Salzburg

Still Thursday, April 1 – We watched the Sound of Music on the bus to get us out of our depressed moods/ready for Salzburg! Our hotel was on the sketchy outskirts of the city (as usual), so we walked a found a little restaurant by our hotel to have some traditional Austrian food! I had Stiegl, a Salzburg beer, a salad, dumplings, and apple strudel. Man I love this food! I even used some of my German skills that I have picked up from Jill (and Aunt Kristi, and my mom) and the tape that Jill had when she went to Germany for the first time way back when – I still remember the alphabet from that tape :) Well if you consider telling the waiter how many of us there were and thank you and good night “German skills,” then I’m a pro!

Friday, April 2 – Salzburg! I was with my friend Alli all day, so I showed her around some of the main sites (I remembered where everything was!) – Maribel Gardens, Do-Re-Me steps and the running statue guys. Then we wandered down a little side street - so nice to get away from all of the tourist stuff. We wondered around and walked up this hill to overlook the city a bit. Then we crossed the river to tourist central!

Saw Mozart’s house, the street with all of the rod iron signs, a dog that looked like it had a bear’s head, and a guy playing wine glasses like on Miss Congeniality – it was amazing! I took a video of it, but I don’t know how to upload videos onto this blog, sorry. We went into another cathedral – Dom zu Salzburg which was SO pretty! Then we walked up towards the castle/fortress and took a detour to the red abbey steeple from the Sound of Music. It was a perfect day, so we stood up and overlooked the bright green valley and the snow capped mountains for a while – gorgeous! We went into the abbey – I think it was the same abbey that was in the beginning when they sing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” although, that might have just been tapped in a studio somewhere.

Then we walked up to the fortress and did an audio tour through the different rooms and up to the top for a beautiful view of the entire city and the countryside. We also went through the museum attached to it and though the cemetery at the bottom of the fortress where the Von Trapp family hid. All of the headstones had bouquets of fresh flowers.

 The whole day was perfect with gorgeous weather! Trip #2 to Salzburg was just as beautiful as the first!

Back on the bus, took a pit stop at the Melk Abbey. It was like a palace with a cathedral inside. The abbey was unbelievable! It was an amazing baroque church (below). It had gold and gaudy decorations everywhere – very impressive!

At a pit stop on our way to Vienna, we were waiting for some other from our group and a Chinese tourist bus pulls up next to us (I have seen Chinese tourists in EVERY city that we’ve been to, and every time they take a picture they all give the peace sign…EVERY TIME!!!). Anyways, we see this one guy get out and start stretching; ok normal, they’ve been on the bus for a while. But then he continues stretching every part of his body in all sorts of way for the next 10 min!!! He started by moving his hips around in a circle like he was doing an exaggerated Macarena dance, then marching in place for a while (low marches and high marches), straight leg marches forward and to the side, arm circles, then swinging his arms across his body, then his neck followed by his wrists…then he started jumping in place! He did all of these for a good 3 min each! It was quite entertaining.