In the past three weeks there's been a lot of, Paris is my favorite city.... no Lucerne is favorite city... no Munich is my favorite city... but seriously, Salzburg is my favorite city! We got in yesterday afternoon on a very crowded train - since the flooding, the train schedules are all out of whack and even though there is normally a train to Salzburg every hour, there were only two or three total yesterday. I accidentally left my ipod in the hostel :( but thank goodness they found it and are shipping it back home in the states.
1:30 PM Salzburg/Vienna (I got lazy last night and decided to just drink wine and go to bed)
For the first time since Barcelona, we have actually felt
hot! The weather is so nice, but we definitely are having a little bit of luck
after our period of nothing but rain (still holding onto our umbrellas,
though!). In Salzburg we stayed at a budget hotel just a 15-20 minute walk from
the old city. The receptionist was so friendly and quick to chat with us about
our travels. Apparently when she was in India, the receptionist sold them a
broken air conditioner! He knew fully that the AC didn’t work, and asked them
if they would like to buy it anyway. Moral of the story is don’t buy “AC” in
India :P We went to dinner at this nice Italian place called L’Osteria. Andy
ordered something called “spaghetti marinara” … you’d think that was just
spaghetti and red sauce, right? Well it was a total seafood dish! It came out
and was literally staring at him – two large prawns with eyes still intact
(just like in Malaysia!) were on top and the rest of the sauce had mini
octopus, squid, and other unidentified sea creatures in it. It was pretty funny
actually… good thing he likes seafood because I don’t think he realized what he
had ordered. We saw a couple pizzas go
by our table and swore that we were coming back the next day for the pizza!
The Italian food is so authentic here – tastes just like it does in Italy,
combined with super speedy and friendly Austrian servers. Best of both worlds!
So far the Austrains have been the friendliest out of all the locals we have
met.
Mozart, even though being known for living in Vienna, was
born in Salzburg, and besides the Sound of Music, it’s the main thing the town
boasts about. You can buy chocolates, liquor and other various items with
Mozart’s head printed on it in just about every shop. I’m assuming it’ll be
similar in Vienna as well. Some of the more expensive things you can do in
Salzburg generally involve classical concerts that come with dinner or a Sound of
Music musical show. We saved a bit of money with the Sound of Music bike tour –
it still wasn’t cheap, but it sounded a lot more fun than the more expensive
bus tour. I’ve been watching the Sound of Music since I was really young, and
it’s always been one of my favorite movies growing up (that’s actually kind of
an understatement, I’m obsessed with it). So even though the bike tour was 26€
a person, there wasn’t really an option, I had to do it! The good thing about
it was that Andy got a lot out of it as well, despite its cheesiness, the
Salzburg landscapes are gorgeous and our guide provided quite a bit of history
as well as just telling us “the von Trapp kids were here in this scene”.
Our budget hotel didn’t come with breakfast but you could
purchase it for 10€ each. We bought it for the first morning because our bike
tour was at 9:30 and this was the easiest way for us to get coffee and food and
still make it on time! Our hostel breakfast in Munich was 3.60€ each and the
only difference was that the hotel one had scrambled eggs… lol, all well. What
can you do? Those 6€ scrambled eggs were pretty good, actually ;) When I say
“budget hotel”, I don’t mean that it wasn’t nice. It was very clean and the
room was reasonably spacious but had a nice big bathroom. The budget comes into
play when we realized this place has no air conditioning. Austria is quite
warm! We were totally fine, but we figure it would be on the miserable side
come July and August.
The bike tour met in Mirabelleplatz which is a palace and
garden where parts of the movie were shot (think Doe a Deer and that whole
scene there they are standing on the steps and the aerial shot where they’re
skipping around the fountain). The tour first took us around the city to the
square where the Nazis marched in (in the movie still) and there was a large
Nazi flag flown on one of the buildings. Apparently, some of the citizens were
not aware of the filming in the 60’s and thought that the Nazis were coming
back to Austria when they saw the flag!
This is the fountain Maria splashes the water at while singing "I have Confidence"!
Remember this building from the movie? It has a large Nazi flag on it while the Nazis march in
In the Abbey where the children come to see Maria
The hills are alive!
The film crew had to go through a whole
lot of trouble getting various permits and other permissions to film in the
places they did. We biked by the oldest bakery in Salzburg and Christopher
Plumber is reported to have eaten here so many times that the crew joked about
having to make the captain’s costume a little bigger! Next to the bakery is the
catacombs that were the inspiration for the fleeing scene at the end of the
movie when they are hiding from the Nazis. The city of Salzburg did not allow
them to shoot the scene here out of respect for the dead so they recreated it
in LA. It looks quite different than the one in LA so I wonder how the scene
would have been different if they were given permission to use it…
The gates in the catacombs that were an inspiration for the ones in the movie
Nonnburg Abbey is the abbey were Maria was trying to be a
nun and it’s up quite a steep mountain. Most of us walked our bikes, as it was
so steep, and we got to see the gates that the children went up to looking for
Maria. While we were climbing, our tour guide played “Climb Every Mountain”
from the movie. I couldn’t help but laugh because that was the scene I was
mostly likely to fast forward through when I was younger, but I totally enjoyed
it on this tour. The abbey is still being used so unfortunately we didn’t get
to see the actual courtyard where the nuns were singing. Too bad. Same thing
for the opera house – we only saw the outside and the stair case they shot
from, but we didn’t get to see the actual stage where the family sang at the
festival. There was a very steep descent
down the mountain from the abbey and I could really tell how much the brakes on
my bike had been used! I got quite the hand work-out while trying not to skid
on any crooked cobble stones. In our group, we had a handful of funny Chinese
tourists and one of them was really not good at riding a bike. Riding next to
her was terrifying because you never knew when she was just going to fall over!
