saturday, july 7

today's date: 07-07-07. so rad. the best part is that i have not one, but two stamps in my passport with the date.

we left for salzburg, austria at 8:20am this morning on a big tour bus. we passed through the country of Lichtenstein at about 10am. lichtenstein is pretty awesome because: 1. the population of the country is about 34,000 (equal to the full-time enrollment of BYU), 2. they have a castle complete with a prince, and 3. the country is way rich because of weird laws governing businesses; they have more businesses than people. here's the castle, it's a little disappointing:
there was a tourist kiosk at the base of this hill where i paid 2 euros for a fake passport stamp to commemorate the thirty minutes i spent in lichtenstein.

11:15am: we enter austria and get another stamp in the passport. i learn from philip (the tour guide) that there are exactly 22 bears in austria.

we stopped for lunch in innsbruck, a town in austria that has been populated since the stone age. here's a picture of a street on the way downtown: below is a picture of the golden roof: "One of the most popular attractions in the Old Town area, with its Gothic and Baroque architecture, is the Golden Roof, built in 1500. It was decorated with 2657 fire-gilded copper tiles for Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. The reliefs on the balcony show coats of arms, symbols and other figures in his life. He used it as a place to view tournaments in the square below. The Gold Roof is actually a three-storey balcony which has been capped with gold-plated copper tiles."we ate lunch at a small cafe just to the right of the golden roof, then walked around for a bit.

12:00pm: we pass through one of the longest tunnels in europe: it takes us 11 minutes to drive through at about 65 miles an hour. i also get the chance to talk to philip more, and find out that he did his undergraduate and graduate work at byu, and he was even a ta for one of my art history classes. how cool is that?

6:00pm: we arrive in salzburg, and find out that we are staying at the crown plaza hotel just outside the old city center. it is super posh--complete with a pants press and everything. we ate dinner and then went swimming. i was hoping for a jacuzzi, but there was only a tiny swimming pool with jets (and a mirror on the ceiling overhead for some strange reason), so i settled for a steam bath. not too shabby.