Traveling...

So, I am going to Austria Wednesday morning and I will be there until Sunday morning. Therefore, there will be no posts till then. We are going to be staying on night in Salzburg and three nights in Vienna. Here is some of an email that our program director sent us about some of the stuff that we are going to be doing there:

Mozart's Birthplace in Salzburg (Mozart Geburtshaus)
Vienna State Opera (Guided Tour)
Musikverein Wien (concert with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on Friday night)
Mozarthaus (Domgasse 5, Wien) This is the location of two of the most remarkable meetings in the history of music: where Haydn heard three of the string quartets Mozart dedicated to him and after which Haydn told Mozart's father, Leopold, that his son is the greatest composer he has ever known. The second is when the 16 year-old Beethoven came to ask Mozart if he could study with him and performed for him.
Haydn House (Haydngasse 19, Wien)
Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery where Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Johann Strauß--younger and elder--, Schönberg, Salieri, Zemlinksy, von Suppé, Krenek, Bösendorder and Hanslick are buried)

I'm very happy to be able to tell you that our trip coincides with "The Long Night of the Museums" (Der lange nacht der Museen) on Saturday night in Vienna. This is an excited event: all museums in Vienna are open from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Saturday night--one ticket and you can see any (and all) museum you want.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) pictures

Here are a couple pictures courtesy of my friend Jim Wang who is into photography and is learning how to use HDR techniques. Simple explanation is, you take a few pictures with different exposures and you blend them all together and do other magical things. Both these pictures are taken from the Heidelberg castle about 300 steps up behind where I live. 

Day Trip to Swetzingen Castle

We went to Swetzingen (a city about 20 minutes away from Heidelberg by bus) last Friday, and went on a tour of the castle and castle gardens there. Also went to see a modern version of the opera Cosi fan Tutte. It was very interesting....to say the VERY least.

Have Fun Storming the Castle!

Here are some pictures from this past Sunday. We took a train to somewhere about 15 minutes away from Heidelberg and we hiked up to some old castles and castle ruins that were once owned by Minnesingers (German lyric poets and singers of the 12th-14th centuries who performed songs of courtly loved, oh and made a lot of money). And to get back to Heidelberg we took a boat.

(For Mom and Dad)

By the way, I know you guys might be complaining about the size of the pictures. Well, there is some magic on this blog that will let you see them even bigger :-0  Just click on the pictures to see them full size, and then poof! They will be!

More Pictures

Some pictures right outside my hotel. The windows in the second picture are the windows to the guy's rooms and mine are the two on the right. The third picture is looking to the right outside our door and the fourth is looking to the left towards our courtyard where the pictures of the previous post were taken

Picture Time

These are some pictures taken from the end of my street about 15 yards from the door of my hotel. They are panning from the left to the right.

The Church is the Church of the Holy Ghost and the fourth picture is the Heidelberg Rathaus (town hall). 

My Address

So I forgot that some of you might possibly want to send me stuff like, I don't know, letters or whatever. Or maybe some of you might want to know exactly where I live. Well here is the address of the Pension Jeske, located almost in the middle of Old Heidelberg, and about 100 feet away from the Church of the Holy Ghost. And just to let you know, the street name Mittelbadgasse does not mean what it sounds like. It means middle bath lane.


Cameron Belsey
bei Pension Jeske
Mittelbadgasse 2
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

Wartburg Castle

By the way, the castle in the picture is Wartburg castle overlooking the city of Eisenach. We went on the tour of the castle, and it is where Martin Luther was hiding under a different name and where he translated the New Testament from Greek into German. Pretty good use of his fugitive days I'll say.

We landed in Frankfurt last Saturday at 8AM here, and we were all incredibly jet lagged and groggy. So what was the first thing we did when we got there? We went on a walking tour of our beautiful town of Heidelberg. This would have been fine, except I was feeling horrible. Either something I ate or just an upset stomach from traveling. The next day, Sunday, we went on a bike tour to Ladenburg, a city a few miles away from Heidelberg. It is a pretty little town with lots of cobblestones, so my butt really hurt riding my bike through it. But something that was really cool was that we were lucky enough to be there on the only day of the week that the Benz museum is open. We went in the actual garage where Karl Benz invented the first automobile. It was amazing to be there! And the story of how the first car was driven was funny. Karl Benz was asleep, and his wife wanted to go into town to get milk, and she didn't want to wait for him to wake up, so she took the car.

The next few days (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, September 1-4) we all got acquainted with our surroundings and living area by going on tours and starting our German class in which we also talk about the cultural differences and what we need to be careful of. We were not able to unpack all the way because last Thursday we left for our first study trip.

On Thursday we took a train from Heidelberg to Eisenach, the city where Bach was born and lived in most of his life. We went to the famous Bachause (Bach House) where for 200 years people thought he lived there, but now they are doubting it. Then we went to Weimar, where Bach also worked and we went on a tour of Liszthause (Liszt's house) which was in the exact and original way he left it, including all the stuff in it. Amazing. We then went to Leipzig, another place where Bach lived/worked/played and we also went on a tour of Mendelssohnhause, which was pretty cool. We went to one of our required concerts in THE "Bach Church," AKA Thomas Kirche church, and the concert was a boy's choir. Amazing. Last night, (Saturday night) we went to see a free outdoor concert of the Leipzig symphony orchestra, but it was raining really hard so everyone got to go in their concert hall for free!!! It was almost the same as Disney hall, but bigger I am told. It was INCREDIBLE!! And free. Amazing.

Hello

Hey everyone. So I decided to create this blog cuz I think it will be way easier than emailing everyone, and generic emails are kind of hard, as I just found out. So how about a generic blog? Oh and this way I can post pictures and stuff.