Alice's Adventures in Europe: It's the Final Countdown (almost)!

Into the last week of January, and time was going much faster than I wanted it to. With only two weeks left in Salzburg, and one week of skiing after that, I began to wish that time would slow down and I could stay in this magical city, with all of these wonderful people, just a little longer.

The first part of the week seemed to fly by again, working hard at the language school, and keeping up with the other language groups and university lectures I was going to. Before I knew it, it was Thursday and time for a dinner with the other TAs for our 'Last Schnitzel'. Wie traurig :( We went to the Alte Fuchs, one of the only completely non-smoking restaurants in Salzburg, and where I took my family for Liam's birthday. I had a huuuuge portion of schnitzel, along with my favourite Austrian beer, the Himbeerradler (what else?!). Afterwards, we went to pick up some drinks and went to Erika's house. Once Cecilia has managed to opened her bottle of wine about 20 minutes later we continued to education the Americans in the way of English 'Ring of Fire', or as they call it 'King's Cup' rules. Once everyone had has sufficient quantities of wine, we headed out to take Salzburg's Karaoke scene by storm once more. It was another really funny night, although there was a distinct lack of Robbie Williams avaliable to sing, meaning that 'Angels' was sung more in one night than it ever probably should be...

The task of opening the wine...

On Friday I stayed in with the family for a Chinese takeaway and tele night. The Chinese food was considerably better than when we tried the takeaway before at Emily's house, but still left a fair amount to be desired. Nonetheless, it was nice to have a quiet evening in with the 'fam', as it were.

On Saturday, a group of us met in the morning and headed to Berchtesgaden, Germany, which is only about an hours bus ride away, to visit the salt mines. It was something we'd been meaning to do for ages, and I was so glad we finally made it. Plus, it was another thing to tick off the 'Bucket List'! Once we arrived, we were given tickets with an entrance time on, and so had just under half an hour beforehand to look around the gift shop, which had salt avaliable in every possible flavour (tomato and basil flavoured salt, anyone?). When it was our slot, we had to put all of our bags into lockers, and put some sexy mining suits on over our clothes. We got on a small train, kind of like the miniature steam trains you can ride on, and headed into the mines! Our guide had the typical Bavarian accent, so we had to listen hard to catch what he was saying. The tour included two slides to get further down into the mines, which was absolutely hilarious, and a boat ride from one part of the mine to the other. The boat ride was, in a word, magical. The ceiling of the mine was really low, and the water so still that when we were waiting for the boat, we didn't actually realise that there was water there. The ride itself was really quick, less than 5 minutes, but they projected neon lights onto the walls of the mine, which looked amazing in the darkness. At the very end of the tour, Alice and I liked the walls, (the guide did recommend we do this, in our defence!), and I can confirm that the walls of a salt mine do in fact taste extremely salty. We also got to taste some of the water from the salt mine, was has a really high percentage of salt (I want to say 80-90% but I can't remember exactly), and left you needing a drink after just a drop. We got on the mini train back our of the salt mines, and were each given a tiny container of salt as a memory of the trip. It was completely different to our normal 'Kaffee and Kuchen' routine, and I thoroughly enjoyed the day out.

Once back in Salzburg, we all headed to our favourite Mexican restaurant, Lemonchilli, for a late lunch. The nachos, as usual, did not disappoint! I went home for a couple of hours, before coming back into town and heading to Cecilia's house, for the BNO.

NACHOS!

The BNO (Big Night Out) almost deserves it's own blog post. We had literally had this scheduled for a month, maybe more, and we were ready to paint the town red! As we'd all been coming and going at different weekends, and our schedules didn't match up in the week with other people's 6am starts on other people's days off, we had scheduled in the 2nd February as the official night of the BNO. We got through plenty of wine and Jagermeister shots (as well as drinking these with the cap on our nose as you're supposedly supposed to...) and were well into the swing of things when Erika, unfortunately, fell victim to the BNO. We gave her lots of water, which she insisted was poisoned, and then went home, where she proceeded to attempt to boil celery... In hindsight, I think it's best for everyone involved that she wasn't let lose on Salzburg that evening! We headed out to an Irish bar, where Cecilia bumped into one of her students, and we joined them for a few drinks. It was a really international group of people, so we were switching from German, to French, to English every few minutes. One of their friends, from Ireland, had had a little too much to drink, and, already shirtless, decided to get up on a bar stool and take off the rest of his clothes and, well, I'm sure you can imagine the rest... We made a swift getaway with some of the group and went to Republik, a club in Salzburg. After a bit of dancing, we went to another Irish bar. However, they were playing heavy metal music, which we were not expecting, having spent most of our time in there on Thursday evenings singing our hearts out, and so we decided to call it a night. I feel like we did the BNO justice, and even ended it with a takeaway, just as one should. Back at Cecilia's house, and we squeezed 3 in a bed before going to sleep. I will admit that I didn't have the greatest sleep in Cecilia's room (or Africa, as it's fondly referred to, due to how HOT it is in there ALL the time!!!), and woke up a lot sweatier than when I'd gone to sleep!! We had a full English breakfast the next morning to round off the BNO, and I can't wait for BNO round 2 when they come to visit in Barcelona!