Hello again everyone, welcome to another blog post. If you’re a regular reader of these, my apologies for the hiatus. Life got super busy between finals and some traveling that I did. But now I’m back and ready to share about my recent adventures.
After finishing up finals week in December, Ian and I headed out to Austria to do some traveling prior to heading home for Christmas. Our trip lasted only a couple of days, but the sights and experience we received made it totally worth it. During our time in Austria, we were able to visit the town of Hallstatt and the city of Salzburg.
Our trip began by visiting the small town of Hallstatt, which is surrounded by mountains and sits right next to a lake. Before reading anymore, do yourself a favor and google “Hallstatt Austria” and go to images. The ones on google do an even better job of displaying the true sights we were able to take in. The highlights of our time in this little town of 800 included hiking up a path on one of the mountains, as well as touring the world’s oldest salt mine. While Hallstatt is beautiful, it has become a tourist hotspot in recent years. According to locals, it’s nearly impossible to live in the town anymore, which hosts around 1,000 tourists daily in the winter months, and well over 4,000 a day in the spring and summer months.
After touring Hallstatt, we had one full day to spend in Salzburg, Austria. Salzburg has a population of around 150,000 and was a really neat city to experience. The highlights of our day around Salzburg included doing some sightseeing, walking around the Christmas market, as well as eating some delicious food at local restaurants. Also, Ian and I were able to take a tour of the birthplace of Mozart, which was right in the heart of Salzburg. I was amazed at how clean and well kept the city was, as it was fairly spread out considering its population.
Overall, I learned several things on this trip. For starters, Austria is an awesome place to visit, even if you don’t speak any German. Everyone knows enough English to be able to interact with others and even ask for directions. Secondly, there is quite a large Italian influence in Austria, which actually makes sense considering Italy borders Austria to the south. I truthfully just didn’t know this, and added it to my growing knowledge of European geography.
Thanks for reading! Tune in next time where I talk about a special visitor I had last week!