behind and talked with him behind closed doors. I had been worried about Eszter, because in recent weeks I haven't seen źher at the academy much, and hearing her excerpts in the morning, it sounded like she hadn't prepared nearly enough. Now she emerged from the room, trying to hold herself together. I walked with her back to the trombone room and tried to ask what was wrong. She explained in halting Hungarian, and cried as she talked. I was so sorry that I couldn't understand, but did my best to comfort her, just knowing she was hurting. Reni came over soon after and asked me to let them talk it out. I gave goodnight puszi and went to Rizsa to celebrate with Balázs.

I've been asking everyone for a group photo for weeks now, and I finally got a few. The one with Guszti is missing Eszter, and the one with Eszter is missing Guszti. Here's one of them.

Got up early the next morning for another landmark - an excursion out of Budapest with some of the internationals! But you'll just have to read about that tomorrow...

Trip? I'm already ON my trip!

I just installed the new version of Google Earth (5.0 etc). Besides smoother graphics, a good safe mode and a more user-friendly interface... it is equipped with a decent flight simulator. I kid you not. You can take off from JFK, Moscow, Salzburg, LA... or just find a good viewpoint and start the simulation from there. The F-16 is tricky to pilot because it goes so fast, but the ride in the twin engine is much easier.

My planning for the Bolzano to Cortina d'Ampezzo hike is going really well. A number of locals have given me great information about the weather, mountain conditions and links to find places to stay at night. I've bought two really fantastic maps and a compass, but it's kind of gratuitous because if I stray a kilometer off somehow, I'll hit a small town road. The maps are great for planning a route, though. Another great way to plan a route is to fly an F-16 around the mountains and scout from there... which I did with gusto. Just for future planning purposes, I also piloted through a stretch of the grand canyon and did a pass around Everest, just before going into a stall and crashing into the mountainside.

I hope I have time to practice trombone with all this planning.

Today was the last day of classes. It is a big occasion for us, but I didn't feel the impact very much. My mind has been occupied with trying to figure out my travel plans. I think I have a good path set. Now get a map and follow along:

Budapest - Bratislava - Vienna - Innsbruck - Bolzano (Italy) - HIKE TO CORTINA D'AMPEZZO over several days - bus to Trieste - bus/train to either Ljubliana or Zagreb - back to Budapest.

Thanks to everyone who's sent me e-mails over the past few days. I miss you guys a lot.

Now to bed. I get up early now to hike Buda with a loaded rucksack.

The photo is me finding a geocache near Parliament a few days ago.

Performances! Finally!

Many of the international students had chances to perform today. There was a chamber ensemble performance at the school at Semmelweiss (where my theory and solfege classes are held). Jack played with his frequently-absent violinist partner (who showed up half an hour late). Nuno performed with a cellist, and Hosung played a Brahms cello concerto with Catarina accompanying on piano. They all did wonderful jobs.

Take a look at this guy, though. He volunteered to be a page turner for one of the pianists that played. Page turners are generally meant to be a functional background piece in a performance, of course. However, this kid perceived it as his duty to interpret the music through body motion and facial expressions, which he did with gusto. Through the whole movement he stood towering over the pianist, his hands firmly planted on the piano and the pianist's backrest. With crescendos, his body shook, and relaxed again on the backslide of the music. I don't even remember what the cellist looked like in this group - I was distracted by this raging Beethoven the whole time.

There was an encore performance in Music History later today, as our last class of the semester. I also got to present a piece, a Bordogni etudé I'm working on for my jury in ten days. It went very nicely, and reminded me that I need to work more on the things I'm not yet comfortable with. Jack played Prokofiev's Diabolic Suggestion, a short catchy ditty that makes one want to sacrifice a black cat in a graveyard. Mr. Merrick signed my credit form, and that is that - no more solfege, philosophy or music history.

