Last you read I was in Cesky Krumlov, having just lost my room keys, and on my way out of there to Salzburg on Friday, March 14. Pension Lobo, next to where I was staying, runs a shuttle between Cesky Krumlov and Linz, Austria, that takes only 1 1/2 hours, compared to four or five hours by train with multiple connections. From Linz it’s one train and less than two hours either to Vienna or Salzburg. I’d signed up for the shuttle the day before and arrived a few minutes early.
Those of you who have had the misfortune of letting me tell you about my car know that I absolutely LOVE my Mini Cooper. In fact, I love all Minis. In fact, I keep a daily Mini Count, excluding mine, of how many I’ve seen that day. Minis are made in Germany and I have the treat of seeing many of them there. However, they are few and far between in the Czech Republic. I’ve seen only two there up to this point: one was a modified Mini advertising Red Bull in Ostrava (I’ve seen one like it in Florida), and the other was a red Mini with a black top as I walked from the train station in Cesky Krumlov the day I arrived.
As I stood waiting for my shuttle, that selfsame red Mini with the black top pulled up to the curb right in front of me. A young man kissed the young woman who was driving, got out and went into the door of the shop next to me as the young woman drove away. Mini count for the day: 1. Mini count for the country: 2.
Several minutes later the shuttle pulled out of the pension’s courtyard and the driver got out to help me with my bag. It was the young man who’d just gotten out of the Mini! So I got to sit in the front seat of the van with him and talk about Mini Coopers during the trip to Linz. For anyone who is interested: the car was two years old, and it belonged to his girlfriend who’d bought it only three weeks ago.
All this almost made up for the fact that I’d dropped my keys in the river that morning. Almost.
There were two couples in the van as well as me. Both of them were American, both from California. One couple from San Francisco and one from San Diego. The man from San Francisco seemed to know everything about everything, to the point of my not believing him at all in the end. He was telling us about what type of snow we saw on the mountain (new the night before), he told me Minis fell just one inch shy of the US limit for a wheelbase size of a car, he told us Czech history I knew to be false, etc. Nice guy, though.
The other couple were visiting the country to trace the woman’s genealogy. I didn’t catch the name of the town/village they’d just come from, but they’d managed to gain access to the church records of the town where her grandfather had been born. She said that they had discovered her grandfather had a sister that she wasn’t aware of. She also said the church records recorded not only a child’s birthday and sex, but also his parents’ names and occupations as well as the names and occupations of all four grandparents. So in finding information about one person you actually get information about three generations of the family.
The couple described having to sit in the cold church cellar with the old, original, handwritten record books. The books were written in old German script, which is almost indecipherable today. They took digital photos of the pages on which their family information appeared since there was no photocopier available. A church deacon accompanied them; they were not allowed to take the books out, of course, and the books were the only copy of the information available. It’s some kind of miracle to me that the books even exist at all.
Halfway through our journey we crossed the border into Austria. As of January 1 this year, there are no longer any passport checks between nations of the European Union. So, we drove past both the Czech and Austrian checkpoints, now closed, without even slowing down. It’s disappointing to me that I don’t get my passport stamped as I go between countries anymore. My last passport was almost full of stamps; my new one has only one from when I landed in Germany in February.
Our driver dropped us off at the Linz train station, which is new and looks more like an airport than a train station except there are trains behind it instead of runways. I had to buy a ticket to Salzburg since my Eurailpass is only for Germany and the Czech Republic this time. I had about 37 seconds to catch my train after buying the ticket; the ticket agent said I had plenty of time. He didn’t take into account the fact that I would get slightly lost on my way out of the ticket office! But I made the train, mostly due to a wonderful escalator and an eagle-eyed conductor who saw me running toward the train as the doors were just closing.
In less than two hours I was pulling into Salzburg, Austria. Salzburg lies at the eastern end of the Alps right on the border between Germany and Austria. This place is ALL Mozart! He was born here and lived here until he was 24 or so. The town is beautiful: all stone and Baroque and elegant. It lies on the Salzach River and grew up as a fortress town and trading post. The major natural resource here is the nearby salt mines: “salz” is German for “salt” - both the town and river are named after salt.
