Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

Location: Hallstatt, Austria
 
When you go on vacation, you spend a lot of time stuck in waiting mode. It’s a given. It might as well be a feature.

It starts at the airport. You wait to check-in for the flight, wait to get through security, and wait to board the plane. Once on the plane, you wait to be served and wait for your turn to use the restroom.

The waiting game continues as soon as you arrive at your destination. You wait to get your luggage, wait to clear through customs, wait for the ride to the hotel, and wait for your room at the hotel.

It doesn’t stop there. If you’re part of a tour, you wait for your guide to lead you on to more waiting at the museums and other popular attractions. If you’re on your own, the waiting isn’t over by any means. It just gets worse since you have to deal with it all by your lonely self.

Waiting is inconvenient for sure, but it brings order out of chaos. It makes everybody falls in line, so to speak. In the meantime, you can put it to use by reading a good book or texting. Better still, you can take it as an opportunity to look around you, this time with a sense of urgency that you won’t be back there again. On occasions like this, special moments can occur. Get your camera ready.

One of those moments happened to me in Hallstatt, a small village in the Salzkammergut region of Austria. While waiting for the ferry, it started to rain that made a group of Japanese tourists put up their umbrellas. Against the backdrop of a darkening sky, the sight of their colorful umbrellas was simply irresistible that I took a picture of it right away. It remains one of my favorites to this day.

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Wordless Wednesday: Waiting for the Ferry

Location: Hallstatt, Austria

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unusual

Location: Hallstatt, Austria
 
While visiting Austria, I was amazed at how beautiful and well-maintained the cemeteries are. The graveyard plots look more like small gardens.

 
Americans may find it unusual, but you don’t buy a gravesite in this part of the world. It’s leased for a certain period of time instead. In Halstatt, for instance, I was told that a family can lease the plot and maintain the rights to it until its last member dies.

 
As the need arises, the family prepares the plot for reuse by exhuming the remains of the current occupant and the bones are either transferred to the ossuary or cremated. In some cases, the skull is saved and cleaned and put on display in the Beinhaus (Bone House). Once the last member of the family dies, the plot becomes available for another family to take over.

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Inside Austria: Hallstatt in the Rain

Location: Hallstatt, Austria
 
It was raining when the bus dropped us off by the train station where a ferry would take us across the lake to Hallstatt, a small village in the Salzkammergut region of Austria.