Hello Austria!

On Friday night, my host family and I set off in the middle of the night, on our way to Austria. At first I couldn't sleep, but after we had crossed into Germany at around 3am, I got some sleep. We made a stop for breakfast somewhere in Germany, at a service station near a town called Würzburg. It was quite interesting to find that in Germany (and other parts of Europe I assume) you have to pay €70 which is around 90c, to use the public toilets. As you walk in and pay, you are given a ticket and as you walk out the toilet cleans itself. We drove along the Autobahn, which is actually the name given to most of the motorways in Germany. There were massive machines driving along spraying salt onto the road, to melt the snow and ice. For a lot of the way, mostly in southern Germany and once we passed Munich, which is called München to the Germans, my experience of the Autobahns was not what I expected. While there is officially no speed limit, with only advisory signs of 130km/h, we were lucky to even go 30km/h. It seemed as if half of Europe had decided to travel to Austria on the same day.

Later in the afternoon we finally crossed into Austria, to the sight of huge mountains on either side of the road. As we got further into the country, we began to head up into the Alps, driving through tunnels mostly around 3km long, that went under and through the mountains. The views of the mountains were incredible, with castle-like houses perched high up on the side of pretty much cliff faces. It is crazy to think that people first came and settled up here so far in the mountains, I have absolutely no idea how that would have even been possible. 

As we arrived to the town we are staying in, Bad Gastein, buildings and lights were scattered in a valley between two massive mountains. We drove through very skinny alley ways on the mountainside and between buildings to find our hotel. So finally, after 18 hours of driving, we arrived.

After a very long wait in multiple queues for ski hire and to get our lift passes, we were ready for our first day skiing! It is so interesting to hear people speaking so many different languages around you. I was speaking English, my host family was speaking Danish, the people in front were speaking German, the people behind us were speaking Czech and who knows what language the people either side of us were speaking.
We took the lift right to the top of the mountain called 'Stubnerkogel', which was 2.3km above sea level, which is higher up than even the highest point of Australia. The view was breathtaking. The sun was out, the sky was blue, it was around -20'C, and there were tiny particles of snow and ice in the air. It is impossible to adequately describe the beauty of this, it truly looked as if there was glitter in the air, everywhere you looked there were sparkly particles floating around. You can almost see some of the particles in this photo, but it was really difficult to capture in a photo.

I had a great day skiing, being taught by my very patient host family! Some of the runs we went down were quite steep, we even went down a red level run. Although I ended up in the snow countless times, even face planting into a pile of snow that was probably about 1m deep, it was a lot of fun. To begin with, we skiied on wide open runs above the tree line, which is what you see as the white peak of very tall mountains as it is too high up for trees to grow, then as we got lower, the runs got thinner and through forests, we skiied through trails that were lined by huge pine trees covered in snow.

Day 2 of skiing was a bit more difficult, as my muscles and shins were quite sore, it was colder, and the overcast and slightly windy weather made seeing the contours of the snow much more difficult. But still, it was a lot of fun. At the top of the main lift, there is a restaurant, that I found out sells the best hot chocolate that I have ever tasted, as well as so many different typical Austrian foods like Schnitzels and Apple Strudel, that I plan to taste at some stage during the week. I truly am having the most amazing time here in Austria, it is hard to believe that this is real life; I am so grateful to my host family for this incredible opportunity!