Today was our only chance to see Hallstatt before we headed off to Vienna. The little town is famous for is salt mines, and in the past (...like B.C., you know, that time when people had to communicate without email *shudder*) has been a major settlement. Hallstatt has its own archeological age named after it (the Hallstatt Period), due to the importance of the salt that drew many ancient tribes to the region. The Romans even used the town and its mines during the height of the Empire.
We took a fun little tour into one of the mines. They make you put on some over-clothes before you can go down, then they shove you onto a little train that consists of an engine, and wooden benches on wheels almost. You descend deep into one of the old, unused, mine shafts (that grow shorter and narrower the deeper you go until I had to duck to avoid taking off the top of my head) where the tour guide talked about the history of the mines and the methods used to mine the salt today. The really cool part was the bannister slide, which was used in the past by miners to quickly get to another level in the mine. The bannister rails are put parallel to each other, and you slide down them like a regular slide. There were two that we slid down. Silly fun maybe, but it was a kick. Coming off the mountain on a variety of tram car called a funicular, you can really see the beauty of the landscape. Alps, lake, waterfall...what more need be said?
From there we went to the other sight that Hallstatt is known for. Due to the small size of the town, and the really small size of the graveyard, there is a space issue with the graves. Before the Catholic Church allowed cremation as an accepted form of burial, the dead only got 12 years in the ground before they were exhumed to make way for the newly dead. I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the body, but the skulls were painted, named, dated, and placed in a small building called a charnel house. Ladies got roses and wreaths, men ivy and both got names and dates and crosses painted on. About 2 minutes after we got into the house, the group of school kids we had been dodging and avoiding ever since the salt mines caught us, so we beat a hasty retreat.
After we were done in Hallstatt, we caught another train to Vienna, but ran into the same problem as we did coming into Hallstatt; we got into the city too late to do anything much but sleep. It took us a while to locate a pension for the night and then trek there with our packs.
However, on the train to Vienna, we ran into a college student from a small town who was on her way to her school in Vienna. We talked to her about beer, travel, colleges, mass transit and other differences between the U.S. and Europe. We asked her what she thought about the E.U. and about Americans. She spoke good English, so I was able to make myself understood, while Bill, who knew more about the proper German sentence structure (verb goes on the end) spent about half the time digging through his Langenscheidts English-German dictionary looking up words. And I was able to mix in some of the German words I know with regular English.
Her views on Americans were based mostly on the media, since she had never traveled to the States and only met American tourists. She said that she thought that Americans seemed to want to impose their ways on other people and countries. She also believed that Americans thought that they were better than everyone else, and always knew the answer. Of course, she was making generalizations, as we all do.
It is unfortunate that she got most of her information from the media and the small segment of the American public that can afford to travel (and expect things to be a certain way). The media is never a really reliable source of information. I think that traveling and meeting locals is probably the only way to really understand the culture and people. As the saying goes, "Don't judge a book by its cover."
