Continuing on with the Mariazell Adventure

So back to this medicinal schnapps. If you look at the pictures, I took a few of the schnapps-making equipment and then the final product, but I think that one came out a bit blurry. As soon as the other IES kids put some pictures on facebook, I'll shameless steal them and post them on my picasa thing. Which I'll put the link to at the bottom of this post. It really helps to look at them and read this at the same time. At least til I get captions put up there, maybe this weekend.

Anyway, this schnapps. We went up a set of curving stairs into the upper bottling room. There, we all got mini-shots of each kind of schnapps. The first one took everybody by surprise because it wasn't pleasant going down. But after a minute, once you got past the burn, it got better and left a very clean, herbal flavor in your mouth. Honest to God, I felt that little mini-shot all the way to my belly. It was kind of cool, but I'm not sure I liked it. The next two shots were a little easier going down, but that's probably because we were expecting them a bit more. The semi-bitter is the most traditional kind.

In the previous post, I mentioned that this was a family recipe. The Arzbergers had three sons. Back in the day, the first son got the business, the second got the farm, and the third was essentially useless. So the father took his third son to the monks in Mariazell, but they didn't need another monk-to-be. The son could not go back to his hometown because there was nothing there for him, and so he decided to stay on in Mariazell and apprentice to the schnapps maker in the town. By the time he was 19, the son had bought the business from the original owner. This was pretty much unheard of because it usually took a lot longer to surpass the master and generally one would go somewhere else and begin his own business instead of buying him out. It was the son who developed the recipe for the schnapps. But he was very jealous of his neighbor, who owned a larger yellow house with a better business location. Finally, the house went up for sale, but the young man did not have enough money. There was another family in the area who had many daughters. Several of the daughters were of marriagable age, and each came with a dowry. Between what the young man had saved and what he thought his wife would bring with her to the marriage, he thought that he would be able to buy the big yellow house. He wrote a long, flowery letter to the woman's father requesting her hand in marriage. He recieved a missive that was very direct and stated that he come to the house with 5000 Gulden, the currency of the day. In doing so, he became a married man, and was able to buy the big yellow house. From that day on, the recipe has been passed from father to son and is now in the fourth generation.

By now it was getting late and it was time to walk back to the Hostel. The houses of Mariazell are all painted in pastels with light colored trim, and parts of the streets are cobbled. All the streets are kind of narrow and most of the houses are at least three stories tall. I don't know if I acutally got any pictures of them, but it's incredibly pretty there. If you google Mariazell and look at the pictures that came up, I'll probably have seen some of those places.

Once we were back at the hostel, we had some time to ourselves before dinner, so I used the time to call Matt and home, and go through a lot of internet-withdrawal. After running up my phone bill quite a bit, it was time to discover dinner, which happened to be spaghetti and either meatsauce or something that looked like alfredo sauce. I was excited for the meat sauce and dumped a lot on my pasta. After trying a few bites, there was something definitely different. It was made with pork instead of beef. It was strange and stranger because it was completely unexpected.

After dinner, we were bussed to another hostel about 20 minutes away. There we saw a few presentations on social manners and the educational internship. Then we had a special treat, that the IES people called and authentic Austrian evening. It turned out that our Austrian evening was full of guys in lederhosen. There were seven dancers and one man that played the accordian. They had on traditional costumes with the high socks, the lederhosen, white shirts and hats with feathers and edelweiss in them. The ages of the dancers probably varied between 25 and about 40. The accordian player was probably in his sixties. The seven came out in a column, doing mini-yodel-yells and formed a circle where they slapped their legs and hopped around in sync. It was impressive. They did a few rounds and then it was our turn to learn how to do the slappy-jumpy dance. We had to do it in two groups and the guys in lederhosen laughed at us because we were so uncoordinated. Afterward, they brought out a blanket, a log, four axes, and a two-person saw. They also carried out a little pan that they could heat from underneath. Then they started doing their slappy thing again and started chopping rythmically. I'm very glad that they had good aim, or else people would have been missing important appendages like feet. And they actually made something in their little frying pan. And I got to try it. I'm not sure what it was, but it didn't taste that bad or anything. During their clean-up from that activity, they played a polka and picked some girls to dance with them. Then they gave the girls brooms to clean up the woodchips. Their last number was an uber-slappy-dance, where they all dramatically beat on each other. They also passed out a sweet bread thing and schnapps at the end.

Finally it was time to go home, and I opted to stay in and look over paperwork and get a shower and go to sleep.

End of Friday!