We're Off to See the Checkers... the Wonderful Checkers of Prague!

Prague. The Most Beautiful Place in the World. In our three days there, I took 897 pictures. I'm gonna break it up into two blog posts, so here are the first 11 of 22 pictures I narrowed it down to.. (soo difficult!)

 Just one random beautiful building in Prague. With a beautiful blue sky. I love Prague.

 Actually the biggest mall I've ever seen. 5 levels. And on the top level they had something called "LA Finger Food" and it was all sorts of fried food haha... it seems that fast food is what we're most often stereotyped for!

 At the Opera. In Prague. We're fancy like that. No idea what happened. Seemed to be some sort of demonic Little Mermaid.  We liked it though, it was a really cool experience.

 THE CASTLE!!!!

 View from the Castle, hello beautiful Prague :)

 Actually my favorite poster ever. This is hilarious.

 Gorgeous view, too may beautiful views of the river in Prague...

 Just another gorgeous nook...

 Jesus on a bridge! We had to touch something at his feet for good luck, but apparently i did it wrong so some woman tsk-ed me and showed me how to do it

 Old Town! At this point Allison goes: It looks just like Disney Land!

 ... And then we saw Amanda. And I love her. The end.

Prague Part 2 is on the way! More gorgeous views to come!

...And then we slept a lot :)

Vienna! Beautiful Vienna. So we were pretty much in Vienna for a half day because the other half of the day... we slept haha. We were really exhausted from travel and tours and pretending to be various members of the Von Trapp family!

 Here we are at a church! That's all I know about it.

 Something pretty and golden! yes!

 They were having a festival! It was really cool and there were all these fun booths and things for kids to climb in haha, and balloons of course, which are the best.

 Allison and I playing in leaves :)

 Riding the pony. This was as a shout-out to my FAC Board friends, because there's this amazing FAC Board ice breaker called "ride the pony"

 And then a beautiful train ride the next day on our way to Prague...

Such a pretty lake :)


Sorry this is such a short post but we really weren't there for long! I promise the prague photos will more than compensate!!

Our Own Sound of Musical!

As promised, here we are posing at all the famous Sound of Music places!!

The Hills are Alive...

BEAUTIFUL SALZBURG! I absolutely LOVED every minute there, and we made sure our minutes were jam-packed! We started with a Sound of Music Tour (the pictures side by side with the stills from the movie will be in the next post), then did a Bavarian Mountains-Eagle's Nest-Salt Mines tour (for a total of 8 hours in one sitting!) the next day. But since we arrived in Salzburg around 9am, and our SoM tour wasn't until 2, we started by frolicking around town :)

 From birth to the twenties: I have always loved posing with animal statues. This is me with a lion statue in the gorgeous mirabell gardens!

 See Mom? We saw mozart stuff too! We walked in, found out it cost money, and walked out to take this picture. This was his home I think. Also, see that yellow folder in my arms? All of our travel details for the entirety of fall break. It is the (usually) invisible member of all these photos...

 Really pretty probably famous building! yay!

 More Mirabell garden photos, that's me and my roommate Allison :)

 Next to a fountain (in the gardens again) that the Von Trapp kids walk on during the montage of Do a Deer

 Allison and I by Lake Wolfgang

 This is a famous desert in Salzburg called "Hot Love" - vanilla ice cream with hot raspberry sauce on top. Absolutely delicious!

 A Christmas Store! In October?? We were to find out that Austrians and Germans have a deep seated love of the Christmas Holiday that out-rivals America (people who wait until AFTER Halloween to start advertising Christmas? Blasphemy!)

 Can you spy, with your little eye, two of my suitemates behind the most heartwarming display of Halloween-Christmas decorations I've ever seen?

 Because I love tea :)

 Me with the entire cast of Sound of Music!

 The Bavarian Mountains!

 Allison and I doing our Alpha Phi hand symbol up at the Eagle's Nest. The Eagle's Nest was a house built for Hitler for his 50th birthday, which he didn't like because he was afraid of heights, and as you can see we're quite high up. He didn't like driving in reverse, either. Quirky evil dictator, that Hitler.

 

I guess you could call this my "ta-da" pose

 Allison, Me, and Susan finding yet another breathtaking view of the Bavarian Mountains!

Trying to squeeze in as many pictures as possible before the fog rolled in...

 Then the fog got pretty thick. And the makeshift stairs were super icy so it got pretty dicey up there...

... So i just sledded down the hill on my butt! Well, I fell first, but I felt so much safer on the ground than on my feet, I just slid all the way back to the house! Allison, a Californian, gripped to the railing for dear life.

 The Salt Mines tour! So my friends in choir in senior year had actually gotten to go to Salzburg for spring break, and they'd told me about this tour so I was really excited! Turns out, it's pretty boring unless you have an invested interest in how they mine salt. But this was a cool area, it took us forever to realize the water was mirroring the ceiling, because we thought it was so see through that we were looking at the bottom!

After the Salt mines we got tea! I've been mainly having Cappuccini here (which I am now thoroughly addicted to) so it was really nice to go to a place with tea! This picture was taken to show a satisfied tea-snob, who'd been slightly disappointed that when the tour guide said the cafe had great "tea", he didn't mean the meal.


And that was our lovely trip to Salzburg! Next we hit Vienna and Prague!

Memmingen? Memminememen? ... and then Munich :)

 So this was the gorgeous view out of our plane at sunrise as we flew from Pisa to Mememningimin. Something like that. Anyways if you've never tried it, flying at sunrise is something I would strongly suggest... I ended up taking about fifty pictures just of the mountains and sun :)

 So this was the very first leg of our epic Fall Break trip, we were flying into Munich (but not really, because RyanAir only flies to really random airports like memminmmenimmgn, which was two hours west of munich). We only stayed one day in Munich (it was the closest we could get to Salzburg) but it was absolutely beautiful!

 Snow-Capped Mountains at Sunrise? Yes please.

 Some really cool building in Munich

 Pink Pineapples?!? This acutally blew my mind.

 My friend Allison and I posing outside of the cool building we found

 One of those freaky people-statues

 The International symbol for "Walk Like An Egyptian"

 Berries! We stopped here and each got a bag of blueberries :) Thank goodness everyone in Munich speaks English because not only do I not understand German, but I can't pronounce any of it for the life of me!

Shout out to my Uruguayan Father :)


So little known fact about Germany, their sausages are actually hot dogs. So we went to some very touristy place for lunch (where our waiter didn't speak English...) and we were all like "sausages! we should get those because Germany has good sausages!" So of course there are about ten different varieties and we have no idea what the difference is so we all just pick one and order it (and sip on our really gross fizzy water because the waiter didn't understand us when we said 'no gas'). But allison and I end up with mediocre hot dogs, and our friend Susan got this large covered bowl. She opened it up to find a white sausage (white??!?) floating in the water.  That's why we needed the berries later... lunch was not very appetizing...

But we still enjoyed Munich a lot! Jaywalking is super illegal there it turns out (oops!) - some of the locals made siren noises at us as we crossed the street to our hotel! But overall it was a really fun day :) And the next morning, we woke up super early to head to Salzburg...