Day 5 (5/18)

Sunday, May 18th
All day excursion to Eisenstadt: Schloss Esterhazy; Haydn house; Intro to mapping project

Today we met in the lobby at 7:15am and left for the train for our "excursion." We had a bit of trouble finding the right one, but we found it eventually.
So much pretty landscape stuff out the windows on the train ride! We had to ride three different trains to get there, but it only took about an hour and a half.
When we walked across the train tracks into the town, I grabbed a few cool looking rocks, just for the heck of it!

We walked through this small quiet town to the Esterhazy palace, where we took a tour. This is where Haydn worked for most of his career, about 40 years. The castle just didn't seem that interesting or special compared to others I had seen before. It was more run down and not as fancy.
Kinda tired today, but I'll catch back up!

When we left the castle, I bought a couple postcards and things. We looked for a restaurant for lunch, and the first one we looked at the outdoor menu and the waiter asked if we want to the table, and I tried replying in German that we were looking at the menu, and he walked away laughing. So I said we are not eating here that was rude. And walked to another place.
The "Stadtrestaurant" is sort of Italian and they have lots of good ice cream treats I ordered spaghetti caprese and Fanta. the noodles had pesto or basil and some other weird taste it was not the best. I also got one scoop of ice cream on a cone strawberry. yum!!
 We then met the whole group at 2 PM to go to the Haydn house, a tour of Joseph Haydn's house. We each got an English audio tour on an iPod touch that was provided. We originally didn't have a long time to go through but the teachers change their minds. But my small group had already turned in our audio tours so we sat around and talked and played silly games.
We played this one game called animals were you have a partner and on three you shout out an animal then on three again you shout out a combined form, and if you get it the same, you get a point. And making a sentence in a circle one word per person, it was pretty fun! Lots of laughs!
After the Haydn House we lollygagged toward the train stop taking pictures on the way! The sun started coming out and warming up! On the train ride, I journaled and read one of my ID magazines! The seating was a little cramped and uncomfortable.
We got back we walked around and looked for food and into eating at café latte. I got the general tso, which was pork and not spicy like I expected, it had sweet sauce over it. It was really delicious!
They had super awesome Wi-Fi so we got to upload pictures and text our friends. After dinner we went back to the hotel and did some reading and work.