My big concert is tomorrow! This is relative, of course, to the number and quality of performances I've had this semester, which is two... both in the chorus. Tomorrow night however, I will play trombone! Gabrieli will echo in the Nagyterem (the big concert hall)! It will be fantastic. A small after-party will follow with the rest of the department, as well. Apparently some brass from the ministry will be there. I will practice my kurva anyad... ;-)

I've gotten some responses from questions I've sent to various sources for information about hiking the Dolomites, and I've narrowed my exploration to the provinces of Trento and Bolzano-Bozen. There seems to me lots and lots of good hiking here. "Bill" from Trailspace said there are enough trails "to occupy a full year without repeating." The photographer Lacitot, whose stunning pictures I found on Panoramio (check these out, Margaret), also replied to my query and suggested I pick up a book at the library he found useful. Momma, I may not get out to the temples - they're in the west, beyond Milan, and I also really want to go south. There's also a chance I'll be going through Slovenia as well, depending on what Malcolm has to say about it. I definitely want to see the Adriatic Sea, but Rijeka, Croatia doesn't look like the best place to do that from. Possibly I will stay a night in Trieste, which is an eastern coastal city. If I visit Venice, I will see plenty of it there, as well.

Another far-flung idea I had was to cross the Adriatic from Bari, Italy to somewhere in southern Croatia or Montenegro and go east to Kosovo - FAR-FLUNG IDEA! But on my last skip through Boston, my old Earlham friend Rachelle mentioned that she has a good friend living there, and if I needed a place to stay I should contact her. I also hate the idea of backtracking north through a chunk of Italy. Why go to Kosovo? I love the idea of a brand new country. How often do you get to see a new country? Ok, so that is still disputed, and it's not exactly a gem of a place. It probably won't even happen, but... I'm looking into it. It's fun!

Well, I've dissipated another perfectly good evening reading and writing. I will be on a stage in tux in less than 9 hours. Sleepy time.

Geocaching

(Picture is Jack, Petr, Hosung, Nuno above, Catarina, Dinah and Elisa. Taken at the hazi buli, written below)

Ok, even though I'm super busy with things right now, I feel inspired to tell you about this hobby of mine I've picked up recently. It's called Geocaching. My friend Barbora (batocache on the website) from the Czech Republic introduced me to it earlier this semester, and in the past week I've really taken a liking to it.

Geocaching is sort of a worldwide treasure hunt. Geocachers hide small containers in places where other geocachers can find them. In these containers (varying from 35mm canisters to big buckets) can be anything. The bare essential is usually some kind of logbook, where people can record their visits. The ones in the film canisters are really creatively made! If the "cache" is larger, it can contain other stuff. Some popular items are the Geocoin and Travel Bug, which are custom-made, trackable items that travel wherever their finders take them. Someone who finds one of these in a cache doesn't keep it, but moves it to another cache in a different place. For example, when I visited Barbora in Prague, she passed onto me this travel bug, which I brought to Budapest with me, and hid yesterday. It started at an ice hockey arena in the CR, but who knows where it will end up!

The main online portal where all this seeking and hiking and tracking happens is at Geocaching.com. Through it I've found caches (but only virtually) back home in Maine. There are a good number in Lincoln, thanks in large part to Ryan Pickering, who designed and set a series of caches which has been a big hit in the local geocacher community.

Whatever a geocache contains, it is inevitably located in an interesting place. On many geocache listings is thought-provoking information about the place in which it is found. Eric Hendrickson is one geocacher who has contributed greatly to education about Maine's particular geological quirks through a large series of earthcaches. These are atypical caches in that there is no container to find - only a location listing found online with an earth science lesson attached. Mr. Hendrickson is a science teacher in Presque Isle, and has written over 75 earthcaches and hidden almost 100 physical geocaches. Here is his website, and a sample earthcache he wrote.

This picture is from my first solo find. It was hidden at the top of a parking garage near Nyugati Station, cleverly disguised as an electric maintenance box and hiding in plain sight. Inside was a logbook, a small toy, a 1992 Barcelona Olympics pin and a sample package of fabric softener. I took the fabric softener, because you can never have enough. I left my travel bug there. It was picked up this morning and moved somewhere else in Budapest. Hopefully it will leave the country soon and pick up more history.

