Festivals and Farms

After our beautiful stay in Hallstatt, we took the train to a larger town called Bad Ischl. Our main objective was to find an internet cafe to figure out how we were going to get out of Austria and to Paris by the end of the week. We checked our packs at the train station and headed out into the town. It was Sunday... enough said. All of the shops and restaurants were closed for the day, but thankfully we found the one and only internet cafe in town, and we were able to reconnect with the outside world and solidify some plans for the week. We decided to stay in Bad Ischl for the night, because we knew we didn't know other towns in the area, and we didn't want to take a train back to Salzburg. We criss crossed that town at least 10 times, and finally found a place to stay for the night. It was out of our normal price range, but we were tired and hungry and didn't have many other options. After fulfilling our primary need: shelter, we started working on fulfilling our secondary need: food. We noticed that everyone in town was starting to come out at about 6:00 and we didn't understand why. They were also all in strange costumes, or had their faces painted. Remembering that we didn't know any German, we decided to make many guesses... Halloween in February? Costume ball? Maybe the people of Bad Ischl always look like this? We returned to our room for the night, but didn't stay long. You see... our room was directly over the bar/restaurant, and all we could hear was laughter, yelling and music blasting through our floor...so we headed down to the bar to check it out. There was one woman in the bar. She was dressed as a mouse. There were about 7 or 8 men at the bar. They all had black paint marks all over their faces. Trying to be discrete, we sat at a table close to the bar and observed for a while. It wasn't long until we struck a conversation with the mouse... who spoke English... and she told us that this is considered the week of the Festival. Apparently many Austrian cities celebrate in their own way, the coming of Lent. Basically it was a 3 day drinking festival that happened before Lent started on Ash Wednesday. So on Sunday night, the whole town was out in costume to drink and 'be bad' before they had to 'be good' during lent. Our conversation with the mouse led to making Friends with the rest of the clientele in the bar (We stuck out like a sore thumb!). The men took it upon themselves to make friends with us and paint our faces. We had a great time drinking with the locals, listening to traditional Austrian music on the jukebox (mixed with a little N'Sync) and trying to hold conversations with people that had no idea what we were talking about. Good news... they knew Chicago as Al Capone, Michael Jordan, and Jazz music.


The Men... The Mouse... and The American Girls.


Kary and I with our face paint

We woke up the next morning... laughing about the night we had, and then headed to the Tourist Info point to get some tips as to how to get to Paris. After talking to the nice lady in the office, we decided to stay another 2 nights in Austria... on a farm. It was more or less a home stay with an Austrian family, and they lived on a farm! Our wonderful hostess, Theresa, picked us up all the way in Bad Ischl and drove us to her home in Abersee (about a 20 minute drive). She didn't speak much English, and we didn't speak much German, but we had a great time. She was so funny and tried soo hard to communicate with us. I've learned that a smile goes a long way... and laughter breaks down any language barrier. She had fantastic breakfast for us every morning, eggs and milk straight from the barn. There's nothing like the smell of cows in the morning... and I thought to myself, this is why I love Wisconsin. She was so accommodating and was happy to give us a tour of her farm- cows, pigs, dogs, cats, barns, tractors. At night we could hear her children singing some American songs from down stairs, and even though we didn't know what they were saying... siblings still fight in other countries :)


Our hostess at the farm


The view from our bedroom on the farm


Today we left the farm and took a bus/train/bus/train combination to the city of Linz. We will leave from here tonight at about 10:00 for France by bus. It will be about a 14 hour ride (yikes), but we will wake up in Paris.