2.10-7.10 Wall of text, write everyday ffs
All right. A lot of things to write about. Sorry about the long break. I've been a bit down about mission Salzburg. It doesn't look like things will go down as I liked, so tomorrow we are driving to Hungary... Read more lower:
Football: It was a great week of Football, 2-4.10. Champions League is always joy to watch and I'm glad after these rounds there's plenty of interesting games left. I'm glad Valencia got draw vs United. Makes their group very interesting. Barca beating Tottenham puts them in very tough spot. I'm not sure if they will recover from this. Losing to Inter away was a tough beat for Tottenham. Losing home to Barca was no surprise, because they have so many injuries right now. Barca hasn't impressed in LaLiga at all but I guess even their entitled and old crew gets sometimes excited by big CL games. Messi showed up and that's enough most of the times for Barca. Rest of the team played good as well.
Thursday we had opportunity to go watch Europe League game, Salzburg vs Celtic. I just remember it was a very busy day and at the end we were just happy to stay at hotel and watch the match. Celtic fought well but lost at the end, I thought the ref gave quite harsh red card to Celtic, which basically ended the match to Salzburgs win. It was fun to follow Celtic fans coming up our hotel in Salzburg. Normally so quiet Salzburg got a lot of action. Police was ready outside the Irish pubs for possible fights(match day). Gotta love the passion Celtic fans showed and boy do they love drinking. The hotel lobby smelled even in the morning after their nightly drinking.
Renting a flat in Salzburg/Austria:
Not an easy task. We wanted to find a furnished flat in Salzburg. Not an easy tas. first of All, almost all flats are not furnished, so not many options. Then we have a small dog, it cut few options as well. Then we had language barrier while asking on a phone if they speak English: "nein" and call ends. Rental length was also not optimal, apparently here they make only 3-4 year rental contracts, but you can leave after one year, If you want. So min. Rental time is one year. We never wanted to commit here longterm(3-4 years), maybe one year. It seems the best most of the time, them move on. Then we also had problem with bureaucracy(which we found out later), that we would have to get longterm residency permission after 3-4 months. Good note to myself, always check these facts before you travel and try to move somewhere. Hah.
At the end we started lowering our expectations and started looking for 1 bedroom places(basically I need one bedroom for my office), so one bedroom is not ideal but we wanted to give it all and check flats without furniture as well. It gave us more options.
As someone moving around a lot. You don't want to own furniture. It's simply annoying. I feel like I have too much already with me, so I wonder what kind of burden big amount of furniture would be. Normally I leave my tables/chairs to whoever rented the place to me or take those to charities. I think it's fine way. A bit of a waste but I don't see myself moving this stuff around Europe, unless I had truck and truck license.. Then it would be fine. I hate the idea of buying furniture, building them up, then selling them/throwing away after one year.
BTW I like IKEAs idea of taking back old furniture and giving you discount on a new one. It seems a quite good system and we can keep these old furniture going to use again instead of junkyard. Our resources in the world are not unlimited.
Exercise/moving/Diet/weight
Exercise:
We have been walking here on Average 11km per day, so few hours a day. I count that as an exercise, because I don't feel bad about not moving more. We've been exploring the nature, flats, salzburg etc. At the end quite satisfied with the movement. I want to get back to regular exercising though, but living in hotel never feels like your own home and having same routines seems tougher to keep up. Also this feels like semiholiday trip. Weird trip.
Diet:
It's been tricky. We are staying at hotel, so we have been eating at restaurant for a one week. I think my restaurant choices been quite excellent, outside of local beer what I have tried. Certainly beer is not something you want to have too much if you are losing weight. I think drinking beer has slowed down my progress(if I still have progress!??), but otherwise I'm quite happy.
Restaurants are full of temptations but we have been trying to stick to as much as possible to health Restaurants, vegetarian etc and if you go to Austrian restaurant choose the healthiest meal you can. Basically every restaurant today offers salad. Few times I had steak with salad, quite good as well. I don't want to eat too much red meat, though.
Weight:
I'm curious about my weight because I have no idea if I am gaining or losing. I think I should be at least at the same when we left but it's tough to say. It would be crushing if I would be back at the start weight. First thing when we find a flat in Budapest, I will go buy a scale. I need to see my weight daily to push myself. It's a great reminder. I am a bit scared to see the scale number. I hope I have done okay. I don't want to make the rest of the challenge torture for myself. I will give my All, though, till the end.. I still believe I will lose the weight. It's a great challenge.
Eagles nest hiking trip:
Last Friday we had a great weather here and we decided to hike the mountain up to Eagles nest (history of it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehlsteinhaus). It was a good idea but bad reading skills of signs led us to follow googlemaps, which was a big mistake. We walked first somewhere one kilometer and then started hiking up, googlemaps said the trip would take 1,5 hours. For someone who doesn't hike that much(basically never), that sounded just fine. 1,5 hours is not that bad. The truth was something else..
Anyway, even the start of our journey was a bit sketchy because googlemaps was showing us to go way, which had earlier some red tape crossing the road but someone had cut it. We decided to take the road anyway, because that's where the googlemaps is saying and it could be an good adventure. We also took our Chihuahua with us and his bag, so we could carry him time to time.(Small dogs get tired).
The road was not well maintained. My GF was a bit scared and the lack of other people was a bit weird as well. I guess this wasn't the main road to Eagles nest. We were a bit worried but googlemaps was still showing us forward so we just kept going. After 30 mins we saw some old house. It was like straight from horror movies. My internet stopped working at the same time. Thank God it was day time because at night these forests would be scary as ****. Human mind is powerful coming up with ****ed up stories. Anyway, we just quickly walked past the house(I think the front door was open), but we didn't see anyone. It just felt unreal, internet stops working when the creepy house shows up. I just wanted to see if we were still on the right way. We were. Internet started working again for a bit and I was able to check our location. We kept walking and the signs were saying 3 hours to top, 4 hours to top, 2,5 hours to top(EN). I guess someone was trolling us with changing the signs. It made no sense. Googlemaps was telling us 1 hour, signs 2,5 - 4 hours. What to believe??
We just kept walking and after 1,5 hours, when we're supposed to arrive at the location or be near it, I couldn't get my internet working again. So technically googlemaps was right. It knew at what point the internet would crash(and googlemaps trip is over), but we were not even close to end. We still had to hike few more hours to get to the top. Normally i trust googlemaps quite a bit but not as much after this trip, at least not on my hikes. Lesson learned in that regard as well.
All right. I think this became too long post already. I will post tomorrow more after we arrive to Budapest. Cya!