In other news, we had our 2nd international potluck hazi buli last night, hosted by Irish Íde. I came about 4 hours late due to a hellish Saturday night rehearsal, but made time to prepare a good dish - I call it Magyar Gyümölcs Joghurt! Because, I'm sure you realize, the color scheme represents the Hungarian flag. There's nothing Hungarian about the ingredients. Raspberries fill the top, coconut flakes and sugar cover the middle stripe and sliced kiwis line the bottom. Under the yogurt is a layer of chocolate granola. It was almost overflowing the dish, so transporting it on the tram eight blocks north was tricky and took a lot of concentration. Got a lot of stares, and some quirky smiles. Unfortunately, everyone was full of great Italian pasta and salad and chocolate cake and palacsinta by the time I showed up, so nobody touched my dish. Íde will be eating well for breakfast the next couple nights, though.

Jack had his solo concert today! He played Liszt's Sposalizio, with a quiet accompaniment by myself, who hummed the whole thing because I've been hearing it every damn day since we moved to Budapest. But really, it was a fantastic performance. Jack has been working extremely hard for this, and it clearly paid off this afternoon. Before he came on, Íde, Mirva, Elisa and Dinah hurried in from the Hilary Hahn concert with the Budapesti Fesztivalzenekar, which gave Jack quite an audience. We went and enjoyed some gelato in Liszt Ferenc tér while contemplating the monstrous statue of Liszt there. He definitely deserved the two scoops I bought him. If you want his own biased analysis on his performance, read his blog entry here.

This is the last week of classes for us. My final (and only) exam is my trombone jury on May 22nd. Then, almost a full month of travel. I did more planning this morning, and it's looking like eastern Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, Italy. Hopefully I'll find some travel bugs to take with me before then! More updates as the story develops.

WHEEE!

Life is speeding up. I have so much to do in so little time. Every day I'm scanning the koncert kalendárium for interesting operas and concert to go to. Tonight I saw Tosca at the opera house (four bucks, thank you), and last night I saw a big Haydn concert at Liszt Ferenc. Tomorrow night Hilary Hahn will play at MüPa, and I'll be watching from the stratosphere, clutching my 300 forint student ticket. Jack has two concerts this week, and mine is on Wednesday. I have 12 orchestral excerpts, 2 etudés, a Telemann fantasy and the Martin Ballade to perfect by the 22nd.

This is why I'm not posting a lot.

But in my free time, I like ice-cream, candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach.

Oh, mad props to Gov. Baldacci of Maine for legalizing same-sex marriage, by the way. I didn't see that coming.

The Fuzz

I made a big casserole dish a few weeks ago, and gave some of the leftovers to Gábor, our handyman/super. He's the guy who always comes to fix our internet when the other workers cut the lines. He's a really nice man. Yesterday, he returned the casserole dish, but first filled it with homecooked palecsintas (crêpes)! Delicious! Anyway, here he is!

Time is ticking down until the end of the semester. My final concert is on May 13th, almost 4 months after our arrival here, and my jury is on the 22nd. After that, I have no obligations until June 20th when I fly back to New York. One way I'm keeping my mind off the mountain of practicing I have to do is by baking bread - I accidentally used twice the amount of water, and thus twice the amount of flour, than necessary in this unfortunate batch. I'm also writing tons of postcards (you've probably gotten one). My nostalgic side has also gotten the better of me in the past few days. I've been watching episodes of Disney's Recess on YouTube. Looking back on it, it was a fantastic show.

I'm brainstorming places to go and things to do in that free month, and here are a few ideas:

- Germany again, to visit Jonas
- Temples of Damanhur, Italy
- Hiking in the Dolomites, Italy
- Zagreb and the Adriatic Sea, Croatia
- Szeged, Eger and Aggtelek, Hungary
- Transylvania, Romania
- Visit Tamás and family in southern Hungary
- Vienna again. It's amazing.

Another great hike

I returned to the Pilis Hills today (see the Esztergom és Visegrád post), this time with Emese. We took the suburban rail northward to Pómóz, and then a bus to Döbögökű. That is a small town on top of a hill in the middle of the Pilis National Park, from which branch tons of trails leading to surrounding towns. We headed to Dömös, a town on the Danube and halfway between Esztergom and Visegrád, and from there to Visegrád.

