blogging and adding photos from an iPhone is relatively awkward and cumbersome, and you can only post one photo per entry without doing alot of additional work- so I will not work additionally. Above are a few photos from a rainy day in girona. At the top are a couple from the town of Sant Feliu on the Spanish coast. Probably won't be able to add any photos from the camera until we get home, but I'll put them all up then...

Since i'm on my phone...

I figured I might as well add a couple more photos from a hike we went on outside of cesky krumlov. The hike and hills were awesome, but unfortunately we forgot our camera and I only remembered I had my phone camera until we were almost back down, while Amanda was singing an aria from a grassy hilltop. Obviously the last photo is my favorite...

The view...

Since I haven't had access to a computer for quite awhile to upload photos from our camera, here are a couple quick shots from the terrace atop our hostel here in Girona. Today is our second day in Girona and we have really really enjoyed it here- a very different feel compared to Barcelona and many of the larger cities we've been in. It's a very beautiful city.

For the next couple days we're headed over to costa brava to visit a small coastal town on the Mediterranean. We don't realt know much about it but many locals we've talked to have really talked it up and it's just a half hour bus ride away. It's nice to be back in Tshirt and shorts weather, and I fully expect to be swimming in the Mediterranean by tomorrow afternoon...

A few photos from Hallstatt

Finally getting around to adding a few of the last photos from our time in Austria - Hallstatt:

Hallstatt photos on Picasa

So our flight to Scotland was officially cancelled today, which was kinda expected, so tonight we'll be flying back over to Barcelona. We currently have no plans, no reservations for anything in Spain, so we'll see how this turns out! We're maybe a little strangely not worried about it, but we will at least book a hostel for tonight...

Well, we made it back to Prague, where we currently have tickets to Manchester and Barcelona scheduled for the 20th, which we thought was pretty safe (we had round trip tickets from Barcelona to Prague, then decided to go to Scotland), but now the Prague airport is closed for all flights, so we're not really too sure what's going to happen. At least out hostel here in Prague is $8 per person (and even has a pool table-too bad you're not here Jake!)

We have no idea what we're doing

Apparently Iceland has decided to erupt and spew forth it's contents onto this fine continent that we are currently visiting. We are in one of the few places that is not immediately affected by the ash, but the trip to Scotland for which we JUST booked tickets will have to be cancelled if the skies don't clear up in the next few days. The problem is that we can't even really fly anywhere north of here at all- maybe down to Greece?

Right now we're enjoying a very nice, tiny Czech town- Cesky Krumlov (Joey- the postcard I just sent someone was taken by a Tuma with a little dot over the u). The only bad weather day we've had the whole trip was one rainy day in Salzburg, but was a nice excuse to sit inside all day drinking coffee (which is actually quite good in Austria, but still doesn't beat Seattle) and inhaling second hand smoke (which is nearly impossible to avoid here). My first cup of Turkish coffee - I figured Czech republic is as good a place as any- is actually pretty tasty. Smoother than I thought and the grinds settle out nicely, kinda like a cup of french press. Tim, I think you would enjoy it.

Cesky Krumlov looks like it literally hasn't changed in 300 years. Next time on a computer, we'll hopefully be able to put up some photos to show. Olda: we wanted to see the revolving theater, but that whole area up by the castle gardens was closed for repairs, but the garden and castle were very nice. It was a little bit of a language shock to switch again from German to Czech. It's just such a difficult language to interpret, at least there are similarities between German and English. It just makes for more interesting results when ordering from the menu.

Our hostel here is a 200+ year old house right in the old town. It's run by a woman from LA who traveled here long ago and decided she needed to move here. The hostel is a very earthy, kinda hippy place and has a very friendly feel. We have a private room on the second floor with one side of the room probably six inches higher than the other side! Maybe they had different building standards back then. It's a very nice place though, and has been one of our cheapest (besides all the free couchsurfing).
Time to do some flight searching to the south. And thanks for the tip Raymond- just delete the .at from the link to picasaweb album to get English results...

