Salzburg, Austria

As a city, I really liked Salzburg. The parts that tourists want to see are very close together, and we were able to walk everywhere. There were some very old buildings and some beautiful architecture. The best of all, there was "the Sound of Music".

The first full day in Salzburg, we went on a "Sound of Music" bike tour. It was so fun. The guide was a recent graduate from Atlanta and working in Salzburg for the summer. The whole tour took about three hours, and went over a lot of the city and into the suburbs. In the city, we saw sound of music sites (the horse fountain, the music hall, the abbey, the garden and the streets they filmed in) but we also saw other famous Salzburg sites (the sound of music sites usually have a picture taken of the site and then a pictures taken of a picture from the movie (provided on the bikes)). There are beautiful squares in Salzburg, and one houses a famous Cathedral. The cemetery behind the cathedral is where some scenes were filmed from the movie, and it is packed with gravestones and tombs. Outside of the city, we saw the front and the back of the houses used in the film (two different houses about 10 minutes away from one another) and the gazebo from "16 going on 17." This has been moved to a public garden because people were breaking into private property to dance in it, and it has been locked because the last people to break in and dance in it were a 72 year old woman and her Ralph. He wasn't quite up to the challenge and she fell off a bench and broke her hip.

After the tour, we climbed up a hill to see the Salzburg fortress. It was very, very old and very fortress looking. The inside has been turned into a museum in many places, and some rooms have been preserved as they would have been hundreds of years ago. The fortress is so formidable that it was never attacked in all of it's almost 1000 year history, but it was lost during one war, when it was simply handed over for fear of a fight. The fortress was high on a hill, and gave very good pictures of the city.

The following day, we went to visit Mozart's house, which is now a museum to his life. A Mozart fanatic would enjoy that far better than I, but it was still interesting. In the afternoon, we walked up another hill (they were everywhere) to the old monastery. It is still a monastery, and I did see a monk on a bike. This place also had wonderful views of the city, especially the newer parts. The grounds of the monastery were beautiful, and there were wonderful statues everywhere. That night for dinner we went to a pub, which was very good, and ordered "apple pie" for desert, but it was more like an apple pastry, I miss apple pie.

Two general things I noticed: 1, people wore the stereotypical mountain yodeling outfits in complete sincerity. Even young women, as a part of everyday wardrobe. It was insane. 2, all of the buses ran on cables and they ran above all the majors roads in entangling networks allowing buses to pass one another and switch lanes, that was also pretty cool.