Coming back to the area a few months after I had first visited, I was stunned by how different the spring made it look. Here are a few before/after pictures.
It was a pretty tiring hike today, so this is all I'll write for now. Sorry for not writing much over the past couple days, but not much has happened. Kat told me she was accepted into NECCA for this fall - a huge accomplishment! I'm so proud of her for this :-)

The week since

You know, it's been more than a week since we returned from our trip. It seems far away now, but the memories are pretty vivid because I've written about them. I showed the pictures to Eszter today, and tried translating all our stories into Hungarian. My favorite one to tell is about playing trombone in Nuremberg. Funny.

The week since has been pretty lazy. Get to sleep late (for some reason), wake up late, practice and eat. Mom's Easter package to me was full of chocolate and pop-tarts, which made my recuperation time very comfortable. That included two days of sleeping, watching movie trailers on apple.com, and more sleeping. Over the past few days I've gotten back into the rhythm of student life, like real practicing and class. Joey Wilson visited on Saturday night, and we showed him around the city nightlife (what little we know of it). I've written a lot of postcards recently, too, so check your mailboxes in a week or so.

Practicing is good now. I've figured out what to play for my jury at the end of the semester, and after half a week of hard work on it, I'm feeling confident it will go well. Guszti gave me great confidence during my lesson this week. He asked what my plans are for the future, and I said I didn't really have a specific plan as yet. He said that in only three months of lessons, he think I have come a long way and would be sorry to stop when the summer comes - it would feel incomplete to him. "Would you like to come back?" Oh yes. If I choose to pursue a master's degree, he said he would like for me to return to Budapest.

I will stop writing here, because I can't give a good testimony for my feelings after hearing those words.

Spring Break photos

The Director's cut of the photos (with captions!) are viewable by clicking here. Upcoming and developing plans include going to Transylvania with Mariann, Szeged (with Jack, hopefully), and hiking in the Dolomites of northern Italy with myself.

Check out the Vienna post below.

Vienna

Ok, it looks like I strayed a bit from "what I learned" in the Salzburg entry. Sorry to waste your time, everyone. Here is Vienna.
We were in Vienna for three nights. I think, for this entry, chronology will not be important, so I'll just talk. Our hostel "Wombats" was enormous and well run. I have mixed feelings about our stay there. The staff was very helpful and gave great information whenever we needed it, which was often. Breakfast cost 3.50 euro in the morning, all you can eat. They had peanut butter and a panini press, both of which I abused to no end. Everything was clean and comfortable, as well.

On the other hand, it had that party atmosphere I think I've mentioned before. There was a huge bar downstairs, and in the stairwell were those 20's spoof ads for binge drinking, like "have you hugged your toilet today?" I noticed that not all of the lodgers were college students - I saw numerous older couples and even a family with young kids. Not very tactful, I think. The nice desk folks provided us with maps of greater Vienna, which we appreciated to some degree. It had a good layout of the city with roads and major transportation lines, but I found the 100 item "tourist key" kind of a sell-out. The first twenty listings were for museums, sights, cultural landmarks and the like, but the remaining items were devoted to restaurants, bars, cafés, clubs... Places every city has were time and money can be lost. The reason I found this so appalling was because they were listed at the expense of Viennese cultural attractions which deserved the space. There is amazing history in this city in all aspects. I need someone to tell me why Murphy's Irish Pub is included while St. Stephen's church is left out.

Anyway, we had a little culture book with us Jack's friend Diana had lent us during her visit to Budapest. We took a great walk along the ring road around the city. Many of the big sights are here, including the museum quarter, parliament (top photo), the old town hall, the national theater, and Vienna University. This last one was particularly interesting. We pretended to be students and slipped into the courtyard in the center of the complex. Lining this beautiful area are busts of academics who studied or taught there. It was fun to name-hunt, trying to find ones that looked familiar. I found Schrödinger, Doppler, Freud and Martini, who I assume invented the martini. All dead white guys. Gorgeous place, though.