There is a very imposing, perfectly intact Medieval fortress (Hohensalzburg on the cliff overlooking the city. The cliff’s name is Moenchsberg (“monks’ mountain”). The existence of the castle kept invaders out of the place until Napoleon. Even in WWII, bombing didn’t destroy any of the old town, so it’s all original stuff.
My room was in Christkoenig-Kolleg pension in a 14th century church building at the base of Moenchsberg and just behind Salzburg’s cathedral. Of course the plumbing has been updated since the building was built! It’s actually a dorm for the girls who attend the Catholic college there. They have a few rooms to rent to travelers as well.
My room on the top floor (there was an elevator that went all the way up) was only a tad larger than my walk-in closet at home; it should go without saying that the bathroom and shower were down the hall. But the tiny room was very light and airy with an attic window that faced the cathedral. It didn’t seem as claustrophobic as it could have, really.
The worst part was the teensy bed, barely long enough to be classified as a twin size. The size didn’t bother me, but it was hard as a rock! After the first uncomfortable night, I talked to the ‘dorm mother’ who said they would remove the BOARD out from under the mattress to see if that made it better. It didn’t make it better, only different. Now it was a mattress that was hard as a rock that sagged in the middle. But it was fine for three nights, it was safe, and the price was right in this expensive little tourist burg (32 Euros a night, about $50, including breakfast). And to be fair, I was told they had other, larger rooms, but none that were available on the short notice I had given them. The breakfast, service and personal attention I got here was also top-notch. I’d definitely recommend this place if you visit Salzburg.
Salzburg is for strolling. Things are much closer together than I imagined. Walking from my room beneath the castle fortress all the way across old town, across the river, across new town to the train station takes only about 35 minutes. It’s also a town for shopping. There is a main street called Getreidegasse that is a pedestrian zone. It is lined with every upscale shop you can imagine and some you can’t. It’s mobbed at all times.
The thing that comes to my mind first at the mention of Salzburg are the bells. From my room, which looked out onto the square adjacent to the cathedral, I could hear the cathedral bells, the glockenspiel atop the adjacent museum, and also bells from St. Peter’s and a couple of other churches.
For you Americans who you don’t know how this bell thing works, I’ll explain: At 15 minutes after each hour, a bell rings once; at 30 minutes after, it rings twice; at 45 minutes after, it rings three times. Then, at the top of the hour, optionally but oftentimes, a characteristic tune is played (think Big Ben), or the bell rings ecstatically for a while, then the hour is chimed.
Now, think about this happening at each quarter hour from at least four different church bell towers and the glockenspiel all through the day and all night long. I love bells, though, so it made me happy every fifteen minutes.
It was raining when I arrived, and it continued to rain most of the evening and night that Friday. After I’d checked into my pension, I went out walking to get my bearings. Rick Steves’ guidebooks always include a self-guided walking tour, and I did part of that with what daylight that was left.
I had dinner at Saran Restaurant, also mentioned in Rick Steves. The owner is from the Punjab in India and the menu is a great mix of Austrian traditional food plus Indian specialties. I told Saran that I found his restaurant in Rick Steves and he gave me a postcard of the restaurant with a picture of him and Rick with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the dining room.
Because the town makes a lot of money on Mozart, there are images of him and performances of his compositions just everywhere. In fact, on the Saturday that I was there the weather was very warm and sunny, so someone rolled a grand piano out onto the cobblestones of the square under the portico next to the cathedral. A young man in black tie and tails plus ribboned pony tail sat at the piano for hours playing Mozart. He started around noon and went until 8:00 or 9:00 that evening. I not only got several pictures of him that afternoon, but I also heard the music, mixed with the bells, long into the evening from my room. He even kinda resembled the actor that played Mozart in the movie “Amadeus”. He needed a powdered wig, though.
