Our first day in Salzburg we decided to dedicate to the exciting activity of ... clotheswashing! We've been on the go for a month now and haven't really done any clothes cleaning other than tossing our thermals and underwear in the sink with shampoo (and Marco the awesome guy that he is, also did 2 loads for us). So it was time for the rest of our clothes to hit the washing machine.
We found a nice little laundromat called Bubbles which ended up being about a 30 minute walk from the hotel. As you would expect, we figured the machines would be coin operated ... apparently not. They had a big central control machine thingy which only took notes AND only gave change in coins ... very frustrating as you can imagine. We ended up with a lot of coins and went through a lot of notes!
We tossed all of our clothes into the machine (even the shirt and jeans I wore to the laundromat!) and it only took us about 2 hours to get everything cleaned and dry.
We returned to the hotel with our clothes, dropped them off and then decided to explore Salzburg. Salzburg is split into 2 sections by the river that runs through it. On one side of the river is altstadt (the old town) and on the other side of the river is the new town (where all the new high rise buildings are etc). Our hotel was on the new town side so we decided to jump on a bus to altstadt and have a look around (all the touristy stuff is in altstadt).
We wandered around Salzburg altstadt for the afternoon, it has a real Brugge feel to it. The roads are all cobblestone again and the town is filled with buildings that are centuries old. Salzburg was settled around 700AD by a bunch of monks and was a country in it's own right for awhile. There are quite a few churches, monasteries and convents in Salzburg as you would expect in a town settled by monks. Altstadt was very beautiful, we took many photo's again and, as always, they're up on Mariya's facebook. Here's a fact that some of you might not know; Salzburg is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Many of the town's attractions, monuments and statues are dedicated to Salzburg's most famous citizen, Mozart.
As the time started ticking past 8pm (with the sun still at full strength, the European sun is playing havoc with our internal clocks) we decided it was time to head back to the hotel area and grab some dinner at an Austrian pub nearby. Score, back to Austrian Cuisine! We walked to the pub only to find it closed, unfortunately it seems alot of places are closed in Salzburg on Sunday nights. Instead, we walked across the road to an Indian Restaurant called the Taj Mahal and grabbed dinner there. Weirdly enough Salzburg seems to be swamped with Austrian, Indian and Italian restaurants, what a weird combination! Mariya went with the Chicken Vindaloo and I had a tomato based chicken curry. They were both surprisingly impressive but not as hot as we'd expected.
Day Two we had some serious Tourist Activities on the agenda!
In the morning we headed off to the Hohensalzburg Fortress. This is a huge fortress overlooking the town of Salzburg on a nearby hill. The construction of this fortress began in 1000AD and initially it was more of a large house with a wall but over the following 500 years it was enlarged into a fortress with an accompanying draw bridge and walls. The nobility of Salzburg resided in the fortress while the "peasants" lived down in the city of Salzburg. At one point the peasants revolted and the nobility holed up in the fortress while the mercenaries they hired slaughtered the people, charming. The fortress was very impressive and it certainly has an ancient feel about it. To get up to the fortress there's a cable car that goes from the town of Salzburg up to the Fortress, Mariya was ecstatic and excited by the prospect of jumping in a cable car but it is the oldest cable car in Austria so Mariya decided she'd give it a go. It didn't end up being that bad, it was more like a train that ran up a steep hill as the cable car didn't actually leave the ground.
We finished up at the fortress at about midday and headed back to the hotel for <insert trumpet fanfare> The Panorama Sound of Music Tour! Mariya and I signed up for the most popular Sound of Music Tour in Salzburg. You can't really go to Salzburg and not check out the Sound of Music sights ... the only thing more famous in Salzburg is Mozart. The Tour was absolutely awesome! Everyone knows I have a small soft spot for the Sound of Music. It's a movie I saw a hundred times as a child because my grand parents only had 4 videos to watch, the Star Wars Trilogy and The Sound of Music and you can only watch star so many times. The tour took about 5 hours and took us all over the country side around Salzburg. We got to see a bunch of really cool things from the movie and the list is huge. In Salzburg itself we saw the Von Trapp house that was used for the movie, the nuns convent that Maria came from, the garden gazebo where Liesl and the postman sang "I am 16 going on 17", the lake the children and Maria were in the boat on and the Mirabell gardens they danced through in "Doe a deer". We then left the city itself and travelled out around the mountains to visit a few places including the mountain they picnic'd on, the mountain they escaped over at the end of the movie, some of the lakes used for scenes in the movie and the big church that Maria and the Captain got married in. We then stopped for some cheese strudel and apple strudel before jumping back on the bus and heading back to Salzburg. The tour was fun with a lot of the songs from the movie being played while we were on the bus and the hostess spoke a lot about Salzburg itself and the movie of course while the bus drove along. She was very funny and personable and made the whole tour very enjoyable. If you ever go to Salzburg you should most definitely do the Panorama Sound of Music Tour!
For dinner we finally got to the Austrian pub. The atmosphere was amazing, the beers tasty and the food fantastic, as we've come to expect of the pubs in Austria. For dinner I had a traditional Austrian meal made of little dumplings with bacon, greaves (pork dripping and crushed crackling) and onion on a bed of sauerkraut with bacon, it was simply divine. Mariya had Bratwurst and fried potatoes with sauerkraut that was great too.
The food and atmosphere was fantastic and a great way to finish off our second day in Salzburg.
3 comments:
this is the first thing i want to see when i go to europe, you've completely 100% sold this to me.
I'm... not entirely sure what I'm reading here... o_0
-Brock
Haha,even though I read a whole lot of stuff there all I could think was that I hope you had air freshener in you room after that meal ;)
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