Someone pinch me, I think I've died and gone to heaven. It's such a glorious feeling waking up in a country as amazing as Austria.
Day 3 of our stay in Salzburg we decided to visit a few attractions in southern part of the city.
We started our morning by jumping on Public Bus 25 and heading out to the Hellbrun Schloss (the German word for palace) and the Trick Fountain Gardens; this place was a delight. Hellbrun is the name of the suburb, a Prince Archbishop of Salzburg (yes, it's a very weird arrangement, the royalty and religous heads were combined in Salzburg ... so much for seperating church and state =P) back in around 1700 built his spring/summer home on the outskirts of Salzburg in the suburb of Hellbrun. Apparently this guy was a huge practical joker, I reckon we would've got along like a house on fire =)
Hellbrun Schloss is a normal palace like many others you see around Europe. You can't actually go inside the palace but it looked nice from the outside. The real attraction, however, are the Trick Fountains behind the palace. The prince built a whole garden of fountains behind his palace for people to walk through and admire. The catch being that he installed a plethora of "Trick Fountains" in the gardens that his visitors didn't know about. While visitors walked around the gardens looking at the fountains, the prince would have "secret fountains" turned on when people stood in certain spots and they'd get completely saturated by the hidden water spouts, the prince is my kind of guy! =) I guess he was the creator of the medieval Wet 'n' Wild! The tour guide of the Trick Fountains Garden walks you around the garden and shows you all the tricks, it's a lot of fun and I'm sure in summer you'd probably get very wet. As it was only about 10 degrees when we were there the tour guide was fairly careful when he turned the trick fountains on and people only got a little bit wet. The first Trick Fountain was a big table the prince built for eating out in his courtyard. There were water spouts installed in people chairs that they didn't know about. Once people had a few drinks he'd get a servant to turn on the fountains and they'd all get wet as a fountain would shoot out of their chair, although of course the prince's chair had no fountain installed. Etiquette of that time dictated that they must stay seated until the prince stood up, what an awesome idea! There were a few other fountains where you would stop to look at a small fountain only to be sprayed by hidden fountains from behind. Another trick fountain was a huge deer head that you would stop to look at and then water would burst out of the deer's mouth and antlers. This was an amazing place especially considering it was constructed in the early 1700's when all of the Trick Fountains had to be powered by water pressure.
After you walk out of the Trick Fountains Garden you are greeted by the Stein Garten and on the hill in front of you there's a 3 storey house. That 3 storey house was built in 30 days in the early 1700's and it still stands today. Pretty incredible huh? How did they do it? The prince bet another noble that he could build a house in 30 days and so had 3000 workers working 24/7 for 30 days to build the house. It appears that they did a pretty damn good job! The Stein Garten is filled with some more fountains and stone statues in various poses.
Once we finished looking around Hellbrun Schloss we wandered down to the Salzburg Zoo which was about a 15 minute trip, as we were on feet. The Salzburg Zoo has won the "Best Zoo in Europe" award a couple of times in the last few years so Mariya was very excited to check it out. The Zoo was very big with many enclosures but we were unlucky and a lot of them were being refurbished. This unfortunately meant that the animals weren't in their enclosures but in holding pens elsewhere. That aside, there were a bunch of really cool animals we did manage to see, including a snow leopard, lions, rhinos, marmosets, big brown bears, cheetahs and lots of monkeys. They even had a JAGUAR <insert awesome french laugh> enclosure being built. We both grabbed a bratwurst roll for lunch at the zoo and then an icecream cone each for our walk out to the bus back to the city.
As it was only about 2pm we still had plenty of time for sight seeing and decided to go to the Modern Museum because in the advertising pamphlet it looked really cool with science centre stuff and a big aquarium. We jumped off the bus in altstadt (you remember what that means right?) and headed off to the Museum der Modern. Jumping in an enormous lift, we were rocketed up to the museum. With our Salzburg Card granting us access to the museum we were pumped to get into some interactive science experiments! We walked up the stairs and glanced into the first room, there were a bunch of pictures on the wall with skirts in them, hmm whatever, that's not science! Onto the experiments! We walked into the second room ... a bunch of different gherkins on white pedestals ... at least 50 of them ... ok this could be some weird science experiment, maybe they're genetically modifying Salzburg gherkins or something, and then I read the sign, "Self Portraits" ... WTF?! Ok, I'm pretty sure we're in the wrong place now. A quick check of our entry tickets that we previously just stuffed into our pockets informed us that we're in the Museum de Modern ART! Man these Austrian Artists are just weirdo's ... and to make the experience even more loopy, on our way out we glanced into the "skirts room" again and there was a girl just standing there looking at one of the pictures of a skirt ... we stood there watching her for about 30 seconds just staring at the picture of the skirt ... it appears their art fans are bonkers too.
Onwards we went to the Museum der Natur! Now this is what I'm talking about! The Museum of Nature and Science was awesome! It was very much like all the other Science Centre Museums we've gone to in the past, heaps of fun! We wandered around doing all of the interactive experiments and having a ball before we were finally exhausted and decided it was time for a coffee.
After coffee the time was once again getting on and it was time to head back to the hotel and begin thinking about dinner plans. We decided to try the restaurant in the hotel only to find that it was going to be closed all week. The hotel concierge gave us a voucher for 2 apperetifs though and sent us on our way to their sister hotel with an open restaurant. For our apperetif we both had a wine/orange liquer/lemonade spritzer, Mariya loved it but I struggled to choke it down =P We both had a soup to start, Mariya had a Beef Goulash and I had a Beef Consomme. For our mains Mariya had a Prawn Salad which wasn't very good and I had chicken pasta which was actually quite good. Mariya didn't eat alot of her main and was still quite hungry so had, yep you guessed it, palatshinken with marillen marmalade. We then strolled home and had a relatively early night.
Our last day in Salzburg was to be a mixed bag. We were already scheduled on our train out to Croatia at about 1:30am the coming night so it was going to be a long day and night to keep ourselves entertained while waiting for our train. Luckily our hotel was awesome and happily agreed to hold on to all of our bags until about 10pm that night.
We decided to take our last day in Salzburg easy, so started off with a visit to the Salzburg Museum. It was a bit different to the museums we normally visit but it didn't turn out too badly. There was quite a lot of art and then a lot of history about Salzburg and the influence of catholicism in the region. It was very interesting to see the history of the area.
After the museum we did a sight seeing boat cruise on the Salz river. It was very nice and a different way to see the city that we'd spend the last few days in. As we cruised up and down the river, the sights of Salzburg were pointed out to us and a tour guide provided information and background on these in both English and German.
We then casually strolled around altstadt again, before stopping for a late lunch at an Italian restaurant. It was quite nice, Mariya grabbed pizza again with salad bar and I had some pasta and for dessert I tried a fruit parfait which was really good. After lunch we decided to find a nice warm park bench in the sun on the river Salz to sit down, relax and soak up some sun. We spent some time just relaxing and people watching before slowly walking back to the Austrian pub near our hotel. Here, Mariya and I spent our last few hours in Salzburg drinking Austrian beer and eating Austrian food before returning to our hotel to pick up our luggage and headed to the train station to wait for our train.
Our time in Austria once again came to an end but we were excited, and to be honest a little bit nervous, to finally be heading to Croatia to meet Mariya's family.
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