Praha

Photos here: PRAHA

If these links don't work (not sure if they're specific for Austria), this should catch-all: http://picasaweb.google.com/zachgerig

Barcelona

Slowly uploading some photos finally because our hotel has a computer to use for free, and it takes FOREVER to upload them for some reason. I haven't editted any, which bothers me a little, but it will do for now. I'm just creating PicasaWeb albums, and will post the links here.

Barcelona photos

Today is a very rainy day in Salzburg, so we'll be searching out indoor things and trying to polish off our trip plans for Edinburgh

Hallstatt

From Prague we took a bus (a very nice bus! It played the movie Mr. Bean!) to Olomouc, a very old, beautiful Czech town with a nice square and medieval chuch (of course!) From there to Brno where we stayed with some good friends of Joey´s. Olda and Marie, they were a lot of fun and excellent hosts who were able to tell us a lot about the town and where to go. It was one of the least toursity areas we have been, which was really nice. We visited the castle and were one of the only people there. We also got to watch a dress rehearsal for a choir concert that Marie was a part of, which was really special for me. They sang a song called "Jesu Jabula" an African worship song, that I sang in Middle school... only the lyrics were in english and african, not czech and african :) . Olda and Marie took us to a medieval pub underground lit by candles- cool photo to follow.

From Brno we went to Vienna where we stayed with couchsurfing hosts Florian and Steffi. We spent the first night there just having dinner in their home and enjoying "hanging out" rather than sight seeing. They were great, and we had a lot of the same interests, as both of them are musicians. Steffi is a vocalist, mainly a jazz/pop singer who gets a lot of work, Flo is into mixing his own music- he and Zach got to talk a lot about their favorite electronic music.
Come to think of it, the theme for our time in Vienna was definitely music. Of course Vienna is known for being the hometown of many great composers, and our sightseeing around the city included birthplaces of composers, concert halls, and the Vienna Opera.
We went to a cool place called "Klub Ost" which means east Club, and saw some interesting German and Hungarian bands play some crazy music. The next night we watched Flo`s families medieval traditional Austrian band- made up of herdie gerdie, a very old piccolo, bagpipes and so on, all played by his grandparents aunts and uncles. There is a whole medeavel society that always gets together and dresses up in handmade medeaval clothing for the show. Very funny video to follow- hopefully we can post it soon.


We caught a train from Vienna to Hallstatt, a teensy town on a lake surrounded by Austrian Alps. This town predates Rome and is known for its Salt mining. The train ride from Vienna to Hallstatt was absolutely gorgeous! We passed through villages and villages and mountains and more mountains. Many of the other passengers were Austrians dressed in traditional liederhosen- their Sunday best! No joke. I had no idea people still dressed like that, and would have assumed it was for some touristy show, but Flo told us that it is common especially in the villages to dress this way for church. Apparently the liederhosen is handmade and can cost hundreds of dollars.

Besides the Austrians dressed in Liederhosen, our other main excitement getting to Hallstatt was exiting the train. The trains do not stop for long! As we were walking to the station, the train was leaving, and out flew bags, soon followed by two people who completely ate it. The train was going probably 10 miles an hour by this point. It was quite a scene. We were lucky to catch the ferry to town, but they were still dusting themselves off when we left, and they missed it.

Hallstatt is just gorgeous. We are leaving for a hike very soon, and tomorrow we leave for Salzburg!


In other good news, we just purchased tickets from Prague to Edinburough, Scottland for the end of our trip!
Hope to update again soon!


Amanda

City of a thousand golden spires

Holy Cow it has been a busy two and a half days! On Saturday night we flew out of Barcelona, arriving in Prague at 1:00 a.m. on Sunday.... we decided not to take the city bus into town to find a hostel, sounded kind of sketchy. So our other option was- stay the night in the airport! Which is what we did! I didn't expect our night at the airport to be the best night of sleep I had I ever gotten, and it certainly wasn't. We lucked out on finding the only couch in the airport, in the middle of a Czech exhibition of radio history.


