Ten-Day, Salzburg, Swizterland, up next: Rome!

brushes away the cobwebs . . . 

Yeah, it's been a while. With the end of the semester drawing near I find myself ever busier with an increasing class load and student life rapidly climbing towards a peak of activity. Thus, life plays a cruel joke on me and on my readers as the more and more I have to blog about the increasingly less amount of time I have to actually sit down and do just that! As a result this post will be brief like the last couple: I have a quiz and a reading assignment due tomorrow morning and then I leave for a day to go to Cinque Terra, Italy before our ten-day school trip to Rome and Assisi (where, hopefully, I will be able to visit my long-time friend Rebecca Skiba) so I don't have time to write an exhaustive post on every significant happening. Instead, an abridged version will have to suffice . . .

So, as already alluded in the previous post, my ten day pilgrimage was beyond spectacular. It was in fact life-changing. I am by nature an OCD contingency planner, however, David Mesina does not believe in plans and Audrey Poulin was just along for the ride so we embarked on our adventure with only a hastily compiled train schedule in-hand, with no reservations, no hostels booked, and absolutely no idea what we were doing or where we were staying. All that we did know was that we had a list a places we wanted to go and, somehow, we were going to go to all of them - that didn't happen exactly the way we had wanted it to.

En route to Paris we boarded a night train to Frankfurt, Germany. However, the train was completely booked and there was no room in the inn. We got kicked off in Nuremberg where we spent a good portion of the night in the train station before we could get a connection to Frankfurt. We were already a day behind schedule, I was freaking out, and my two saintly companions were praying like it was nobody's business. The previous sentence could be used to summarize almost every single day of our pilgrimage.

Eventually we made it to Paris where we visited Notre Dame and Ruo de Bac (which I have no clue how to spell) where our lady appeared to St. Catherine de Laboure. From there we went to Lisieux, prayed in the enormous basilica dedicated to St. Therese, prayed in the cathedral where she went to Sunday Mass, toured her house, and stayed at the pilgrim house. We then intended to go to Ars of St. John Vianney. However, unbeknown to us there are apparently eleven Ars in France and we ended up in one of the wrong ten . . . in the middle of no where . . . 600 km away from our intended destination . . . on the other side of the country. After David and I spontaneously purchased new coats in nearby Cognac we travelled to Lourdes. From there we went all the way to Fatima in Portugal and then flew from Lisbon back to Vienna. However, before we made it back to Gaming we found ourselves stranded on a platform waiting for a train at 1AM. It was 5 degrees C. We slept in a nearby elevator because that was the warmest place we could find and were suddenly very thankful for the coats we got in Cognac. A train finally arrived around 5AM and we eventually made it to Gaming and the Kartause. And everyone lived happily-ever-after.

The following weekend I went to Salzburg with Andrew Rall and his dad (who paid for Everything). We went to a documentation center on WWII, toured the salt mines, and went to the Augustiner which is Salzburg's beer hall.

This past weekend I went to Grindelwald in Switzerland with various wonderful people (There were eight of us total - and personally I really liked having such a large group), had an insane amount of fun, and . . . oh yeah, I went paragliding over the Swiss Alps: