Blehternets.

I'm stealing Wifi from a McDonalds here in Salzburg. I would've posted this morning, but we went to a new hotel last night, and those jerkmouths charge 5 euro an hour (like, $7.5/hr). On the bright side, I'm pretty glad that I brought my lappy with me. I won't be able to post tonight either, for the same reason. That aside; the new hotel is pretty nice, there's so many of us that Tim and I got overflowed into a suite in the guesthouse. Today has been a tour of Salzburg, and it's been very tiring. Most of our tour is focused on composers. We spent more than a bit of time looking at the Haydn museum at the Esterhazy Palace, then spent an hour or so at his house, looking at stuff they think might have been his at one point in time. Now, in Salzburg, we've been drowning in Mozarty information (Salzburg was his hometown). It's certainly interesting, but there's so much going on it's hard to find time to write. On the bus I'm often trying to catch up on rest. Throughout the days, we're rushing from one place to another, and it's quite tiring. Excuse the overall lack of cohesion, we're grabbing dinner during this batch of freetime, and I'm very distracted. I'll try to write more later and upload it. I do want to say that the churches and cathedrals have been a magnificent sight to behold. We've sung in several churches already, and this morning we sang for a local mass. The folks were very receptive, and the space was wonderful to sing in. Okeedoke, bill time. More laters.

MOAR!

Yesterday was pretty nice, though busy. We took some tours throughout Vienna proper, and got to run amok in the city for lunch. We got a quick peek at some of the palaces in the area (outside only). The layout, as mentioned in my previous post, is quite interesting. All the buildings are multiple stories, but keep to the original aesthetic styles. In WWII, Vienna suffered from multiple bombings and lost about 30% of their buildings. When they were rebuilt, they kept in line with the original architectures, making it still feel like a very old city. Side note, the Viennese are squeezing every possible coin out of Mozart's long decomposed corpse. EVERY BLOCK had a "Mostly Mozart" store. They were peddling all sorts of poorly fashioned crap plastered with Wolfgang's face. It was the equivalent to Classically styled 7/11's. I hadn't looked, but would not be surprised if they had Mozart Slurpees. We visited the Cathedral in town, dedicated to St. Steven. It wasn't the largest in Europe, but it was pretty huge. What was interesting was the fact that the Northern tower was never finished. The Southern tower was beautifully gilded and gloriously tall, but the north tower only made it about halfway up before they gave up and capped it with an Eastern-European styled dome. We snuck up towards the front of the church and performed a German rendition of Holy, Holy, Holy... then snuck out, given the fact that we never cleared such an impromptu performance with the clergy. After lunch, we visited Sch(umlaut-o)nnbrunn castle, the summer estate for the Hapsburg family. (Past tense, of course, they kinda stopped ruling after WWI and all....) It was impressively large with some very beautiful rooms. Among my favorites were the rooms for the Emperor Franz Joseph. They were quite simple and functional, compared to the opulence of the rest of the estate. Apparently, he did an incredible amount of work, and fancied himself a servant of the people; so he kept his personal effects to a minimum. Ack, I'm the only person left here at breakfast, and I've got to be in the bus in just a couple of minutes. I'll try to get some pictures up later, I know I promised.... sorry. I'm off to the Esterhazy to sing. More to come later.

One day down....

The initial flight went from Detroit to Frankfurt and lasted about 8 hours. We left at approximately 6 in the evening, and thanks to time zone magic ended up on this side at about 8 in the morning. We had a 4 hour layover before trekking off to Vienna, and our current accommodations will persist for the next few days. For fear of sounding cliche, it is quite beautiful, the bits we've seen. We did a bus tour of Vienna proper, but it was cut short due to some kind of municipal strike. The city is divided in an interesting way. There exists a road that circles the old portion of town. Inside the circle, the majority of the buildings are quite old and elegant, but outside the circle things get a bit more modern. Melanie has a very nice SLR camera, that can take snapshots in rapid succession, which worked out well for the unpredictability of taking pictures from a moving coach. It also totes a pretty nice lens, so we got some nice shots. Today is a walking tour of Vienna, and weather permitting, we'll grab some more pictures. I'll post the up when I get an opportunity to upload them to the computer. Our hotel is located in a suburb of Vienna, Modling. It's a small town with a couple of old churches. One of which was open and operational, an old (yet still very tall) not-quite-a-cathedral catholic church. In a fluke of reservation screw-ups, Tim and I managed to get one of the nicer rooms at no extra charge. I'm in the process of enjoying some nice breakfast, and we're going to get moving on pretty soon, but I wanted to throw down a quick update. If anyone needs to reach me, e-mail is the best bet. Photos up later!