The couch was seated infront of a big flat screen tv. As soon as we sat down and made ourselves comfortable, two Czech police officers strolled up slowly and asked for our passports and tickets. When we showed that our tickets had "Prague" as our destination, they asked, "you arrive in Prague, you go into town then?". And we said, "yes!.......later". They laughed and dropped the whole intimadation tactic, told us no sleeping in the airport, and left us alone for the rest of the night. Zach and I decided the best thing to do was to sleep in shifts, so I took the first shift and got a good three hours until 4 am or so, and then Zach slept until 7 or so. We cleaned up and hopped on the 8 a.m. bus into Prague on Sunday.




Prague has been very enjoyable! As soon as we checked into our hostel we took the metro into the old town square which was packed with Easter booths (lots of decorated eggs and whips tied with pastel ribbons- strange strange Czech tradition)... we had a great, well deserved, very satisfying breakfast right in front of the Tyn Chapel looking into the square, which kicked off the morning right.
Another highlight of Easter Sunday was going to a nice concert at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Lesser Town. Basically every church or major theater in Prague was offering an Easter concert (there are lots), so it was a hard decision to make. When we found that St. Nicholas was charging entrance fees just to see the interior of the church, we decided it must be a pretty spectacular venue for a concert, we were right! Also, they weren't playing Vivaldi's Spring from the Four Seasons, or Mozart's Night Music, so that was a plus. The church was beautiful, with some of the most resonant accoustics I've heard in a while (not always the best for choir music, but always impressive).... Zach may or may not have been nodding off through the whole concert (understandable- truly).

Today we took it a little easier, we saw the Mucha museum, went to the Franz Kafka cafe where we watched a funny Norwegian family take Absinthe shots together at 2 p.m., and wandered around the Prague Castle grounds. St. Vitus Cathedral was the highlight- and happened to be free today! Awesome. Tomorrow morning we are catching a bus to Olomouc, a little town we don't know a whole lot about yet. Then we will head to Brno- a town where our good friend Joey lived for a year. We will be staying with his friend Olda, and we are looking forward to having hosts again after spending a few nights in a hostel.


Internet access has been surprisingly difficult to get ahold of, but we will update as soon as we can!


Love,
Zach and Amanda

p.s - we tried to add on a bunch of photos, but the internet here is so slow that it is taking FOREVER, so maybe at the next computer we can add more? (and maybe some from barcelona too...)

Update from Barcelona

3 and a half days in Barcelona and we have tackled the city pretty well. I am posting from Zach's phone as he is on a hunt for some meat to go with our over abundant bread and cheese for dinner. It is Good Friday, a holiday, and therefore everything save a couple Indian or chinese owned groceries are closed ( including the Internet cafe's). That seems to be the theme for our time here- you realize you suddenly need this and that as soon as everything closes:) siesta is alive and well here. Between 2 and 430 or so, everything shuts down and parks are full of families and couples taking it easy. Just one of the many cultural differences we have observed since we have been here. This culture really knows how to appreciate a balance of leisure and work each day, not living for the weekend. However, on the flip side, we visited the Sagrada Familia yesterday ( by architect Antonio Gaudi, it was amazing, pictures to come) which began construction in 1882 and is projected for completion in the year 2030. We can't help but ask, perhaps it may have been completed by now were it not for siesta ;).

We have seen many Gaudi sights since we have been here, they are among my favorites along with the Gothic quarter. Antiquity always does it for me.

Tomorrow night we leave for Prague! Antiquity at it's finest! We will be there for the Easter festivities. I see it going two ways, cheesy tourist traps, or an authentic view into their cultural celebrations. We will see!

Pictures and more soon!

Amanda