Lynn's Adventure Through Europe: Munich and Neuschwanstein Castle

It's been another great week! Tuesday instead of having my History class in the morning, my professor invited us to a lecture at this prestigious school held in the palace where some of the Sound of Music was filmed. There was a college from Miami who came to Salzburg for a week and listened to these lectures by many famous and prestigious professors and scholars, then at the end of the week had to do some kind of presentation. The lecture we heard was by Dr. Martin Luther King's granddaughter and she spoke about social entrepreneurship, which was interesting but since I am not in the business field is was a little out of touch for me. But many of the kids in my class are majoring in business or marketing so they got a lot out of it. We got to meet her and had some great discussions with her. She is in the McDonalds business and could tell you anything you'd ever want to know about McDonalds! We had coffee with the 100 students from Miami and their professors and they were all so impressed by us students from Salzburg College that they invited us back that night for a dinner in the palace. Of course we accepted! So 5 of us went back for dinner and interacted with the students and again had a great time. After that they invited us to this dance they put together, and it was all Salsa dancing! So I learned how to salsa a bit and we stayed for about an hour and even the guys had a great time! After that the 5 of us went to another Irish Pub called Shamrocks and sat around and had a beer and talked about the day we had and all the cool people we got to meet.

The rest of the week was a bit stressful with midterms and papers and such, but we got through it and on Friday we all left for Munich for a trip the school put together. Everyone had different museums they had to go to for certain classes, like I had to go to 2 art museums for my art class, but the marketing and PR classes had to go to this really cool BMW museum. (I wish I could have gone to that instead of art, but oh well) The first art museum was kind of boring, all the art seems to start blending together for me now since we've been required to go to so many museums on the same sort of topics. The second museum however was more modern, pop art and it had some cool exhibits I'll put some picture up of. Like one work looked like a medicine cabinet and inside it had 26,000 pills of all different kinds. They were all lined up strategically in order and the purpose behind it was that the artist was trying to show people that we are in such a "medication driven" society and we think these medications will help us prolong our life, yet if we took too many of them it could kill us. There were other cool works like a short film that we watched that made absolutely NO sense at the time, but now thinking about it it had some really deep meanings that make you think. After the museums I walked around Munich a bit, and went to some different parts of the city that I did not get to see last time I was there.

Friday night me, Katherine, Kim and Trevor took the train to a town called Fussen, which is where the famous Neuschwanstein castle is, which is the castle that they modeled the Cinderella Castle in Disney after. It was built by King Ludwig who was supposedly insane and spent all the towns people's money on multiple castles, some in which he never even got in live in because he died before they were finished being built. There were even some rumors that he was gay because he never took a wife and some of the designs and painting he had around his castles were very provocative. We stayed in a hostel Friday night and went to the castle Saturday morning, which it was a very good thing we went in the morning because there weren't as many tourists there as when we were leaving in the afternoon. We had to hike up the mountain about 45 minutes and it was definitely the most "touristy" place I have been to so far. We met many Americans and people from all over the world. There were a lot of Asian groups, all with their SARS masks on, which was absolutely ridiculous since they were in a place in the world were the air is probably the freshest, on the top of a MOUNTAIN in the ALPs! But hey, it was funny to see. We took a half hour tour of a part of the inside of the castle but we couldn't take any pictures and we didn't get to see too much, so we were a bit disappointed. But it was cool to say we've been there and we got a great day out in the fresh air and we had fun with our friends so the experience was definitely worth it!!! We came back to Salzburg last night, and I got a great night sleep and now I'm trying to get all my homework for this week AND the week after the break done so I don't have to do much HW while I'm traveling, or the night I get home. I leave on Thursday March 18th for Amsterdam, and come home from Venice April 5th, so I will be spending Easter in Venice with some of my friends! I love Easter at home and I will greatly miss spending it at Aunt T and Uncle Jeff's house with my family!! But I'll be there in spirit and I'll be thinking about you all!! I won't have much internet access during these 2 weeks but I will try to update at least once or twice so I don't have a 10 page post when I get home from it, because I'm sure I'll be seeing and doing so much!!! Hope all is well at home and I miss everyone so so much, and it made me sad to miss the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Albany with everyone!! But I'm almost at the half way point in my adventure and I'll be home before I even know it, it’s crazy!! Love and miss you, hope all is well at home..