August 18

Today was the last day of our weekend trip, so we got up early to go on our last adventure of the trip. Hallstatt is known for its salt mines. It is actually home to the oldest salt mines in the world, so some us decided to take a tour of these mines. To actually get to the mines we had to take a vehicular up the side of the mountain. It was a little scary because it was so steep, and it kind of felt like we were going up on a roller coaster. Once we got off the vehicular, we had to hike a little more to get to the entrance to the mines. Once we started putting on our colorful jumpsuits (to keep us from getting dirty in the mines) I was feeling a little nervous because I am claustrophobic. When I saw the entrance that we would be walking through into the mountainside, I was definitely scared, but after we walked single file through the entrance tunnel and started making our way deep into the mines, I felt much calmer for some reason. Our tour guide walked us through many different levels of the mines and explained to us their history. The mines were first used by men thousands of years ago, and they are still being used today. The guide also showed us some of the old and modern equipment used by the miners. My favorite part of the tour was sliding down the slides to get to the different levels of the mines. Instead of using stairs, the tour guide had us race down the slides to see who could clock the fastest speed. It was fun, but someone could have easily gotten hurt. At the end of the tour, we also got to ride out of the mines through a narrow tunnel on a train-type vehicle. I got very claustrophobic at this point because the tunnel was too narrow for us to be able to tell how far we had gone through the tunnel or how much farther we had to go to get to the exit. The tour definitely was not what I expected, but I had fun. For the rest of the time we had in Hallstatt, I walked around some more and visited the famous catacombs at the church, where they house the hundreds of painted skulls of many priests and other important people from the town. We left the town in the afternoon to go back to Vienna. I was sad to leave, but excited to get back to Vienna.
The German word of the day is offen, which means “ frank”.