Great weekend in Salzburg

Even though it didn't seem like I was doing much this weekend, this weekend ended up being a lot of fun. On Friday a group of us went to Europark, which is a very large mall on the other side of town. There were a bunch of stores with clothes that actually fit me when I tried them on. I'm lucky that I don't usually like to spend a lot of money or else I would be broke at the moment. Some people that were with us went a little bit spending crazy, but I think that they will probably take it easy for a while. It's always fun to notice how things differ in Austria from the U.S. and the mall had a few differences that I noticed right away. One was that there were a supermarket and stands inside the mall which sold fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, etc. The supermarket also had carts that you can take around the mall with you if you put a deposit down on the cart (like the carts at Aldi, only you need either a 1 or 2 Euro coin to get a cart). As always, when you take the cart back you get your money back. There were also lockers that you could use with the same system of putting a deposit down and getting your money back later. It just seems incredibly funny that if you want a cart or a locker in a mall back home you have to pay at least a few dollars and you don't get the money back. It seems like stores here actually care about security (being able to use lockers) and ease/comfort for families, especially families with children (free carts for shopping/pushing kids around in).

The other most exciting part of my weekend was the soccer game yesterday. Like I said in my last post, we won the game 2-0, although we should have had at least 2 more goals than that. We had great seats though for the game. We were in the third row toward the corner of the field on its east side. Since we were students we were able to get discounted tickets and we only had to pay 14 Euro. There is a section on either end of the field where the crazy-mega-fans for each team sit. We were a couple of sections over from the Salzburg fans and I don't think that they got quiet once the entire game. They have chants, motions, or songs for just about everything that can happen in a game. One thing that I thought was neat was that instead of booing, the crowd whistles when something bad happens. I remembered that from the bullfights in Spain also. It is such a horrible sound when an entire stadium is whistling as high as they possibly can, but it gets the point across. After the game, there were all sorts of police and crowd control around. The fan section from Salzburg took the field and marched across to the other team's fan section waving flags and chanting. The police formed a line in front and drove them back to the center of the field. From what I could see I don't think that anything violent or bad actually happened. Eventually, all of us went out on the field too. Players were walking around taking pictures with people, signing autographs, and being interviewed. It was a lot of fun overall to be able to go to the game and especially to be out on the field after the game was finished.

The rest of the weekend was spent hanging out, studying, reading, doing homework, etc. I meant to do laundry at some point also, but I forgot to get that done. It's not too big of a deal. I just need to make sure that I wash everything that I have before we leave for Cologne Thursday morning. That's about all I have for now. Thanks, as always, for the comments that you all leave. I especially enjoyed the two comments that were in German on the last post. I'm sure I'll write on here again soon.

Video Clip:

At the game: