Das ist Magische!

Two weeks ago I went on a hike about two hours outside of Vienna. It was a Sunday morning and we had to wake up pretty early and leave the academy at 7 am. When we arrived at the start of the trail, I will admit that I was asking myself, why am I doing this? It was completely gray, drizzling, and foggy. The ground was wet and my mood was equally soggy. Soon we entered the forest and began to climb. Instead of being under a cloud, we were moving into a cloud.



Everything was misty and spooky and I felt like I was in a movie. Pretty soon my hair was wet, even though it wasn’t raining. Looking up we started to see faint hints of blue through the gray and in another 15 minutes we had hiked out of the cloud and over it. Everything was crisp and clear and sunny and beautiful. I seriously felt like I was in one of those “Claritin clear” TV ads. The higher we went the more the clouds below looked like white ocean, waves lapping up against forested mountain tops.





We continued at a fairly quick pace up the trail and stopped to drink icy water from a natural spring. There was a huge sigh of relief from all when we arrived at a mountain hut for lunch. This high up, there aren’t really vegetarian options, so I classified eating bratwurst, sauerkraut, and potatoes on an Austrian mountain top a “cultural experience”.



I have had a lot of “cultural experiences” lately. Along with my uber-Austrian meal, I drank Almdudler, and Austrian soft drink made of elder flowers and other mountain herbs. I couldn’t help but to yoink the old glass bottle once I was done drinking. From here on we made the decision to continue up to the top of one of the peaks. The professor who was leading us on the hike was bookin’ it!!



The rest of us scrambled to keep up, rocks and mud sliding beneath our feet. There were 5 other students on the trip with me: Dubrovka and Mili (super nice Serbian-Montenegrin couple),



Nikolina (pretty eyed Croatian),



good old Manuel (with his ever tumultuous love life…) and his Russian ex-girlfriend visiting from Paris who won’t seem to accept that they are no longer together. Awkward.



One by one we made it up to the top and the view was spectacular.



The pictures came out like postcards but even that cannot do the scenery justice. It was a magical.