In which our room assignments were a little odd

In Salzburg we stayed at the Institut St. Sebastian, which is a hotel run by nuns.

We were given keys for single occupancy rooms and keys for shared rooms for the students.  I'm not sure why that meant I had the largest room that could comfortably house three people, but what the hey.

Here's the view from the door.  There's a short hallway with the shower and sinks to the right, and the toilet to the left.  The separation of toilet and shower/sinks is a common architectural feature, which makes washing one's hands a little annoying.

Toilet room.  The panel on the wall is the flush trigger, which can be stopped at any time to save water.

This is the bed I ended up sleeping on.  The metal thing on the wall is a lamp.

Another view of the room from the direction of the door.

Turning another 90 degrees, another bed and more storage space.  Some of the rooms in the hotel are rented by students studying at the nearby Mozarteum.

Here's the view out one of the windows.

Here's the view out the other window.

Alas, the nuns had already anticipated my thought about trying different beds.  Curses!  I did end up stealing a pillow off another bed after the first one proved to be completely flat.  The second one was fine.

In which we get on a train

24.05.13

Our first trip with an overnight stay was Salzburg.  In this post, I'm going to show you lots of pictures of pretty mountains.

This is the Graz Hauptbahnhof.  We gathered here at 9:15 to board our train.  One student was late, but thankfully did not get left behind.

Here we are getting settled.  Everyone here is a part of our group except the old woman looking at me funny for photographing on a train.

A view out the window while we're waiting to depart.

This is a typical mountain around Graz, which is considered to be more of a hill.  The local topography reminds me of the Appalachians.

We passed this complex of buildings on our way out of town, I'm not sure what it is.

As we moved away from Graz, the terrain became rockier and the hills got higher.

The mountains started to have snow at the top.

The train stopped at a few smaller towns along the way.  We had to change trains in Bischofshofen.

Random palace.

And the mountains got higher...

And higher...

Due to cloud cover, it was often hard or impossible to see the mountain tops.  On the way back, it was clearer and we could see more.

In which we visit the Kunstgarten

 31.05.13

Today we visited the Kunstgarten, a combination of flower and sculpture garden.  It's run by a couple essentially out of their backyard, one of whom happens to be the brother of the program coordinator.  Most of this post is just going to be flower porn that I'm not going to bother captioning, but I'll add information where I can.

At the entrance we encountered The Cat, who entertained the students.

 There's a small stage area that can be used for performances or as display space for artwork; currently an artist who works with iron has a piece in this space.

Scattered throughout the garden are small statues.

Hanging rocks over a pond.

The garden features many varieties of rose.  The fellow who tends the garden explained how roses are cultivated from cuttings once a good cross has been made, so any given cultivar of rose is essentially a clone organism scattered across the planet.

There's also a little greenhouse.

It was a rainy day, which gave me a good chance to play with the macro settings on Backup Camera.  Austin's camera needed its battery charged and I didn't feel comfortable taking it out in the rain, anyway.  Backup Camera still does a good job, even if it believes it's in 1980.

There were speakers installed in a few places.  One of the art installations is the sound played in the garden.

Our guide explained that most of the rose varieties would be in full bloom in ten days, though there were still a bunch in bloom.  This was my favorite.

This fractal statue is one of the larger pieces in the Kunstgarten.

This gray box is a beehive.  Our guide explained that they don't harvest honey, but they need the bees to pollinate the fruit trees.

In addition to roses, there are also food plots.  This plot of land has actually been used as a garden for about 80 years now.  Originally it was intended as a place for poorer people to grow vegetables.

The garden also has some resident ducks who protect the plants by eating snails.

Here is our guide explaining his compost system.

Eventually, the compost breaks down into soil and twiggy bits.

The compost is then put through a sieve to remove the twiggy bits.  The black material is plant ash that they're experimenting with as a soil additive based on the gardening traditions of South American indigenous peoples.

 This is a flightless breed of duck that was cultivated in India to provide British colonists with eggs for breakfast when chickens proved to be ill-adapted to the wet climate.  They like snails.

I liked this statue a lot.

In the house, they had a very extensive library on roses and gardening.  This book is from the 16th century.

He showed us books from different centuries and explained how gardening books developed as printing technology improved.  It was a very enjoyable and educational visit.