Red Bull this, Red Bull that…

I started my classes this past week and so far they have all been great, I am taking courses on Austrian Culture, Folk Art, WWII in Central Europe and continuing my German language courses.  So far my favorite course is Austrian Culture, as our teacher seems to get the most out of us by really grilling us in the hour and a half he gets twice a week.  I thought WWII in Central Europe was going to be great but the teacher just kinda reads from his powerpoint for the entire class period.  My Folk Art teacher seems to like me but I’m kinda scared of her, oh well.

But enough about school, I went skiing again this weekend to my new favorite ski resort, Snow Space Ski Amade, in the Salzburg region.  Ski Amade is a huge and is really 4 resorts connected across 2 mountains about 45 minutes south of Salzburg.  The resorts are Flachau, Wagrain, Alpendorf and St. Johann.  So far we haven’t ventured to far away from Flachau where we get dropped off at but on Friday we took a tram to Wagrain and tested the waters for a bit in that resort.  It was great skiing but a little more crowded then Flachau so on Saturday we just stuck to the main resort we get dropped off at.  On Saturday we had a better idea of the resort so the day went much smoother, we even found time to hike up past the highest ski lift on the mountain.  We ended up on a ridge over-looking the Ennskraxn and the little city of Kleinarl.  We were on the highest point around for a few miles and it literally made us feel as though we were on top of the world.  Definitely worth it even though ski boots are the worst things in the world to walk in, let alone hike in.

If we had the choice, we never would have left but lift tickets cost money and we wanted to get our money’s worth.  After a full day of goofing off and typical behavior of 4 guys in college we had to call it a day.  Exhausted we headed home looking forward to Sunday where we were going to be treated to an FC Red Bull Salzburg game by our program AIFS.  

FC Red Bull Salzburg play in the Austrian Bundesliga and they are the reigning champions of the past 2 seasons and it seems as though they are going to make it 3 in a row.  They’re on top of their league at the moment and the team they are playing sit 3rd so it should be a great game.  The team they are playing is FK Austria Wien from Vienna so I expected a pretty good fight.  Turns out they aren’t very good, maybe it was an off night but Salzburg cruised to a 4-1 win and really just outplayed Vienna from the opening whistle.

For some reason though, Fc Salzburg has a 30,000 seat stadium but only seems to attract about 10,000 fans a game.  It kinda puts a damper on the atmosphere inside the stadium but the Stiegls were flowing and we made as much noise as possible regardless and had a great time.

Classes again on Monday and Tuesday, not much to talk about here…

But on the way to class Tuesday we saw a billboard for the Red Bull Salzburg HOCKEY team, yes there is hockey in Salzburg.  Apparently they’re in the playoffs and they played about an hour after class gets out Tuesday night.  Seems like a no brainer considering tickets are only 15 euros.  I wasn’t sure what to expect but buckled up for the ride ahead as I hear things could get pretty rowdy in Red Bull Arena.. (If you hadn’t figured it out yet, everything here is sponsored by Red Bull because Red Bull is headquartered just outside of Salzburg.)

Just arrived and it could not be any more different then an NHL game… It pretty much has the atmosphere of a soccer game, flags waiving, fans chanting and jumping in unison, the away section is divided from the rest of the stadium by plexiglass boards for their safety.  Standing room around the entire rink with seats behind that!  We bought tickets for 15 euros and got to stand on the glass the entire night!  We asked one of the locals what the biggest differences between Austrian hockey and the NHL and he said “bigger ice in Europe, no fighting in Europe, the refs suck and the players are a bunch of wusses…”  Sounds fun lets get this started…

The arena isn’t huge but it was one of the loudest sporting events I’ve ever been too.  We found out that it’s the quarterfinals of the playoffs and so far Red Bull Salzburg is leading the series 2 games to 0.  However they played terrible that night and got smashed 5-1.  There were a few names that didn’t seem Austrian so we looked them up and both teams had some Americans and Canadians on them which made it fun to know at lest a few players could understand our yelling.

Anyway as you can expect the game got pretty chippy by the 3rd period as the Salzburg players weren’t too thrilled with getting smashed at home.  But again, the “no fighting” rule kinda just makes it so players square off and can’t hit each other… Don Cherry would be very disappointed.. Regardless they still get penalties which is pretty dumb considering nobody threw any punches but anyway it still gave us a chance to mess with them in the penalty box.

The opposing team seemed to find our heckling pretty funny considering they were wining  by 4… Salzburg on the other hand did not find us funny…

By the way, this happy fellow is Brett Sterling, from California who unlike the other guys in the penalty box could understand me when I told them “to stop dancing with the other team and throw a punch”… Oh well, still had a great night.  Definitely going to return for another game later this week if the series last long enough.

But anyway, that’s it for now.  Last week was somewhat of a boring week with the focus being on school and getting my schedule figured out for the semester ahead.  Next weekend should be more interesting with our first big trip planned and ready to go, more on that next week so stay tuned.  Auf Wiedersehen!