We had to get up a little earlier this morning because it was our big Sound of Music tour day. We ate our breakfast and were out on the sidewalk waiting for our ride at 8:45 a.m.
My mom was so excited the hotel had Sugar Smacks. You have no idea the fun little argument we had over Sugar Smacks and cereal in particular. My mom is quite the storyteller and she told this really funny story from her childhood to prove her cereal point, and it was just so hilarious. The people in the rooms next to us probably hated us for laughing so loud. It was fun hearing a story from my mom's childhood, but it was even better seeing her laugh so hard that she had to hide her face underneath the covers on her bed. She looked like a little kid!
This was my breakfast. I think Sugar Smacks smell like tuna for some reason, so none of those for me.
Our tour bus (technically tour minivan) was 30 minutes late, so we didn't leave until 9:15. Our tour guide's name was Gerlinda, and she was a fun older Austrian woman. What I took away from the SOM tour was that Salzburg likes to capitalize off of its SOM fame, but it's also kind of their dirty little secret. Gerlinda sped through the attractions so fast that it was hard to get a feel of what everything was. I started taking notes, and Gerlinda was making fun of me for having my little notebook out (I was sitting directly next to her on the front row bench seat). I explained to her that I blog and it's my form of a journal, and she was cool with that and started telling me things to write down.
Because it was our first full day in Salzburg (having spent the day in Germany the day before), we weren't really familiar with the city sights, so I took a bunch of pictures of things I hadn't seen yet and we were going so fast that I didn't know what they were exactly. So, here are a few pictures of Old Town Salzburg.
The place on the left here is the place where Bishop Leopold stored his 1500 horses, and it's now a music hall where Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz filmed scenes from their latest movie. I only vaguely remembered the movie Gerlinda the tour guide was telling us about, but she made it clear she had a big crush on Tom Cruise. I told her Americans don't share her same feelings about Tom Cruise anymore, and she wondered why. I just told her it was a long story. He's a nutcase. Anyway, the place on the right is the University of Salzburg, established in 1623.
More Salzburg sights:
This is the lake where the VonTrapp children and Maria fall in the water. Apparently that scene was not scripted, and little Gretl almost drowned.
There were swans in the lake, so I took a picture of them for the kids:
Next, we drove by the little lane where Maria sings and dances her way with her guitar and suitcase to the VonTrapp home, singing, "I Have Confidence". Again, Gerlinda was driving quite fast past it so I got a lame picture out the window.
Our next stop was Hellbrunn Castle, summer home for Prince-Archbishop Sittikus. Just a small, humble little palace set high on the hill (yeah, right).
Apparently Sittikus was a pretty dour guy, and to cheer himself up he like to play tricks on people. More specifically, water fountain tricks. He had a table set up in his gardens where he like to entertain a table of ladies. The chairs that they sat on had a water fountain underneath them, and if things got boring at dinner, he would squirt them. Classic! We didn't actually get to see this part of Hellbrunn Castle because we were there for one reason:
Hellbrunn Castle is not the site that the gazebo was originally on. It was on private property, and there were too many people coming to see it so they moved it to the Castle park. People used to be able to go inside the gazebo until some old lady decided that she wanted to dance around like Liesl and Rolph from bench to bench and she fell and broke her hips. Way to ruin it for everyone!
The Castle grounds were beautiful. They had this amazing playground that the kids would have loved.
After Hellbrunn Castle, we headed out to Salzkammergut, which is the lake district outside of Salzburg. Here's a few pictures on the way there:
We all got a chance to run up the hill and twirl around like Maria. Only a couple of people did it (me included!) My mom did not do it. BOO. At least she took a video and pictures of me while I spun around. I think I needed to be further up the hill to get a better spin, but you get what you get!
Earlier in our trip, I told my mom that I was noticing how big Red Bull was in Austria. It seemed like everyone was drinking it. Do you want to know why Red Bull is popular in Austria? Here are their headquarters! I wouldn't mind it one bit if Brian got a job here!
I had completely forgotten that the tour description said that we would be given the chance to go down a luge (for an extra fee) if we so desired. We stopped at this little place in the hills, and of course I had to go down the luge! Not my mom, though. Such a party pooper! It was so fun. You sat on your little luge and then they hooked you up to a sort of ski-lift thing. It pulled you backward up the hill to the start of the luge. I would have gone full throttle down the luge except I had this lame lady in front of me who kept putting on the brakes because she was so scared. She rode the brakes so much that she finally came to a complete stop. What's the point of doing the luge if you're going to ride the brakes all the way down?
This is looking down the hill:
This is looking up the hill:
This is another rider going down the hill (sorry, I wasn't going to take pictures going down the luge - I was having too much fun!)
Just beyond the luge was a deer farm. They have these unusual deer there with large antlers.
