So Saturday night at the Olympiapark, Ian asked Mary and I if we’d be interested to go to Saltzburg, Austria on Sunday. We looked at each other incredulously. “Austria. Tomorrow?” He was pretty casual about it. We were flipping out. Of course we wanted to go. Apparently in Bavaria, there are train tickets that go for certain zones of travel, and there is a 25€ ticket for up to five people to travel to zone 2, and Salzburg (from now on I’ll spell it in German) is on the fringe of the zone. So getting five people… makes each ticket 5€. I flipped out. Austria, for 5€!? No way. (The fact that Austria is 2 hours from München helped, too.) We agreed to meet at the Haupbahnhof at 7am to get on a 7-something train to Salzburg, so we’d arrive sometime in the 9 o’clock hour. I went back home and asked my roommate and Stephanie if they’d be interested — both were as surprised as I that they could go to Austria with such ease! — and eagerly agreed to wake up at 6am to get to the Haupbahnhof on time.
Waking up was probably easy because I was so excited. I poked Ayse until she opened one eye and then we set off at a quick pace up the street to meet Stephanie and get there on time. We arrived at 7:05, and couldn’t find Ian. I didn’t know who else was going, so the three of us searched the station for someone we knew, then all of a sudden they were there. We were 13 all told — but we couldn’t find Mary anywhere. The train was at the platform, and we couldn’t wait, so we hurried to catch it, with three tickets for the thirteen of us — only about 6€ a ticket. Mary never arrived despite the cell phone calls we attempted, so we shrugged and boarded, and most of us napped on the ride. When I woke rather abruptly, I looked out of the window to see which station we were at — and I saw the Alps.
I’ve never seen mountains like that before. (Vermont… does not count. No, not at all.) They were still far off, and fields of green farmland stretched between the train and the mountains, with almost nothing else in between, as far as I could see. They rose sharply from the ground at a surprising angle, with clouds wreathing their uppermost peaks in mist. I grinned. Mountains! The train continued on and before long we arrived in Salzburg.
Our group disembarked and we found a tourist station, where we purchased maps. “Erin, is Salzburg the city in The Sound of Music?” Stephanie asked me. I frowned. I had no recollection. I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and I know the opening starts with a gorgeous panorama of an Austrian city and it starts with, “—, Austria, in the last golden days of the thirties.” But I couldn’t remember where! “I don’t know,” I said. “I bet we’ll find out really quickly, though.”And sure enough, in the tourist booth there was a sign for a Sound of Music guided tour and later on, at 19.30 Uhr, a Sound of Music sing-a-long, in a theatre. Costumes were “not necessary but highly encouraged!” What could you dress up as? I wondered. A nun or a nazi? Kind of… weird. Yeah.
Setting out into the city, our large group attempted to make its way toward the river and the main attractions we could see on the map. As is usual with European cities, the main attractions were large Kirchen, or churches, and Mozart. Mozart ist 1756 in Salzburg geboren. (I can speak German! Ha!!!) They take their Mozart seriously in Salzburg. Apparently, Vienna and Salzburg have a sort of tourist rivalry; Vienna, as the old capital of the Hapsburg empire, was where Mozart lived a great part of his live when he was a great court composer. The two Austrian cities are in a constant battle for domination of the Mozart city. Hehe. Anyway, we took a short cut through a wooded park and came out in the garden of a palace, right near the water, with a fantastic view of the domes and the castle on the mountain ahead of us. Salzburg, if nothing else, is picturesque.
By the time we got to Mozarts Geburtshaus (the house of his birth… and Germans don’t believe in possessive apostrophies), the group was becoming harder and harder to keep track of, especially as most of us didn’t know each other. The majority of the kids spoke excellent German and so Stephanie, Ayse, and I had a bit of trouble talking, though I could understand them and speak in simple sentences. We decided it was best to split by ticket — three tickets for five people, so we’d split into a group of five, and two groups of four — and attempt to go sightseeing independently.
In our smaller group, our new prerogative was to see as much of the city south of the rushing alpine river as possible, in as short a time as we could, attempting to get back to the train by at least 5 or 6pm. We walked from church to church, from cobbled street full of vendors to cobbled street with arching fountains, passing tourists and even bedecked World Cup fans preparing for the evening’s final match. At every turn there was another dome, and always the arching mountain in the center of the city with the castle. We checked the map and saw there was a tram going from the base to the top, sort of like Pittsburgh’s Incline, and we decided to pay the 10€ to get to the top and have access to the panoramic view and the museum in the castle.
The castle was… amazing. It was originally a keep built by the archbishops when Salzburg was granted a diocese from the Pope in the early middle ages, and was mainly there for protection and arms for most of its next millenium of use. Salzburg was originally a small town built up around the vast salt mines (Salz, in German, is salt). The mountains and the rushing water yield fantastic types of marble and stone, and there was even a scientific museum explaining the different kinds of rocks, with a jewelry shop. The castle/keep itself was rather unadorned, even in the prince/archbishop’s chambers and the main inner part of the castle built at the height of the Renaissance. Salzburg is a simple city with a simple sort of outlook, or at least it had one; nestled in the mountains, it’s not a center of culture or urbanity, but a quaint place that even today functions more like a tourist city than a city like Munchen, which is a central hub of Germany.
They had a marionette museum in the castle, oddly (remember what I said about odd museums in odd places? Wow!) and it was kind of funny to see the puppets from the movie Amadeus. I wanted to see Sound of Music puppets, but oh well. Part of the castle had a pretty substantial museum from the history of Salzburg and of Austria, starting with its medieval roots and going up through the wars Austria was involved with over the centuries… there were items from the peasant and religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, items from Napoleon’s conquest of Germany and Austria… and more. Then we went into the room with Austrian soldier garb from every major battle/war in Austria’s history… leading to World War II. Oh man, was that odd. Having only ever seen American and French and British WWII uniforms, I’d forgotten that when Austrian soldiers were drafted into the army… they joined the Nazis. Freaky beyond imagining, seeing uniforms with the Edelweiss crest of Austria and… tiny, tiny Swastikas. I shivered. They hid them well, but they were there. It was really like watching the Sound of Music when you see Liesl being so happy with Rolfe, then Rolfe telling her he’s joined the army — then you realize, with horror, that good, kind, next-door-neighbor Rolfe, is now a Nazi. They played it down — Austria hasn’t really, er, won many wars, so everything was quite played down — but still. You can’t just pretend that whole decade or two didn’t happen…
We left the castle soon after that, making our way down the mountain and back through the ancient, curving streets to the train station. We felt thoroughly touristed-out and I was prepared for a nice nap. Salzburg was completely worth the trip, though. Buildings there were built five and eight hundred years ago, churches even older, and walking down the streets — streets that looked unchanged from the 18th century — was completely worth it. And I saw Haydn’s grave! Or I think it was his grave, maybe a memorial. (Haydn, for those of you who didn’t take Mr. B’s music class, was a composer of some reknown in the 18th century. I could hum you a few bars of one of his more famous pieces, but… blogs being all written and such…)
It was a fantstic day. And natually, I took pictures!!!
Enjoy!
