tours, tours, tours!
These last two days I've been going around with the American group, and our director, Antje, doing paperwork and such. Actually, most of it's been fairly easy, although a little tedious. We first went to the University and registered, which didn't take too long. And then we went to a bus ticket place and bought our semester bus cards and another card that allows us to take the bus in Austria at half price. Then we went to the health insurance office, which took the shortest amount of time, surprisingly. Our insurance is only going to be 20 Euro a month and it comes everything: dental, eye, medical, you name it...if only it were that simple in the US :P Then we went and opened bank accounts, which was also pretty easy, now I just need to have money wired to it.
The day before we took a short city tour, which I took some pictures of. Learned some interesting things, like that Salzburg was founded in 696 because of the near by salt mines in Bad Dürrnberg (Salz = salt, Burg = fortress). Also learned that the oldest cloister in Europe is in Salzburg! It was founded in 800 something. Also, I found out that it took the fortress 600 years to be built!
Today we went to the Salzbergwerk (Literally: Salt mountain work), which were the salt mines that have been so important to the area. Actually, salt was first mined here in about 500 BC by the Celts that inhabited this area. They discovered the salt rock in the mountain and began to mine it, by hand! They mined it until 100 AD, but I don't know what happened to them after that... In the middleages, the salt was rediscovered by the Austrians and they began mining it. In 1573 there was a scare in the mine because they actually found a mummified Celtic man in the mountain! He had been perserved by the salt, but I guess he still looked pretty scary, there was a replicia of him in the mine, lol ^_^ Speaking of which, we went into the mine on a tour! Here are some of my pictures from that.
It's actually quite interesting, because once they got more innovative with their salt mining in the middle ages, what they started to do was use water. They would carve out large chambers in the mountain and fill them with water. Then, the chambers would be sealed for some time. While the water was closed up in the chambers, it would melt away at the salt in the walls and the walls would actually crumble into the water, exposing more salt. They would then drain the chambers, and they would eventually empty into large vats where they would boil the water until all that was left was the pure salt! Considering that the mountain is made out of 40% rock salt, that's a lot of salt! The salt was how Salzburg became wealthy and at the time, it was called the white gold.
Also today I ended up meeting my roommate! She was here when I got back from the field trip! Here name is Katrin and she's from Oberösterreich, which is a state in Austria. She's 18 and only in her 2nd semester of school. I had the feeling that she was going to be younger than me ^_^ She is studying French and Spanish, which is pretty cool because she likes languages too! She has a boyfriend named Hannes who she goes home to see on the weekends. I don't really know much else about her yet, but she seems very nice and she's helpful when I don't know how to say something in German. Maybe I can ask her later if I can get her picture, but I don't want to weird her out now, lol : )
I've been sleepy since about 5:30 and it's 8:10 now, so I'm guessing that it's gonna be an early night for me, which I am certainly not complaining about! Hope everything is going well for everyone, let me know how you are!
The day before we took a short city tour, which I took some pictures of. Learned some interesting things, like that Salzburg was founded in 696 because of the near by salt mines in Bad Dürrnberg (Salz = salt, Burg = fortress). Also learned that the oldest cloister in Europe is in Salzburg! It was founded in 800 something. Also, I found out that it took the fortress 600 years to be built!
Today we went to the Salzbergwerk (Literally: Salt mountain work), which were the salt mines that have been so important to the area. Actually, salt was first mined here in about 500 BC by the Celts that inhabited this area. They discovered the salt rock in the mountain and began to mine it, by hand! They mined it until 100 AD, but I don't know what happened to them after that... In the middleages, the salt was rediscovered by the Austrians and they began mining it. In 1573 there was a scare in the mine because they actually found a mummified Celtic man in the mountain! He had been perserved by the salt, but I guess he still looked pretty scary, there was a replicia of him in the mine, lol ^_^ Speaking of which, we went into the mine on a tour! Here are some of my pictures from that.
It's actually quite interesting, because once they got more innovative with their salt mining in the middle ages, what they started to do was use water. They would carve out large chambers in the mountain and fill them with water. Then, the chambers would be sealed for some time. While the water was closed up in the chambers, it would melt away at the salt in the walls and the walls would actually crumble into the water, exposing more salt. They would then drain the chambers, and they would eventually empty into large vats where they would boil the water until all that was left was the pure salt! Considering that the mountain is made out of 40% rock salt, that's a lot of salt! The salt was how Salzburg became wealthy and at the time, it was called the white gold.
Also today I ended up meeting my roommate! She was here when I got back from the field trip! Here name is Katrin and she's from Oberösterreich, which is a state in Austria. She's 18 and only in her 2nd semester of school. I had the feeling that she was going to be younger than me ^_^ She is studying French and Spanish, which is pretty cool because she likes languages too! She has a boyfriend named Hannes who she goes home to see on the weekends. I don't really know much else about her yet, but she seems very nice and she's helpful when I don't know how to say something in German. Maybe I can ask her later if I can get her picture, but I don't want to weird her out now, lol : )
I've been sleepy since about 5:30 and it's 8:10 now, so I'm guessing that it's gonna be an early night for me, which I am certainly not complaining about! Hope everything is going well for everyone, let me know how you are!