Day 19 - June 3rd - Hallstatt

         Nutella on rolls and jam mixed into homemade yogurt has quickly become my favorite breakfast here at the St. Gilgen hostel. It’s a nice change from having to find our own breakfast everywhere else. It feels just like a high school cafeteria, albeit an multinational one. After breakfast, we all went to Halstatt by way of a complicated combination of buses, trains and ferries - Hallstatt is pretty far out in the Alps. 

Waiting for the ferry

          It's a very authentic and charming little town built up the edge of a steep mountain right next to a very deep, glacier-formed lake. 

The ceiling of the church in the picture above

        We explored the town a little, visiting a lot of really cool souvenir shops and a cathedral. We even walked up a ton of stairs to visit a cemetery-like place that has a little cave filled with painted human bones.

     

        Before you get all creeped out about why they have painted human skulls on a table, here's the story. The Bone House is in the basement of one of the churches there in Hallstatt. There are over 1200 skulls stored in here, about half of them painted with crosses and flowers and wreaths. Back in the 1700s, the cemeteries and graveyards were getting too full, so they started removing, cleaning, bleaching, painting, then relocating bones from old graves so that newly dead people could be buried in the cemeteries. They painted them with flowers and crosses for the same reason people decorate graves - to show their love and remembrance.
 
        Later Nicole, Suzanne, Heather and I decided that we really wanted to ride the ventricular up the mountain. 

         In the end we were so glad we did, because the view from up there was amazing. On the way up we were starting to freak out a little at how strange it was to feel like we’re hanging in the air as we steadily rose up the side of a mountain. We walked around a few paths up there, admiring the flowers. 

Huge house way up at the top of the mountain.

        After riding the ventricular back down, we met up with our group again just in time to miss the ferry and wait for about an hour to catch the next one. We amused ourselves by taking pictures of Lori, Kaitlyn, and Heather's new Lederhosen aprons. 

 

        We finally got home though, and I convinced Lori and Stevie to come check out the lake by the hostel with me. We sat there on the dock for awhile with our feet in the water, enjoying and taking pictures of the surrounding beauty and hoping that the Loch Ness Monster wasn’t about to leap out and eat us. 

The view out our bathroom window

There - I can say I've been in Lake Wolfgangsee in the Alps