Day 16: St. Florian, Austria

Day Two in St. Florian! This place is so awesome! There has been a monastery here for almost 1,000 years…built around 1071. The current monastery (building) was only built about 250 years ago, but is built upon the original foundation. This is the same for the Basilika… In fact, you’d be interested to know that the walls of the Basilika, at its foundation, are 5 METERS thick!! (Yes, that’s right; meters…that’s around 15 feet!) The walls get thinner near the top of the church to about two meters in depth.

Today will be a really easy day for the boys—basically a free day. We had a tour around 11:00 this morning which brought us through the monastery (which has basically been turned into a museum—a tourist trap of sorts. There are still monks in St. Florian—but not in the monastery. They are dispersed among the area parishes. On the tour, we saw the library, the Imperial and Papal Rooms, including Anton Bruckner’s deathbed. Anton Bruckner was the organist at St. Florian for many years—he is a famous composer known to most worldwide. In fact, the boys sang a song this year composed by him called “Locus Iste” with the Schola Cantorum. On the tour we also saw the Basilika, and toured the crypt and Bone House. Anton Bruckner is buried in the crypt directly below the organ (now called the Bruckner Organ)...His sarcophagus is pictured below with the bone house in the background--YES! Those are real bones. There are about 6,000 human remains stored in the bone house. All in all...It was AWESOME!!! The boys were a little creeped out at the time, but said they loved it afterwards...

The boys then ate lunch, and had free time until 2:45 when we all went swimming! We did some gift shopping in the gift store around 4:00—and warmed up shortly after five o’clock for the 6:00 ‘concert’. The concert in the evening was just an informal private performance for the host families. The St. Florianer Sängerknaben sang a song for us and then we sang a set of songs for about 45 minutes. There was a barbeque fit for a king to follow the concert at which time the boys gorged themselves on pork chops, bratwurst, Kaiser Rolls, Potatoes, Kraut, Fanta, and Sprite.

After dinner, the boys set up a friendly game of Rugby with the St. Florianer boys and played until their host homes had to leave. The boys have long deserved a day off like this, and I think they really enjoyed it. Our stay here in St. Florian has been such an amazing experience. These people are just so nice to us!

Tomorrow we have some shopping time in the morning in Salzburg before we have to be on the road to Eichenau, Germany (near Munich). But it really is too bad we couldn’t spend more time in Austria, but I’m sure we have a lot of fun awaiting us back in Germany!