We stopped at Wolfgangsee ("see" means "lake" in German) to have some dessert at a little restaurant that overlooked the lake. So beautiful.
Yep, we did have apple strudel! That's what the bottom left tray is. We also got it with ice cream, but the scoop of ice cream was just as teeny as the scoop we would later get in Budapest. What's the deal with being chintzy on ice cream, people?!?
This was our tour bus. I even took a picture of the license plate because I'm lame like that and I wanted to remember what an Austrian license plate looked like.
Our last stop was at a small town whose name I don't remember. We were there to see this church, and I'm not positive what its role in the movie was, but I'm thinking that it was used as the exterior of the church that Captain VonTrapp and Maria got married.
The town where the church was was very cute, but Gerlinda ruled with an iron fist and only gave us a few moments in the church before whisking us back to Salzburg.
The one big thing I learned from our SOM tour was that the Captain and Maria got married in 1927. He was 25 years older than her - he, 47 and she, 22. By the time they were forced to leave Austria in 1931 they had added 2 more children to the 7 he already had, and she was pregnant with another child. They did not climb the hill to the Swiss border. In fact, the mountain that was portrayed in the movie was the mountain to Germany, which would have placed them right in Hitler's territory by his bunker and Eagle's Nest. Instead of hiking the mountain, they took a train to Italy where they then took a boat to England and then came to the United States to live in Vermont. There you have it.
Gerlinda dropped the rest of the crew off at Mirabell Gardens (home of the "Do Re Mi" song), but we wanted to shop in Old Town so we asked her to drop us off there instead. The main shopping street is called "Getreidegasse" and it's home to high-end shops as well as many tourist shops. We found out that just a block over from Getriedegasse there was a festival going on for the weekend. The festival is named after St. Rupert, who was the first bishop of Salzburg way back when it was its own state and ruled by the Catholic church. Only Salzburg celebrates St. Rupert's Day, and it was quite the party! Food, handicrafts, games, and performances. I'm so glad we got to see the fun side of Salzburg. It was the only time on our trip in Austria where we actually saw normal, every day people wearing their lederhosen (for the men) and dirndls (for the women).
Side note: Before we left on our trip, we had these visions of buying dirndls for all of the granddaughters. Those dreams were crushed when we set foot in the first clothing store in Vienna. Dirndls are not cheap (and neither are lederhosen!) Dirndls START at 100 Euro - and that's for children's clothing! We looked and looked at each place we went for cheaper dirndls, but there was no such thing as a cheap Wal-Mart-priced dirndl.
Anyway, this is Getriedegasse. Its buildings date back to the 15th century. It's also the street where Mozart was born.
Here are pictures of St. Rupert's festival. When I saw a booth devoted solely to pretzels, I was in heaven!
There's quite a dichotomy going on in Austria. It seems like most of their population is quite healthy. We didn't see a lot of fat people like in America, and lots of people walked or rode bikes everywhere (which is really taking your life in your hands because Austrians drive like maniacs). BUT...a generous portion of their population also smokes like chimneys! GAH! There's no age limit on smoking, and they even have cigarette vending machines. Stinky! Anyway, to give you an idea of the crazy bike-riding, here's a pile of bikes from people attending the festival:
Here's a few other random pictures. These next two are of the Salzburg Cathedral.
That's the fortress on the top of the mountain, and that gold orb with the guy standing on top is a permanent statue. To what, I have no idea.
Mozart statue:
Walking along the Salzach River:
After spending the rest of the day shopping on Getriedestrasse and at the festival, we made our way back to the hotel through Mirabell Gardens (again, where "Do Re Mi" was filmed.
The building straight ahead is the Mirabell Schloss (or palace):
This is the Mozart University:
While we were walking through the gardens, we came up a free brass band concert, so we stayed for quite awhile to listen. I'm telling you, we were lucky to find all of these good cultural experiences in Salzburg.
I got this picture of this couple in their traditional Austrian garb. He is wearing lederhosen, she is wearing a dirndl with a wool sweater over it.
Once we got back to our hotel, we decided to eat dinner in the hotel restaurant. My mom only looked slightly down her nose at my choice to eat veal for dinner (poor, poor baby cows!) but I had to have true wiener schnitzel (I'd already had it once during the trip, but it was made from pork and I wanted to try the beef version). If you are eating wiener schnitzel, sprinkling lemon juice on it is a MUST. My schnitzel was served with boiled potatoes and parsley and currant jam.
We ordered ice cream to share and it came it in this giant dish with this gold decoration sticking out of it. It looked like we were celebrating our birthdays or something (oh wait, we were!) It's a mixture of ice cream flavors, including pistachio, and it had whole raw assorted nuts sprinkled over the top.
This was also the first restaurant on our trip where we were able to just get a glass of water from the tap. Every restaurant before this we had to order bottled water. But don't go thinking you can get tap water AND ice. Ice was practically non-existent in Austria.
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