I visited Mozart’s birthplace (he was born in Salzburg in 1795) and also his family’s other residence. Both places were essentially unfurnished since most of the Mozart family furniture had been sold off. The birthplace was a little creepy. An artist had been hired to spiff the place up in the past few years, and he felt it necessary to place a crib in Mozart’s nursery room with a doll in it. Hanging over the crib was a circular blue neon light. It made the doll in the crib look like a corpse. Weird. It was interesting to see the house, though, because he composed most of his child-prodigy works there.
The other house was where his family moved when he was 17. It had one of his old pianos and copies of some of his handwritten compositions, as well as some original letters by his sister. It was a really upscale house for the time, though, because his father was high society. There is also a great 30-minute video there about the composer’s life that you can tune the audio guide to no matter what language you want to hear. It’s well done.
As I mentioned, Saturday was very sunny and warm and tourists mobbed the city. I did the rest of the walking tour in the guidebook, including the cathedral, or Dom in German (pronounced “dome”). It is a huge, beautiful, classical Baroque building. Doms are typically constructed in the shape of a cross; this dom had four organs, one on each inside corner of the cross.
Later that day I found the open-air market and purchased some vegetables and bread that I then sat on the fountain and had for lunch. Still later, I went to a famous cafe named Thomaselli and sat on the upper deck overlooking one of the squares. Below you could see stands selling various things, but especially Easter flower sprays. Most of the sprays consisted of a stick about a yard long, with a ball of greenery or evergreenery at the top, a little larger than a basketball. Spring flowers such as buttercups were placed at regular intervals all over the ball, and yellow and white streamers were attached where the ball met the stick. They were beautiful fluttering in the breezy sunshine.
In typical European fashion, a woman came to my two-person table where I sat alone and asked if the other chair was free. By the way, Austria’s language is German, and this woman spoke German. I answered her in German that the place was free and she sat. She looked to be in her mid-fifties and was very sweet. She settled in and we had coffee together in German. I was so proud of myself because she was extremely surprised to learn that I was American; she said my German was so good she thought I was Austrian!
She comes to Salzburg two or three times a year and loves the city. She said it was always mobbed with tourists on the weekends. She also told me that the Easter sprays were specific to Salzburg; that you wouldn’t find that particular style of Easter decoration anywhere else. Then this wonderful lady paid for my coffee when I got up to leave!
The city is music-intense, and I had more than one person tell me that the Dom was the best place to experience church music. It is also where Mozart was the church organist for two years. So I went to Palm Sunday Mass there. I didn’t even get struck by lightening or excommunicated or anything! The place was packed but it was still REALLY cold in there, as I was warned, and I was glad for my wool socks, hat and gloves.
The music was nice, though it wasn’t as grandiose as I’d expected. A full choir supplied some beautifully done hymns, and an organist played one of the four organs. The bishop was there with his funny red hat. It was a High Mass, which means it was conducted in a sing-song chant and it was all in German.
People brought their Palm Sunday sprays of evergreens and bouquets like I’d seen in the marketplace the day before. I kept expecting some kind of procession or ceremony involving them, but nothing like that happened. It’s possible they were blessed by the bishop during the services since I couldn’t understand what was going on.
It had begun to rain again after Mass, so I made my way slowly across the river for my afternoon Sound of Music tour. Taking a tour like this is fairly uncharacteristic of me, but it came highly recommended. It was a bit redundant to me since I’d been to Switzerland recently, but it was kinda fun in a hokey, homey way. And it was nice for a few hours to let someone else figure out where I was going.
I hadn’t seen the movie in many years, and didn’t know that it was filmed in Salzburg, or even that it was based on a true story. The true story was about a family named Trapp, not Von Trapp like in the movie, and the family didn’t truly hike to Switzerland from Salzburg, which is about five hours away by train, but they lived in Salzburg, Maria was a young nun-in-training hired by her future husband as a governess for the children, and they were a show-biz family. They toured the US after emigrating during WWII and settled in New England. Their New England farm house is now a bed-and-breakfast run by two of the now-grown children.