Our big concert experience of the city was seeing Wagner's Parsifal at the Staatsoper. It was an incredible event. Only the 3rd full opera I've ever attended (if you count Porgy and Bess at the Maine Center for the Arts... which I do), and I'm not sure if I was fully ready for it. I guess I think of opera as something you have to train for, like a race. You need to review the synopsis, learn about the composer, and know something about the time and events surrounding it. I think it makes the experience richer, anyway. Wagner is a marathon. I knew enough general information to enjoy it, but I could have studied harder for that richer experience. However, academic knowledge isn't a requirement to enjoy the wealth of music Parsifal has to offer, of course.
Tower of Babel, Pieter Brughel the Elder
Vienna for me was mostly about the museums, however. Over two days I went to five, and spent good time at each. The Kunst Historisches (Art History) museum had three of the five remaining landscape paintings by the famous (and Flemish) Pieter Bruegel (the elder). His paintings are really interesting because they are the first landscape paintings to focus on day-to-day life instead of being in a religious context. Also, sometimes he paints famous events while putting them in a larger picture - for example, painting the crucifixion of Jesus in the midst of people carrying on with their lives, and the fall of Icarus in the corner of a grand seascape. We saw his "harvest" landscape in Prague, and the final one on our little pilgrimage is in the met in New York. Also in this museum were paintings by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, contemporaries of El Greco. We saw an El Greco exhibit at the museum of fine arts here in Budapest earlier this semester, and it was interesting to see some of his characteristics in the paintings here.

The Naturhistorisches (Natural History... duh) museum was full of fascination! They had rooms full of rocks! Fossils! Huge crystals! Global warming information! Dinosaur bones! I lost ten years when I walked into the museum and got a hug from the huge lion in the lobby. Jack was pretty bored here, I think, and followed my prancing self around reluctantly for three hours. One of the most incredible things here was the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette over 20,000 years old! I read about this in my cartoon history of the universe book when I was younger, and it was a complete surprise to find it here. Another happy surprise was a small exhibit about deep sea vents! These were the painful subject of my first research paper in 5th grade for Mrs. Bickford (who I am told is now frantically catching up with my blog). Deep sea vents form on the very bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean floor, where water is superheated beneath the earth's crust and jets up through massive stalagmites. This water carries minerals and nutrients with it, and makes it possible for a limited ecosystem to exist in this extreme part of the world. Giant tube worms and crabs are the most interesting to look at. The cool thing is that this life is almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. Just a few meters above this, the crushing cold of the ocean takes control. COOL!

Besides those, the 2nd floor was full of animals from all over the world. They had microscopic bugs swimming around little bits of food. That was really gross. Then all kinds of pinned and labeled bugs, sea animals, amphibians, birds, and larger land mammals. I'm pretty sure the elephants were artificial models, but I think the birds were stuffed. Most of the writing was in German, though. I know there is some little Austrian kid who goes there every weekend to wander around. I'm so jealous. This place is so cool.



For something completely different, the Leopold Museum houses contemporary Austrian artworks. I got a good education here about the works of Klimt (above), Schiele (right), Kokoschka, Egger-Lienz, Gerstl and Moser, just to name a few and sound like a pretentious terd while doing so. This is a fantastic museum for the artistically uneducated like myself, because they often divide galleries by artist and give brief bios on each, to give an idea of where they're coming from. I find I really like how Klimt paints people, but not so much his landscapes. Trees and fields and sky kind of blend into each other, and it throws me off. Schiele paints and sketches nudes in a kind of unnerving way, but I love his facial expressions. Gerstl was interesting to me because the history I know of him and the Schöenbergs. He ran off with Arnold Schöenberg's wife Mathilde for a while, and after she returned to her husband, Gerstl killed himself. The self-portrait you see to the left is one he did in that year, and it gets top marks on my grippingly-creepy scale.

The Belvedere palaces were spectacular on their own. A museum in addition to the incredible architecture and gardens was almost too much. In the upper Belvedere we saw the works of some French impressionists, including the famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. I spent most of my time getting more acquainted with the Viennese painters, however. There were many Schiele and Klimt works, including Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss.

Our last museum was the Schöenberg Center. This building is not just a gallery but a great resource for learning about the Second Viennese school. Besides a library of Schöenberg's scores and recordings, there are reproductions of things he actually used in composition, or just random things he made for fun. This guy was the grandfather of thrift. He used tape and heavy brown paper to make all kinds of things. Did you know that he is the inventor of the tape dispenser? There was a reproduction of his study in Los Angeles, timelines of his life side by side with a timeline of musical landmarks of the time. Replicas of address books, sketchbooks, composition tools, photo albums, his art gallery, a film about his family, radio interviews and lectures... on and on. It was the most thorough exhibit on a particular person I think I've ever seen. I see now the importance of learning about him, even though his music is... thick. He was a fascinating human being.

