May Day Report

The last few weeks have gone fast. We haven't made any big trips, but have done a fair amount of wandering in the area. And, lest you all think I'm not doing any work at all, I have been spending a lot of time planning lectures for my three classes, and several hours over the last few days writing the first exam for my North American Civ. class. It's a strange setup--usually 75 or 80 students come to the lectures, but there are 166 signed up for the course, many of whom apparently hope to pass it just by reading the text, or parts of the text, and the powerpoints and notes that I've been posting of my lectures. We'll see how many actually take the exam . . . but just in case, I've actually written a whole pile of multiple choice and short-answer questions that can be graded automatically on Blackboard!

Enough of that boring stuff. To back up a little, the weekend before last we got a nice Sunday after some rainy days, and thought we'd take the bus to the lake district. But when we got to the bus stop at Mirabellplatz, after taking in a Sunday morning concert in the Dom church, (see photo) we discovered that there's no 11:19 bus on Sunday, and we'd have to wait an hour for the next one. Since we had our bikes and were toward the north end of town anyway, we decided to ride to Oberndorf, a village about 20 kilometers downstream on the Salzach. There's a nice bike path all the way there, nice views of the mountains and such, and we had a fine ride. It's the village where "Silent Night" was first sung, at a Christmas mass, and there's a little chapel and a small museum there. The river makes a sharp curve there as well, and the small village on the other side of the river, Laufen, is in Germany. So we had wurst and potatoes for lunch at a little cafe on the riverside, looked around a little in both villages (there's a fascinating small church in Laufen with the passageway shown here), then pedaled our way back to Salzburg. Google maps assured us it was a 30-mile round trip, but it didn't feel like any more than . . . oh . . . 27 miles.

Last weekend we left town on the train on Thursday afternoon for a Fulbright seminar in Altenmarkt am Pongau, a sort of resort town about 80 minutes away. We met another couple on the train who were bound for the same event (we met them at the orientation back in February), and discovered after we got there that two other Fulbright faculty couples and several students from Salzburg were also on the train. The hostel where we stayed ferried us all there, though it took three trips--fortunately it's close to the train station. There were about a dozen Fulbright faculty and spouses there, the staff from the Austrian office, and about 75 students--Americans studying in Austria, Austrian students who are going to study/teach in the US, and others interested in the program. Most of the faculty gave some kind of presentation; I did a kind of reflection on living as a Mennonite child of the 60s in American and poetry reading on the last night, and (in all due humility) it was quite well received.

The weather was pretty gray for the first day, but we did manage to climb up the little mountain behind the hostel, and it cleared off some as we got to the top. There was time for lots of conversation during meals, and we got to talk with some really interesting students from all over the place, as well as with the faculty folks that we've started to get acquainted with. (Here are some of us waiting for the train back to Salzburg on Sunday morning.)

One of those families lived in Salzburg in the fall, and they told us that we really had to climb the Gaisberg (it's a Salzburg landmark on the northeast side of town, and is more or less in our back yard). (Here it is on the left, from partway up.) So after we got home on Sunday (about noon) and had a little rest, we packed our water bottles, summoned up our strength, and took off. It was quite a journey--a little over three hours to the t0p. The route was not entirely clear at some points, and we ended up struggling up one very steep slope between trees, but at the top we found a paved road that led us onward.

We picked up walking sticks along the way, which earned us some strange looks and rather scornful remarks from the locals, who use high-tech walking poles, sometimes even when they're just walking along the bike paths. But we trudged along, and finally made the top, and the views were quite wonderful. There were paragliders taking off from the top and soaring around, though we weren't quite tempted to try that ourselves.

We'd heard that we could take a bus down, and that seemed like an attractive option, so we went into one of the restaurants on the top (there's a restaurant on top of every mountain in Austria, or so it seems) to ask about it. The waitress seemed entirely baffled by the word "Bus," though, or maybe just unaware that one did come to the top . . . so we went to the other restaurant, had some bratwurst and sauerkraut to fortify ourselves for the trip back, and started down. From the trail we saw a bus go roaring up, and about ten minutes later we heard it roar back down the main road. When we got to the bus stop at Zistelalm, about half an hour's walk farther down, we found out that was the last bus for the day . . . but it wasn't so bad, really. Going down is always a lot easier than going up, and this time we just stayed on the road when we weren't sure of the way. By dusk we were home, putting our feet up and congratulating ourselves on our efforts.







Today is a holiday in Austria, and several people told us we should check out the Maypole dances and festivities at the local church. We walked up that way after lunch, but because of the weather they postponed things until Sunday. We're hoping to do some anthropological research comparing these rituals to those practiced in Bluffton, which many of you know about, but a report on that will have to wait until the next entry!