Vacation part 1 - Salzburg

I just got back from a 2-week vacation.  My friend Adelene flew over to meet me in Vienna, and we went off to Salzburg, Munich and Bregenz.  We had a wonderful time!  I will write a series of blogs about the trip, one for each city/region visited.

OK, part 1: Vienna, Salzburg and surroundings.

Our first weekend was spent here in Vienna.  I showed Adelene my favourite spots and the usual tourist-popular ones, including of course Schönbrunn palace, Hofburg, the Naschmarkt, the Belvedere and the cathedral.  On Saturday, we met up with my friend Mark and his mother (who was visiting from Australia) and went to Figlmüller's to eat some face schnitzel (schnitzel the size of your face!).  We then moved on to theSacher Cafe for Sacher torte and a latte.  Sooo much food, but sooo tasty! 

Saturday evening we went to hear Mozart's Requiem in performance at the Karlskirche.  One of my favourite pieces, sung in a Rococo church, makes for a nice evening! Though the setting did take some getting used to: Rococo means excessive use of gilding, cherubs and assorted decorations. It's a bit of sensory overload at first. More sightseeing on Sunday, and then a 4-course dinner at Schönbrunn followed by a fabulous concert of chamber music, opera, and even a bit of ballet. It was my second-favourite concert of the whole trip!

On Monday, we took the train to Salzburg.  What a pretty town! The river is green due to the limestone dissolved in the water.  We walked around taking some pictures and had a nice lunch. 

Then we played the ultimate tourists and went on a "Sound of Music" bus tour.  It took us to many of the locations where scenes from the movie were filmed, including the Von Trapp house (backyard terrace), the lake where Maria and the kids fell in, the road from "I Have Confidence", the gazebo, etc.  I even went so far as to sing along to the soundtrack in the bus on the way back! Now I really want to see the movie again, and notice things I learned about on the tour...

By the end of the day, the weather turned rainy, and we had a quiet evening.  On the second day, we were supposed to do a "Lakes and Mountains" tour of the surrounding countryside, including a boat ride on Lake Wolfgang and a cable car and short hike up a mountain.  Unfortunately, the weather was so awful the tour was cancelled and we had to turn back. :-(   We went to the Sacher Hotel for lunch and treated ourselves to Salzburgernockerl. It's a kind of very sweet soufflé/meringue; it supposedly served 2-3, so we thought we'd share one and theat would be our lunch. However, we discovered it was GINORMOUS, and only got about 2/3 through it before we gave up.

In the afternoon we took a shorter tour similar to the cancelled one, only without boat or mountain ascension.  It was still soggy, but it was not so bad.  On the way, we came across the Red Bull Sports Headquarters.  Did you know Red Bull is Austrian? The owner is the 4th richest man in the country. Red Bull sponsors sports from Formula 1 racing down to local community teams, very impressive really.  In another village we saw a booth with a friendly woman selling nothing but bacon. Heaven!  We also saw several explosions of cuckoo clocks...

On the third day, we walked through the old town from one end to the other, taking in sights such as Mozart's statue, Nonnberg Abbey, Mirabell gardens, the cathedral, myriad other churches, and the pedestrian shopping street. We came back to the hotel with sore feet, full tummies, lovely pictures... and dirndls.  (traditional Austrian dresses). 

We changed into our dirndls and took the cable car up to the fortress. We toured the fortress, had a nice dinner at the reastaurant up there, and then went to a wonderful concert of quartet and quintet music.  During intermission, we were lucky enough to have a bird's eye view of the sun setting over Salzburg.

On the fourth day, we had planned to go the the Eisriesenwelt, Europe's largest ice cave.  However, this cave is at the top of a mountain, and required a 40-minute hike to reach it.  But it was raining... A lot. (This would turn out to be a theme during our whole trip: if we tried to go up a mountain, the clouds would immediately gather and rain would fall. I felt a bit like Charlie Brown with my own personal rain cloud over my head.)  We judiciously switched our plans and went for a tour of a closed salt mine.  It was interesting, although maybe a bit too "touristy".  While deep underground, we crossed from Austria to Germany and back.  And on our way back to Salzburg, our tour guide (a nice American man from Boston who loved to hear himself talk) took a little detour into Germany to a Schnapps distillery, where a whole table of samples was waiting for us.  Bottoms up!

That day, we also went to the Stiegl (Austrian beer brand) Bräuwelt, or "Brew World", a kind of museum about the brewing of beer and the history of Stiegl.  At the end of the tour we were given coupons for 3 free samples of beer and a little gift.  We got to the restaurant and sat down, expecting to receive 3 shot-glasses of beer to taste and compare.  However, what we got were 200-mL portions of each, in cute mini beer mugs.  I think we drank 1/3 of the first one and then gave up (I still hate beer, but at least I tried it.) 

While we were there, we also noticed some brewery staff who came in on what was presumably their coffee break, except it would more aptly have been called a beer break: mid-morning brew, anyone? And then on our way out we got to pick our gift. We were expecting some token or other, but instead were offered the choice of a bottle of beer or a small Stiegl glass.  Great gifts, other museums should take notice!

Oh, so much more!  Here is just a random sampling of other things we came across:

The 7 dwarves' forgotten cousins, Gay and Messed-Up:

The old man in the tree:

 A stick figure army:

And then Salzburg was over, and we set off for Munich.  Please come back in a day or three for the next blog...