That's what we did in Vienna. The Staatsoper is running a lot of Wagner in May, and I hope to go back to see some, as well as more museums. I missed so many! But in the meantime, I will be reminded of what Budapest has to offer. There are a lot of museums here as well, and I've been to only one. This trip reminded me of the massive collective experience humanity has. I loved seeing such amazing buildings in Prague. The instruments in Nürnberg captivated me. The sounds of the churches in Salzburg will ring in my memories for years. And Vienna... you just read about Vienna. It made me want to paint all the ideas the previous three cities gave me. It's too bad the pinnacle of my artistic career was in 8th grade.

Well, it's happened again. I've dissipated another perfectly good evening writing in this blog. Tomorrow - more practice and classes. Lesson at 7:30pm. Wheee...

Salzburg

In Gramps' autobiography, he details that the Walburn ancestors came out of a Palatinate in southern Germany. So the train ride to Salzburg was of heightened interest to me, as we passed through Munich and a great deal of that part of the country. The vague details about their origins made me spend a lot of time fantasizing about their lives three hundred years ago. Maybe they lived in that valley there? Or went hunting in those woods? Worked in those fields? Doubtless the landscape would be different, of course. My mind did a superman rewind, and I enjoyed watching the huge trees shrink back into the ground, towns dwindle to nothing, ancient groves spring up out of nowhere, and rivers slowly shift their course. I fell asleep somewhere in the Mesozoic era and had dreams about T-Rex eating club-weilding Walburns.

A quick transfer in München and we were Salzburg bound. As the train was pretty empty, the ride was almost cancelled. The conductor asked everyone to get off and wait for another train, but 2 minutes later he shuffled us back on. We sat on the top half of the double-decker with two other families. There were two kids with one of the Austrian families, a boy and a girl. Much to Jack's chagrin, I pulled out my back of small tricks to entertain the critters. Twirling my notebook on my finger like a frisbee hooked the boy, who was reading a very educational book his father had thrust at him. The girl came around later to see what her brother was so fascinated with, and I folded a napkin in the "Birds of Paradise/Sydney Opera House" school Aunt Marsha taught me years back. They spent the rest of the trip running around trying to twirl things and fold things and fed me Easter chocolate.

A chance glance out the window during this gave me my first sight of THE ALPS. I've noticed that as big and rooted as mountains are, they still have a great talent for leaping out and astonishing me. Needless to say, the pictures I took are small and bland and can't compare, so I'm not posting any of first contact. Just wait a few paragraphs.

We arrived in Salzburg in the afternoon and made our way over to the Yo-Ho hostel where we'd stay for two nights (making sure to go via Haydnstraße - there's nothing Haydny about it). As our trip continued, it seems as though each hostel got bigger and bigger. Prague was simply one flat with three rooms. Nuremberg was more dormitory style, added a small lounge and drink menu, but still only had one computer with free use. Yo-Ho charged for internet (uh oh) and had a noisy bar at night. Three floors, lots of people. Advertisements for the Sound of Music Tour were everywhere. Apologies to those who love the movie and have taken the tour with delight, but I can't take it seriously. It's so... yaaak. Insert whatever adjectives you can come up with, because "yaaak" is the best I can do.

We dropped camp and went searching for a place for dinner. No kitchen here. As it was Easter Sunday, most places were closed. We ended up at an empty Austrian restaurant with great tables. Just huge planks of wood - no, slices of tree. "Plank" gives the impression of process. Imagine a basted turkey served on Thanksgiving instead of sliced turkey from a package of cold cuts. That was our table. It was the Grandfather of Tables. The rest of the place fell short of those great standards, however. The only person working was an Indian man who cooked my weiner schnitzel while listening to horrible Austrian pop-covers on a skipping record player. A derelict electronic dart board was an interesting touch - I later learned that darts are pretty popular over here. Weiner schnitzel is nothing special. Fried food is universally delicious and bad for the heart.

