Salzburg and digital-earth.eu - Day 2

Friday January 21st


Snow was falling lightly through the night, and had left a covering on cars, but the pavements were clear - there'd was no shortage of Salz in Salzburg !

After breakfast, we walked the ten minutes from Itzlinger Hof to the university Techno campus, which featured those departments which involved technology. In one of the blocks, we crossed the artificial river, and took the lift to the third floor, where we found Z-GIS



Pictures by Michaela Lindner Fally
This was a facility established by Joseph Strobel, who was not present at the meeting as he was in India.
Fortunately the language for the project was English - my language skills were put to shame, although I picked up a few phrases and only had to shake my head in incomprehension a few times.

There were some remarkable people on the project, and then there was me. There were more PhDs than you can shake a stick at. The evaluator was Harry Rogge, who had been involved in education for many years, and was currently involved in a project to build a brand new school. We used the Google Earth app on the iPad to find the location of the school during our meeting.

There was lengthy discussion on the background to the project, the financing and the deliverables: all required because of the EU funding that was making the networking possible.

Each person introduced themselves with a few slides, and there was a wide range of experience and talent amongst the project team - a real eye opener into another world of European connections and traveling...
Some of the team were known to each other, but there were a few of us, such as Ali from Turkey who were fairly new.

Over to the university canteen for lunch - a vey nice fish fillet with vegetables and crusty roll, plus drinks,

Lots of drinks and fruit and chocolates and biscuits brought from various project members were on the side to keep us. The project had gained funding thanks to Karl's extensive work in EU projects such as HERODOT over many years, and his lobbying of MEPs through EUROGEO, the European association for Geography.

There were a few things that we focussed on in particular. The main one was planning an event in Salzburg in July which would be the first of three such events over the next three years.
This would involve us organizing workshops and engaging visiting speakers. John Lyon from the Geographical Association would be taking my place for the July event

Groups were arranged. There was some overlap of the themes, but my area of curriculum was the one that I decided to focus on.

After the meeting ended at around 6pm, we had time to walk back to the hotel for a quick-change, and then had to walk along the river - fortunately my down jacket from Iceland was getting another airing as the temperature for most of the time in the city was below freezing.

We came across a huge group of musicians who were gathered in Salzburg for something we discovered later was an event called Guggemusik (which my iPad kept insisting on autocorrecting to Guggenheim) There were bands from all the Alpine regions, including some from Lithuania as well as an Austrian group.
They gathered somewhere once a year - the previous year had been in Prague.

They were fuelled by energy and alcohol and we encountered them for the rest of the weekend. There were some wonderful costumes, with painted faces and instruments. I met up with Michaela and we wandered through the musicians, listening to the competing bands. These photos were taken by Michaela too.
Don't forget to visit my FLICKR SET to see all of my pictures...





Pictures by Michaela Lindner Fally

Peterskeller, our restaurant for the night, was in the corner of a square in the old town - I discovered later that I had missed out on seeing some catacombs in the area. The restaurant had apparently been in existence for over 1000 years. One surreal moment was a trip up to a splendid dining room on the upper floor, which was full of some of the 400 odd musicians who were booked in there that evening. The staff were getting in on the act with face paint
There was a wonderful atmosphere to the whole city, and to the restaurant too. On the way to the restaurant, I was starting to get the hang of the little alleyways which cut through the blocks of buildings which led to the base of the crags where the restaurant was completed.

The lift to the castle at the top was closed because of refurbishments - the original plan had been to eat in the restaurant in the castle above the old town...

There was excellent service from the man who was in charge of the room: the starter was kohl rabi soup - not something i will probably have again. Some very decent wine was drunk, and then it was back to the hotel. Ran for the late bus, after wandering the old town in the falling snow.
An earlyish night as there was another long day ahead the following day...

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