I say that this group was “funny” mainly because of the way they were
documenting the tour. For example, they all had super fancy cameras and kept
taking pictures of each other doing hilarious things, like the guy would get
down on the knees and make the woman ride her bike slowly towards him while he
filmed her… (we weren’t even going anywhere, we had stopped so the guide could
tell us about a certain site and they would just do things like that
constantly).
Our tour guide was a 22 year old Ecuadorian guy who had
travelled to Salzburg for downhill mountain biking and decided to stay after
falling in love with it. He liked making us do hilarious poses from the movie
and was always playing various songs from the soundtrack for us as we biked. We
biked about 15 minutes out of town to the lake where we could see the palace
used for the back of the von Trapp house (the front and the back are actually
two different shooting locations) and he had us take a group picture pretending
to fall in the lake as Maria and the children fell out of the canoe! This
palace is actually now used by Harvard University for some summer program and
they even shoot 4th of July fireworks over this lake… typical,
discrete Americanism :P This area was so beautiful and the meadows along the
way all had pretty little wild red roses growing with the grass.
Unfortunately,
Andy was horrifically allergic to something in the air and even though I had
him take an Allegra D that morning, it was no use. I felt bad as he wasn’t able
to enjoy the rest of the bike tour as much because he’s miserably allergic to
Austria! (After the tour we bought him some Benedryl, but even that has had
minimal effectiveness.)
Next we rode down this beautiful country-like roads and
neighborhoods to the location of the front of the von Trapp mansion and the
tour guide convinced me to make that skipping video swinging his bag as Maria
does when travelling to the house for the first time. I went out all out (check
facebook for the video) and everyone thought it was so hilarious that the funny
Chinese tourists made me do it AGAIN for their camera… of course. Lol. I
certainly enjoyed doing the little heel click that Maria does as well (I’ve
seen that movie a stupid amount of times… you have no idea) and the only thing
that would have made it better is if I had had a guitar case in my other hand
;) We also saw the famous gazebo where Leisle
dances around with Ralph and the Captain proposes to Maria. This scene
was actually shot in LA and the gazebo in Salzburg is a replica built for the
city after the movie was successful as a way to say thanks. The gazebo is
locked shut because some American was dancing around in it singing “I am 63
going on 64” and slipped off a bench that she leapt on and broke her hip. Being
American, she sued the city of Salzburg and now no one can go in the gazebo.
After wondering a bit over the past few weeks why Americans tend to have the
reputation they do… that gave us a lot of insight… what a horrible thing to do.
Hurray! I'm actually here!!
Just biking along... and dangerously taking pictures :P This is what the country roads looked like!!
The last stop on the tour was back to the Mirabelle Gardens
where we saw the tunnel that the children race in on their bikes, the steps and
the fountain. Andy’s allergies were so bad at this point that he was
practically incapacitated. In our tour group there were actually three dudes
named Andy. It was pretty funny – turns out, the Andy from Canada was having
awful allergies as well. There is definitely something unusual in the air
here. He is currently passed out next to
me on the train in a Benedryl coma :(
This is the fountain the children skip around
The tunnel where they race their bikes!
The beautiful Mirabelle Gardens
The tour ended around 2 and we grabbed something to eat at
an outdoor bbq (by bbq I mean wurst and steak, obviously) and being horribly
sick of German beer, I had my first Steigl Radler…. Basically a Leiny summer
shandy but even sweeter! Yum :) Back to the hotel to shower and relax (our
bodies are NOT what they were 3 weeks ago) and I actually ended up completely
passing out until 6 pm. Back to the Italian place for those pizzas!! So
delicious! After that, we wrapped up our time in Salzburg by running into a little
marching band playing some recognizable tunes (we argued over whether The Saints go Marching In is an American
tune or not… we still haven’t looked it up to find out :P but the band played
it!). They were a lot of fun, I thought they looked like marching band alumni
because their costumes were all customized, and some had cut their pants into
fringes and such.
We checked out this morning and packed up all our stuff for
the second to last time – it’s really getting old and the bags are only getting
heavier. We’re on the train to Vienna right now, where we’ll stay for 3 nights
before heading back to the states. Our adventure is coming to a close :( I told
Andy how I feel sad after every vacation no matter how ready I am to be home, I
just always feel sad when the adventure ends. The good news is that I still
have two and a half days in Austria and we still have a lot of money left!
We’ve done SO well! Can’t wait to get some decent souvenirs in Vienna!
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