Back in the hostel for the night, I met an American girl from Boston, who actually grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, like momma. I wish I could say we had a long, intense conversation about family and history and current events, but she was leaving at 4am the next morning and we only had a few minutes. Can't find her on facebook with only a first name. I really wanted to learn about Jakarta today from her perspective - Wikipedia can only tell so much.

We woke up early for a walk around the city and a visit to Mozart's birthplace. Much of Europe that I've seen is infested with "Mozart" chocolate stores, which show a facade of the composer dressed in performance clothes holding a chocolate pastry instead of a writing quill or playing at a piano. It's not bad candy, but seeing this depiction of him I think gives people a false impression of who he was.

Mozart's birthplace is near the center of what I'll call the tourist district. Besides the gift shop at the end, however, the museum inside gave great insight into who the man was, his family, and his career. Scores and letters were everywhere, and also souvenirs from their life - lockets, hairs, his first violin, stuff like that. Part of the museum was an interpretation by American artist Robert Wilson of Mozart's life and personality. Part of it included a model of Mozart's Salzburg upside-down on the ceiling, with pictures on the walls of the city at that time, also upside down. Apparently this describes Mozart's revolutionary compositions or something. I remember my professor Ruth Rendelmen describing the place in class after she visited. She really disliked it, and while it struck me as interesting, it didn't seem appropriate to put it there. If it had existed in a private gallery somewhere else, I wouldn't have minded. Kinda rubbed me the wrong way where it was, though.

We returned to the hostel (I'm not calling it by its name anymore, they refused to pay for the advertising) for a 1pm tour of the city and a walk through surrounding hills, ultimately leading to the St. Augustine Monastery. Built in the 15th century, this is a big tourist attraction not for the history or the 'solitude' but for the beer halls in the lower levels. They brew traditional beer here in wooden barrels and serve it in one-liter steins. Monks love their beer, I guess. Or at least they love to sell it to tourists.

While waiting for people to show up, I tried making conversation with the few people there. A girl named Whitney was there. We exchanged the general greeting fellow travelers give each other. "Where are you from, how long have you been here, where else have you been..." etc. She told me she grew up in Nebraska. I've never been there, but I know my great-grandfather Hugh Walburn grew up there. I tried a desperate attempt to make a connection with this.

"You know, my great-grandfather grew up in a sod hut somewhere between Callaway and Broken Bow." Like that will work.

"Wait, what? Really?" I turned and looked at her. She'd stopped moving. "I live on a 4000 acre ranch between Callaway and Broken Bow."

Then we exchanged various "WHAT THE F&£%!?!?"s. I described the land as I remembered it from Hugh's autobiography, and she confirmed and elaborated on it. There are canyons between the towns (which Hugh walked through to get to school) and a one-room schoolhouse still stands close by. Whitney told me her family has been in the area a long time. Is there the chance that her great-grandfather and my great-grandfather went to school together? Played that game with the ball over the roof of the schoolhouse? Gramps, what was that game called? And what are the chances that I would meet someone with this common history in Salzburg?

Thinking about it even now makes my head reel. I have a standing invite to visit her sometime. She proposed to go horseback riding around the area and try to find the location of this old farm. I imagine the land is annexed somewhere within her ranch, but who knows? Unfortunately, she hasn't yet sent me the Facebook message I asked her to. I found her this morning, but don't wanna come off as the stalker kinda guy, so I'll give her more time to "find me" before I send messenger pigeons.

Jack and I broke off from the tour after half an hour to walk on our own. We did an extra hill and found an amazing viewpoint of Untersberg mountain and more of the Alps before meeting at Augustine's a little after they arrived. The beer was good, but I had to leave soon after to catch the sunset at the viewpoint. It's up above.

My big plan for the following day was a hike on Untersberg. I first headed to the same viewpoint as the previous night to catch the sunrise on the same mountains. Untersberg is the mountain behind me. Following a great calming wait for the sun, I returned to the street to catch the bus to St. Leonhard. Due to time considerations, I had to take the "touriste-lite" version and ride a cable car from St. Leonhard to the top of the mountain, but I was happy to walk down from there. Untersberg has many fantastic views, with just as many legends surrounding it. Emperor Charlemagne supposedly sleeps under the mountain waiting for the time he is again needed. You can read a good summary about these here.

