Schlierbach and Steyr

Greetings! Saturday all of the International Students took a trip to another part of Upper Austria (the state of Austria that I live in) to do some sight seeing. First we went to Schilerbach which is a monastery decorated in Baroque fashion. The monastery used to hold hundreds of monks, but now is an elementary school. I can not imagine going to school in a place decorated like this.

We also got to go inside the Beauty and the Beast-like library.

The monastery is also now know world wide for their cheese production and for housing several famous glass makers. The end of the tour led us to a gallery where we could see some of the famous glass pieces and sample the cheese! The gallery also had an incredible view of the mountains and the town below.

We spent the rest of the day of the city of Steyr which was founded in medieval times. The picture below is of the palace where the lord of the town used to live. The city was beautiful, but Saturday was the coldest day we have had so far. It snowed on and off while we were there and we had to continually take breaks from our wandering the city to sit in cafes. What a life!

Saturday we also hit up a club, or disco as they say here, in Linz which was quite fun. Europeans really can't dance, so I fit right in and they played American eighty's music most of the night. No joke Vanilla Ice, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Rapper's Delight all came on back to back at one point. I relaxed Sunday and we hung out in the dorm, today will be much of the same and a little getting ready for German classes to start tomorrow. I have more pictures of my trip on my Picassa page and am going to try to get a link up for that soon. Look for it on the side of my blog.