Our guide was an older, handsome Austrian man with superb English since he’d lived in the US for many years. But he did a great Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. We were in a big tour bus that was about half full. They took us to see the house that was used in the movie as the back of the Von Trapp mansion and the house they used for the front of it. We saw the abbey where Maria came from, the farmhouse they used for the wall in the opening scene, the hill that was “alive with the sound of music” and the gazebo where the girl was “sixteen going on seventeen.” In the process we saw the surrounding Alps and countryside.
On the way to see the church they used in the wedding scene, about 30 minutes outside of Salzburg, we passed Lake Fueschl, at the end of which was Red Bull City, as in that obnoxious, ubiquitous “energy drink” that people like to mix with vodka these days. I didn’t know that Red Bull (gives you wiiiings), the biggest soft drink invention since Coca Cola, was invented in Austria. I naturally assumed, since it was heavily marketed and bad for you, that it was American. The complex that has been built for the company is at the end of Lake Fueschl. Look up “Red Bull City” online and you’ll see the vast glass, steel, and water facility that houses the home office.
Our guide played various songs from the Sound of Music movie as we drove. As we rounded a curve and the vista opened up to a breathtaking Alpine meadow scene, we heard the swell of “The Hills are Alive”, etc. Pretty cheesy, especially when the (mostly American) tourists start singing along with the “Doe, a Deer, a Female Deer” song. Now try to get that song out of your mind for the rest of the day.
The tour began and ended at Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens, a huge residence palace, behind which more scenes of the movie were filmed. The pegasus statue is there, as well as the unicorn staircase and dwarf garden where children in the movie danced at various times. I heard that the park that the unicorn stairs lead to is now a gay rendezvous place.
It was raining again when we got back to Salzburg, so I grabbed some dinner at a place called Zum Mohren, which is named after “Moors”, as in Shakepeare’s Othello. The place is underground under 13th-Century stone archways and has an exotic decor. The food is good, too.
On Monday it was proper raining, and I was very glad I did most of my outside sightseeing over the weekend. I went to the Panorama Museum which houses a 360-degree, 27-meter, meticulously detailed painting done in the 1800’s by Johann Michael Sattler. Sattler had made sketches from the fortress on the hill then completed the painting at his studio. The painting actually travelled all over the world in the 19th Century in its own display hut and was a way to promote the city of Salzburg to potential visitors and business investors. It was also a way for people in distant places to see foreign cities without making the trip. I learned that this was a common practice at the time for cities to do.
The painting itself was a marvel, and the museum had telescopic viewers placed around the inside so that you could zero in on a specific detail. I would compare it to the diorama I’d seen at the Zurich museum of the Battle of Murten. It must have taken immense patience to complete a project like that. Seeing it was like standing on the fortress in 1829 and seeing old Salzburg.
Speaking of the fortress, or Hohensalzburg, I visited it that day as well, though it was really raining still. I rode the funicular, a type of train that goes straight up the hill in which the small train cars are slanted so you are standing level the whole time. It was my first funicular ride. I toured the marionette museum up there, as well as the small chapel and restored rooms of the castle, but the wind whipped the rain around so hard up there that I didn’t stay long. It was still interesting to see, though.
When I came back down, it was raining even harder, so I decided to find a cafe and hole up for the afternoon. I walked away from the tourist squares toward the university for a couple of blocks and found a bistro named Mazz, which should, by all rights, be included in the tour books. It’s run by a man whose mother is Filipino and father is Austrian and who has formal hospitality training and has spent many years in various places running hotels and restaurants. The coffee was great and the food looked good. He was a fantastic host and I read about half my book sitting right there.
I will leave you with two travel tips:
I got the Salzburg card at the Tourist Information office when I first arrived. It is a card that includes not only all public transportation but also most of the museums and sights for one price. If you visit enough places, you will save money. I did.
Also, I’d come back a little later in the year because many sights were closed for the winter and the weather was really unpredictable. Although summer brings horrendous crowds, I think I’d come back slightly later in the Spring before that happened.
On Tuesday I left very early in the morning, walking to the train station in the falling SNOW. I was on my way to Liberec in the Czech Republic to see my photographer friends.
Saturday, 5 April 2008
EUROPE 2008 - 5 APR 99685
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