Day 5: Munich to Salzburg, Austria

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Today's highlights:

   -Church with Pres. and Sister Miles

   -Most embarrassing moment thus far

   -Salzburg

   -Camera troubles 

   -Sweetest stranger in the world story!

   -Artsy Apartment

Our first Sunday! Woot! Foreign church is awesome, I hope we can find branches to go to in other cities we'll hit on Sundays! So we started off the day with Brenda's homecookin! Pancakes and caramel syrup, hecks yes. So good. Love love love this woman. Then we all headed off to church where we got to meet so many great people. It is crazy to me how many Americans live here! I was prepared to be clueless with no worries. But the sweet leadership there gave us these headsets and translated the whole meeting for us through the mic. It was actually pretty sweet. It was on tithing and was a super good meeting. One lady read a scripture about tithing saving you from the fire and brimstone, and she added, "So it's kind of like having fire insurance!" I liked that. Adorbs. The bishop also said an interesting thing too. He has never known a full-tithe payer who has lost his testimony. It reminded me of the meeting Robbie and I had with Elder Nelson before we got married. He said every difficult marriage he has ever seen has been struggling in one or both of two areas: tithing and prayer. If both of those are solid and in line, your marriage will be a happy one. Not perfect, but happy. I loved that. It's crazy how something that seems so small can have such a profound impact on us. Simple obedience guarantees us powerful blessings. Man, the gospel is awesome.

We had to leave after Sacrament for the train station and, of course, President Miles offered to drive us. These two have saved our lives! We've been so spoiled, we won't know what to do now. Honestly, we are SO grateful for them. They did so much more for us than we were expecting, drove us around, cooked for us, took us out, lent us whatever we needed, and were just all around the biggest blessing we could ask for.  

So we left our beloved Germany for Salzburg, Austria. We will miss you Deutschland! You will always be our first love of this trip. 

On this train, I experienced my most embarrassing moment. The train from Munich to Salzburg is only about two hours, during which Robbie used the WC (bathroom) on the train. When we were pulling into Salzburg, we stood up to get our stuff together and I realized I also had to use the restroom (#1, to be clear) and didn't know when I would get another chance for free. Not having any idea how much time was left before we arrived (but we knew it was short) Robbie ran me down to show me where the bathroom was. We pushed through a group of people right outside of it who were waiting to get off the train. I ran in to be done as quickly as possible (because I didn't want the train to get there and leave with me still on it) so I was only half-listening when Robbie said, "There are crazy buttons in there!" Right as I was pushing the button to electronically close the sliding door, he pointed to the inside of the door and said, "That's not a lock!" But because I was only half-listening, being more concerned with how I can make this happen faster than lightning, I thought he said, "That's the lock!" So the door shut (electronically), and I saw a bunch of knobs and buttons, all labeled of course but unfortunately for me it was all in German. So I just turned the little metal knob Robbie pointed to, "locking" the door, and did my thing. Well, I don't want to be graphic here, but just so you understand, things were...in the process when all of a sudden THE DOOR STARTED OPENING ELECTRONICALLY!  I was against the same wall as the door, just to the side of it, so I gasped out loud, looked up in panic and saw the backs of the group of people out there. In desperation, I tried to push the sliding door back the other way, but since it was electronic, it just kept opening! And I couldn't reach the button to electronically shut the door again, and I couldn't stand up to get to it (since the process had started), so I just froze in panic. The door was almost fully open when the man directly in front of the door turned slightly, and I think he could just sense it. All of a sudden, the door started closing again. I'm almost positive he pushed the button from the outside for me. I wrapped things up as quickly as I could, scared it might happen again. When I walked out, I kept my head down and couldn't look at any of them. I can only pray they didn't see me! Agh, horrifying.

So needless to say, Salzburg had a rough start. And then to add to it, our camera stopped working, something about a memory card error? I think we have to buy a new memory card. It deleted all our pics but luckily Robbie had just downloaded them to dropbox the night before. TENDER MERCY!! I'm really scared it might happen again. Pray for us that it won't! But on a positive note, that means we took pics on our phones so I can post some more! 

So we headed out, ready to explore all we could before needing to check into our hotel in a neighboring town. We actually saw quite a bit of Old Town, the historic part (including Mozart's statue, since this is his old stomping ground) and a huge Cathedral. It was a jaw-dropper inside for sure. We also got gelato for 1 euro (steal!) as we walked through Mirabell Gardens where part of the Sound of Music was filmed. It was a pretty sweet afternoon, despite its rough beginning :).

This where we meet the most amazing woman of all time. So we booked a room in a neighboring town, Bad Reichenhall, not realizing it would take FOREVER to get there from Salzburg. So after missing a bus and a train to go there, we finally caught the last bus of the day, took it an hour to this little town, where it dropped us off at the main station, which was no where near this woman's house where we were staying. There weren't a lot of people around, and we were super confused on which direction to even start walking. Just then, this sweet older lady was riding by on her bicycle. We asked her if she could help us figure out which way to go. Well, she did not speak a LICK of English, but through her hand signals and the few German words Robbie knows, we were able to communicate. She jumped right off her bike, eager to help (leaving it parked in the middle of the street, mind you). She walked us over to a taxi station we hadn't seen to ask them where it was. They told us it was pretty far to walk and were prepared to drive us there. We were SO tired by this point that we were ready to pay a taxi, as expensive as they are, just to be done. But just then this sweet, little lady, Rosie was her name, started motioning for us to walk away with her. Then she proceeded to say through simple words and lots of hand gestures that she could go get her car and drive us there. We were positive she couldn't possibly mean that, we must have misunderstood. But she kept motioning, "hier...mein wagon..." Robbie knew the words "here" and "my car." And that is exactly what she did. Can you believe that?! She rode her little bike home to get her car (which took her like 10 minutes just for that), then came back to get us and drove us another 5-10 minutes to our destination. We were floored. Who does that?! That would NEVER happen in America. We couldn't even say all we wanted to her because she couldn't understand English, so we just kept saying, "Danke! Danke Danke!" The best thing we could think to do (since she wouldn't let us give her money) was give her the best thing we had on us, a little package of rittersport chocolate that the Miles' had given us before we left. It was a pathetic offering since it had melted inside the package, but we didn't know what else to do! She drove us all the way there, and then even came with us to the door to make sure we made it to the right place. Holy Hannah! Adorable woman! I love Germany! There is so much I can learn from them. Why do we (I speak for myself) always do the bare minimum when it comes to helping people? Here, it's like they do everything they can, without thinking for a second about how it is inconveniencing themselves. What a magical place!  Here is Robbie with Rosie right as we were sayin goodbye.

***This is Robbie now. Angie needs a break from writing so she can finally read during our bus/train rides.  After my prostesting of this whole idea of me contributing to the blog, she sweetly said "You'll do it because you love me," which I do.  So here is my meager attempt to document out trip. The engineer side of me wants to just give a bullet-point list of our activites, but I'll restrain myself. Ok, on with the blog.***

After saying goodbye to Rosie we met our bed and breakfast host, Anna Maria. She is a painter and we are staying in her art studio that she rents out. It is a beautiful little place. Her paintings were on every wall complete with stickers indicating the purchase price. Smart lady, that Anna Maria. Unfortunately we didn't have a spare €200 laying around, so we were only able to enjoy them for one night.

Tomorrow we see more of Salzburg (we wish we had more than one day here, there is so much to see around this beautiful city) and then onto Hallstatt! Viel glück!