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Published: April 21st 2009
First stop...
...refreshmentsSorry, that's the best I could come up with. References to That Movie end here.
Salzburg is beautiful, and the airport is close, two factors which make it utterly recommendable in my book. Furthermore, our first discovery was that public transport is absurdly cheap, rendering our hotel's distance from town irrelevant. It was 3 euros 20 for 24 hours of travel on the electric buses.
So Salzburg is old - but interestingly the 'old' town is the cleanest-looking, so figure that out. People have been quarrelling and building the resulting castles here for a very long time, so it was no surprise that our first night was spent in a restaurant that claims to be (wait for it - Kiwis, sit down now)
1200 years old! Once again, it looked pretty nice for its age.
It was here that we were converted to Mozart's operas. Early signs were inauspicious, however: we walked in and immediately thought 'tourist trap!'. I resigned myself to a night of schmolzart.
I could not have been more wrong (you won't see this often on this blog, folks, so enjoy it).
Our proximity to the performers meant that instead of trying to spot the speck in the
distance squeaking, we saw every movement, every raise of the eyebrow from the passionate, engaged artists. And the singers! They blew us away. I had never appreciated the emotion and performance that go into an operatic piece. Every note was accompanied by a lift of the breast, a turn of the lip, a shift in the gaze... Their control over their voices left us spellbound, beholden to their every move. They interacted with the audience, walking around the tables and letting us experience the accuracy of their notes at close range. The sumptuous food was but a distraction. I cannot recommend this enough to people who have never experienced opera.
To the prosaic - our breakfasts were huge! I was sated every morning, to the extent that the only nourishment I sought most days was a beer around 2pm. Now's that's value for money.
Once again, usual pattern - walk, eat, drink, watch.
On that last point: folks, I'm not a mean guy. I don't deliberately go out to denigrate people, or make fun of them. So it is under great duress that I write these lines: the residents of the Salzburg are the most offensive dressers I have ever
seen. I do not say this lightly.
The phenomenon presented itself fairly early, leading to amazed double-takes and whispered condescension. I'm not talking about just beige here - indeed if beige be the neutral of fashion, the safe catch-all on a doubtful day, Salzburgers embrace the awful. Red and pink. Sandals with socks. Vertical stripes with horizontal stripes. Snakeskin trousers. Colours that never meet in nature, except in cat vomit. Grey T-shirts tucked into brown trackpants
We spent one extraordinary afternoon watching people walk past, managing to fault every third individual on some basic, amateur grounds like those mentioned above. Mon, bless her, tried to defend our hapless victims, but even she succumbed to the visual onslaught.
More entertaining still was the occasional spotting of that seldom-seen beast: the Eurotrash. These are the kind of people who consider tanning beds a basic human right, and happily compete to see who can sport the largest logo on their sunglasses/wallet/wife.
The city itself is pleasant to look at - the old town's cobbled streets are connected by little pedestrian tunnels, lending a pleasantly medieval feel to one's wandering. The castle sternly overlooks the city, and the churches and cathedrals all boast clean,
uncluttered lines which belie their Catholic origins. Indeed, a positively Calvinist aesthetic pervades the city, expressed in a lack of popish pageantry in the exterior and interior of the buildings.
What else? The Gaisberg. We spent a morning climbing up a steep mountain, and ended up walking on ice in shorts and t-shirts. Very odd, and very cool that you can get a beer at the top (it turns out we could have taken a bus).
3 days was enough - the tourist multitudes get tiring, and while 25 degrees was wonderful, any hotter/more crowded would have been too much. I wouldn't go there in August.
Any other time, however, we would thorougly recommend Salzburg!
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Eric
non-member comment
Climed all the way up without taking an iconic photo?
Well, no matter, fixed it for you :) http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/5134/chris01.jpg