Eli's last week in Salzburg

This was Eli's last week in Salzburg, for this trip. She will spend all of next week in Sankt Jakob im Rosental taking an art course from Joze Ciuha, a Slovenian artist. The village is in Kaernten and should have milder weather than we get in Tirol.

On Wednesday night we went to dinner with Horst Clausen, recently retired as the head of the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Salzburg. Although retired from the Austrian work force, he will continue working a while longer at New Mexico Tech in Socorro. He has been our friend and occasional benefactor since our first stay here, the 1992-1993 academic year.

On Thursday night we returned to the same small Italian restaurant with Anne Thysell and Claes Johansson, the Swedish couple with whom we are living for our stay in Salzburg. Anne is a wine buyer for Spar, a huge Austrian company that sells many products, but most visibly runs a large grocery store chain. Claes is in the food wholesale business. They are a really neat couple. We are hoping they will visit us in Tirol before we leave at the end of July.

Although still rainy, there have been enough breaks in the weather to get in some bike rides. The most ambitious to date was to the top of Salzburg's Gaisberg. The climb from the apartment totals a modest 845 meters, but 265 meters of that occurs in the final 2.6 kilometers. Luckily the local Konditorei is keeping us roly-poly.

A more memorable ride was to nearby (15 kilometer) Eugendorf along a well maintained biking/walking/blading path which Eli had discovered several weeks earlier. On the way back we stopped in Sam where there was a neat art gallery at Sebastian Karl's home. The large back yard had a large pond, infested with frogs and surrounded by random sculptures. The basement featured a large three room gallery of sculptures, paintings, wood block prints and so on. There were perhaps 24 artists represented, one of whom was Sebastian. We were the only visitors so he gave us a personal tour.

Richard
2004.06.19