Salzburg today - Sound of Music here we come! It was a 2 hour bus drive from Passau in Germany, across the River Inns where the Austrian border is; as Austria unwound I felt it looked different, cosier somehow, rolling farmlands with no fences, wheat and maize with little onion-tower churches. I now know that round churches are baroque while pointy ones are gothic. Might be handy for trivial pursuit.
The mountains are the Alps which ring Salzburg, a beautiful town with an Old Town and ABC. Our guide led us across a bridge encrusted with padlocks which young people put there as a symbol of everlasting love, as they do in Paris:
and then to the Mirabell Palace
We plunged deep into Old Town, struggling to keep up with the (young) guide and David's Whisper Box not working
David trying to listen.
It was hot in the main square where Mozart's statue looks out at the horse carriages and bubble-blowers
Mozart was born in Salzburg and is commemorated in the Music University and too many chocolate shops. Too hot for chocolate!
Horse poo is collected by a man with a shovel and bucket of soapy water.
Note: the cobblestones aren't bad but it was HOT and when the guide let us off on an hour's free time all we could think of was a cool drink - which left half an hour free time, not enough to look at the very interesting shops. Next time I'll skip the tour and do my own thing.
Salzburg has 8 million visitors per year and a lot of them were there with us as we trekked miles it seemed to our buses for the drive to lunch in the mountains along a steep and winding road rather like driving up to Belair from Adelaide.
We were welcomed to the restaurant by four horn players
and the back of what turned out to be the cello player. No time to admire the glorious view - into the restaurant where we were handed a stein of the local Stiegl beer, the 4th beer I've liked. Might be getting a taste for beer.
After lunch there was a concert, MCed by a Julie Andrews look-a-like and could she sing! Her rendition of The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music brought tears to my eyes.
The concert was a strange mix of classical, Sound of Music and oddities like an Alpenhorn, a guy playing the mouth drum and 2 blokes slapping their leather shorts and tap-dancing.
Strange fact: Europeans don't know The Sound of Music as the film was never released here due to a feeling that the words of the songs were so English they couldn't be translated properly. Salzburgians know the film as something visitors love and they promote the edelweiss flower, one of which we given as we left.
The 2 hour return trip to the boat was tedious as we were all tired.
It was our turn for dinner at the Portobello restaurant in the prow of the boat where every night a select few are fed prime Italian cuisine and wines. It was lovely and so was the sunset over Linz Austria where we were moored.
The colour lasted about five minutes.
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