Mountain Hoping

Today was more free time with our exchange families, and because I feel like much of the story will be missing if I only write about one day, I will write about the whole weekend, including Friday evening.

My journey with my host family started Friday evening after going with the whole exchange to Tubingen. I packed everything I might need for 2 days of living in a traditional Austrian farm house and we left.

The majority of the drive there we where on the autobahn going about 200 kilometers per hour to reach our destination of Pitztal, near the town of Imst.

Here is one of the pictures of Imst through clouds.

Saturday was mostly a relaxation day where we played cards and had some karaoke time with the radio. I also familiarized myself with house and it's surroundings.

Today we woke up around 8:30 and had a very traditional German breakfast with a large assortment of breads, meats, and jams. Immediately following this we drove to Kaunertaler glacier where the main attraction was a lake that was created through the continuous melting of glacial ice. This lake was a beautiful aqua color with many waterfalls leading to it

This was one of the couple dozen waterfalls that fed into the lake

Next we travelled to the top of the glacier where there was an abundance of snow in the middle of summer.

On top of the glacier we also went inside of a small and very dark ice cave

After this we took a gondola up to the peak on the glacier and arrived on the border of Italy and Austria where Maxi and I did several, novelty things such as having a snowball fight from Italy to Austria.

Here is one of the several views to the Italian Alps (Rome is in the direction of the photo)

From our exhaustion we craved food so we went back to the town of Imst to have lunch in a small restaurant on top of a mountain. This was an experience especially since the restaurant was in a cloud

I can finally I have touched a cloud.

Maxi and I had some traditional noodles with bacon and cheese called Kasspatzl'n.

We devoured the delicious noodles quite quickly and returned back to the farm house where Maxi and I played card games for a couple hours until dinner.

Dinner was in a special place called "Neu Amerika" (New America). This place was actually a farm which doubled as a restaurant specializing in ribs. So naturally as an American, I ordered the ribs and so did Maxi.

The ribs were fantastic.

After dinner we took a few selfies with the cute farm animals

At the end of the day we travelled back home on the autobahn once more as a relaxing way to finish this extraordinary day.

-Alex Saarinen