While the mountaintop was snow-covered icy, it was surprisingly warm, with only a slight breeze. I was alone with the place. There are two giant crosses on this mountain, one on the Geiereck peak at 1800 meters and one on Berchtesgadener Hochthron at 1972. Also, a mountain climbers memorial between them. I walked from Geiereck to Berchtesgadener and then down a ski-slope back to town. It was wonderful. I've missed mountains so much. On the side, I've decided to try hiking in the Dolomite region of the Alps in northern Italy for my next big expedition. Anyone want to join me? Jack's not into the idea. By the way, have you noticed the motif in all of these? I will take Kat's name for it, and call it the "God-Awful Red Flannel" shirt. It is my favorite travel and hiking shirt now. If I were a more generous and inspired person, I would give the shirt away and from a brotherhood of the traveling God-awful red flannel. But I don't think anyone would love it as much as I do.

Jack used the morning to visit Lake Wolfgang. You can refer to his blog for that account. I got back to Salzburg around 1pm, and managed to squeeze in a quick visit to the fortress in the center of Salzburg - normally an expensive admission ticket, but free with the Salzburg Card I used to get my cable car ride (If you go to Salzburg for more than a day, I recommend buying it). I was surprised to find a museum with more ancient instruments inside! There were also archeological finds of a chapel and plenty of great views. Besides that, just some places to spend money. We caught a 5:30 train to Vienna.

I will write Vienna's entry tonight and tomorrow. For now, suffice to say it was an orgy of museums for me. And if you're a student visiting Vienna, DON'T buy the Vienna card. It's a waste of 18 euro, because student discounts are better on everything. Time to practice. I officially suck at trombone again.

Nuremberg

Before we left for Nuremberg, we made a plan of what we wanted to do and when we might do them. The highlight of our arrival there was a visit to the National Museum, with a huge exhibit of musical instruments over the ages. My first sight at the entrance to the gallery was a case of brass instruments dating back to the mid-16th century. Some of the oldest trombones in the world were there, made in Nuremberg and other parts of Germany. I had read about these trombones for a research paper, and seeing them inches in front of me was astonishing. Jack was similarly impressed with the long line of pianos stretching the length of the gallery. A few instruments were really comic. There were some walking canes which were stringed, so during a rest, one could play the cello for companions. One of the keyboards was built into a statue of a busty woman. The fretted cello/guitar was interesting, too.

For dinner that day we went to Landbierparadics, a German pub outside the tourist area. Here they have a big selection of village brews from around the country, but unfortunately they don't offer a sampler. We just had to split a few bottles between us. The dinner was fantastic, too. I had some potato dumpling type things, sauerkraut and bratworst. Deeeelicious! Everything was made more-so by the fact that there were no loud tourists around. That's another thing I've learned, that I really dislike loud tourists. I'm the silent type. The only guys there were loud Germans, which I didn't mind so much.

Our next day was full of new experiences. In the early morning (all mornings on this trip were early for us) we set out for the north of town to see the Berg. I played trombone in a huge tunnel in the wall for half an hour. Jack later told me he'd walked around the city while I played, and heard me almost everywhere. The stone worked as another amplifier and made me sound like a full trombone section - no, a choir. I was so loud the police came and asked me to leave. Apparently busking is a restricted activity in Nuremberg. The ones that talked to me were real jerks. The guy made innuendoes about me being homeless and a drunk while he took down my information. As it happens, a drunk homeless guy had been watching me play, and when the police started to leave he shouted something at me about my music, and the cops went over to him and started harassing him. The male cop asked me in passing if I was his friend. Putz.

I met Jack at a big church around 9am to go to an Easter mass. It was a freezing, a long, tall gothic church that we at first thought was catholic. As it progressed and we didn't recognize the form, we realized it was protestant-lutheran. That was a big "oops" moment for Jack, who was raised catholic, and took communion that morning. It was fun trying to sing the German chorales, and the sound of the place was fantastic. Stayed for the whole service, and left energized for the rest of our trip. The train to Salzburg left a few hours after.