Our first official day off program! To celebrate our company presentations and the hard work that we as a group put into them, we collectively agreed to take a day-long trip to Salzburg, Austria. If I had to describe this trip in one word, I would say it was extraordinary. Everything about this trip was incredible, except for the distance we had to travel to get there. We woke up at around 7am to eat breakfast and catch the train to Munich, where we could catch our connection to Salzburg. This process took two and a half hours. I slept through it all. When I woke up we were at Salzburg, and upon leaving the terminal I saw a man in a chicken costume dancing to a chicken song. I knew today was going to be a good day. We walked a few blocks and saw some very pretty buildings and churches along the way. What really struck me was the architecture in the city, as it was very unique and different from everything I saw in Germany.

We then entered a building that led us to a garden space. The gardens were awe inspiring. There was a dwarf garden (yes, a dwarf garden), patches grass with elaborate designs in them, amazing marble statues, and walls with flowers hanging from them. The dwarf garden was apparently really old, and some of the dwarf statues in the garden were stolen over the years, so sometimes there were empty stone pedestals where the dwarfs used to stand. After touring the space for an hour we arrived at another section that served as the entrance to the city. Marble statues on either side of the walkway lead us directly into the city, and once we walked inside we started looking for food. We found a hole-in-the-wall middle eastern place close to the entrance and ate really good gyros.

After walking a little further we found ourselves in the very touristy area of the city. Crowds of people were gathered everywhere, each admiring a different part of the area. The city had many elaborate water fountains, beautiful buildings, and sculptures. One such sculpture was a giant golden ball in the middle of an open space, with a giant chess board right next to it with people playing on it. I watched the chess game for a good 15 minutes before I remembered that I was in Salzburg and had a lot more of the city to explore. At this point we went up to the castle/fortress that sat atop a mountain that overlooked the city. The sight of the city from the fortress was breathtaking. We could even see the Swiss Alps from up there. The fortress itself was built hundreds of years ago to protect the salt that was mined in the city (hence the name SALZburg, since salz means salt) from foreign invaders.

We ate dinner at a very good Italian restaurant in the city and caught the 6:15 train back to Augsburg. Upon my return to the hotel I finished my packing in preparation for our departure bright and early the next day. As I began to fall asleep it started to hit me that we were almost done with our trip, but I felt very content with this since I was very pleased with how the last two weeks went and wouldn’t change a thing about it. See you next time for my final reflection post!