Seeing the world; One day at a time

After spending four days in Italy, my friends and I boarded our final train of a 7 hour ride from Venice to Salzburg. I had been looking forward to this train ride because I knew I would see “some mountains”.
When I had envisioned our train ride to Salzburg, I could never have imagined what we actually saw. Our little, fast moving train zoomed through the Alps, with mountains after mountains on each side of us. These mountains had little villages in between them which seemed to pop up out of our windows every couple of minutes, and every house was painted bright colors and designed so differently from one another. A very different contrast then what we were use to back in our hometowns in Ontario. There were so many moments that we would start giggling because we couldn’t get over how happy we were, and there were so many moments where we had to wipe away tears of happiness because we couldn’t contain them anymore.
We arrived in Salzburg December 31st, 2013 and after checking into our hotel and grabbing dinner at a nearby pub, we walked to downtown Salzburg for the first time and I immediately fell in love with the city. The winding, cobbled streets felt so authentically European. As soon as the words “Oh, wow look how weird the sky looks!” came out of me, I realized how beautiful the world really is. That sky I thought I was looking at was actually a mountain and the so called clouds I thought I was looking at, were its snow covered peaks.
The entire city gathered at the town square shortly before midnight so my friends and I bought some beer and joined them. As we all counted down to midnight we embraced each other with hugs and love and were on top of the world when the new year began. It was a foggy evening but still clear enough to see the fireworks exploding over Hohensalzburg Fortress, a medieval structure which towers over the city-centre. While my friends and I noticed that the traditional "Auld Lang Syne" song did not play we were pleasantly surprised when everyone started Waltzing in the street, which I learned later is actually called the Blue Danube Waltz, a tradition in Austria. Those Austrians know how to be romantic.
Ringing in the year 2014 in Austria with my friends was amazing. I cannot wait to one day look back on my life and tell my grandchildren about how I'll never forget the day that I took a train ride through the Alps and danced the Blue Danube Waltz with thousands of others.