The Hills Are......Wet?

When I was in Salt Lake City earlier this year I managed to order a few of our favorite author’s travel books and Austria was one of them.  We both wanted to see Austria so we picked Vienna and Salzburg for a 6 day trip.  Planning it was mostly Kevin’s doing.  Not to worry there, he’d be filling every day with so many things to do that I would start jogging daily to get my legs in shape! He tends to run us to exhaustion when we go somewhere.  Once a friend who’d been to Paris a bunch listened to us tell him all of what we did in Paris and our friend commented ‘you must have been dead after all that!’….we were.  I think our unspoken philosophy about going to some of these places is that we want to see as much as we can in whatever amount of time we have as we might not get a chance to go back.  It’s ok, we’ll just sleep better on lumpy beds, right?

We had a little debate about where to go for Kevin’s Birthday early July.  Initially it was Naples and Positano, Southern Italy.  We did some research and after a few weeks I came out and said “Do you really want to go down there where it could be really hot and muggy?”  I know he loves Italy, I do too.  I am really interested in seeing that part and would certainly appreciate some warmth right now anyway.  But dealing with 90 degree temps and just as bad humidity might have been a bigger hurdle then either of us was willing to jump over, we opted for Austria.

Salzburg is really charming and very manageable for 3 days.  We had to deal with weather, sadly it rained almost every day on our trip but it didn’t stop us.  It only made things colder than we’d thought it would be but layered ensembles make it bearable.  This time I packed a rain jacket and certainly brought my umbrella.  We saw all the usual sights, statues of Mozart, old gothic and baroque churches, very old buildings and a fortress.  Our trips tend to take on a food tour as well.  We dove right in on the 1^st stop to Demel and had Sacer torte and coffee.  We had the usual roasted pork, dumplings and sauerkraut meals as well as sausage or what we’d call a hotdog.  The beer is wonderful and the schnapps like drinking lighter fluid with a hit of pear or apple flavoring.  We had loads of strudels of various fillings, fruit & cheese.  We made sure to have tried some of the locally prepared meats like Speck or cured ham.  The breads are filling and freshly baked daily.  The cheeses are smelly and tasty.  It’s wonderful to see all of this right there in front of you and not in a grocery display case.

Thankfully all the churches are free to enter, most will have a ‘donation’ cup and leaving a euro or two makes up for going though the place.   We had to force ourselves, at times, to remember that most of the buildings and architecture was bombed and destroyed during WWII but it’s still beautiful and something we’d never see in the US.  Buildings that were in place long before the US was writing the Constitution.  The fortress above the city dates back to the 1100’s, parts are older but what you see now is pretty impressive due to it’s size and position over the city.  From up there you get to see just how small the city is, and especially how beautiful.

The Austrians are unique, they’re not German although that is their national language.  They probably have their own dialect but we wouldn’t have know the difference.  The hotel staff did say that she could tell the where a person came from when they spoke, she said that a Bavarian spoke with a different accent than an Austrian.  It’s still German and I can’t speak it.  All I know is the food is wonderful, the beer is tasty and the sights were magical.

We did have to take on the “Sound of Music” tour while in Salzburg.  I was expecting it to be more, it could be more, is should be more campy.  The driver was pleasant and spoke very good English and took us to all the major spots that were used in the movie.  We saw mostly locations used for ‘Do Re Mi’ as they seem to cover much of Salzburg and some of the country side.  We saw the back of the house & lake where the kids fall out of the boat, the bridge they cycle across, the tree lined road where they’re hanging in the trees, the steps they hop up and down, the statues they hide behind….the amount of ground they covered in this one song would have taken hours to get through if not for the magic of Hollywood editing.   We were taken to the prop for ‘I am 16…’ that has now been moved away from it’s original location due to the tourist singing loud and off key causing disruption to a nearby school.  We were driving out into the country side and told ‘Over that hill is the location where the movie opens and you can’t get there by car’.  It could have been anywhere actually but we’ll go with it.  We saw the church used for the big wedding scene which isn’t where they really got married in real life.  On our own we found the convent and the gate where the kids are seen begging for Maria to come back and marry their father.  I suppose the tour is what it is, but it could be so much more.  I think it needs more….flamboyancy?

One of the side trips we took was to Hallstatt, about an hour south & east of Salzburg via train.  This meant negotiating the Austrian train systems with a limited amount of understanding German.  We had to take the train very early from Salzburg and get off in one town, leave our luggage in a locker then board another train to Hallstatt with a 15 minute window.  Thankfully the train to Hallstatt was a little late.

Hallstatt is a really beautiful lakeside town with an amazingly long history.  Apparently there was salt discovered during the bronze age and was being mined way before Rome was a power. 

The huge mountain behind the town is where the salt mine is, you have a long walk through the town to catch the funicular and then a very steep long walk to where you then enter the mine for a boring & cold walk through it which takes about 2 hours.  Something I wished we had skipped completely. 

There’s enough of the town to see for about 2 hours then you take the boat back across the lake to the train station.  It would have been a much better stop off had the weather been better.  They have plenty of cafes and restaurants there where you could have stopped off for a lunch or strudel and coffee.  There are 2 churches in town, the Catholic church has a unique double altar and the cemetery is very interesting.  Space is a premium there and up until the 1980’s they only kept a body in the ground for 30 years then they removed the bones, bleached them out, cleaned them and placed in this little chapel.  Very creepy and worth the 2 Euro admission. 

 

Vienna is much more cosmopolitan than Salzburg, more Imperial and not so much Romantic.  After all, it was the seat of the 600 plus years reign of the Hapsburg dynasty.  You really feel like you’re in a big city when you’re there.  Trams, Buses, Taxis, Underground Metro and horse drawn carriages, they have it all. 

We managed to get some better weather while there, actually sunny days and some with an occasional rain storm.  No matter, we packed for it and off we went.  Sadly most all of the major sights had scaffolding on them.  The whole city seems to be under restoration of some kind.  We just had to imagine what it could be like without the pipes and advertisements covering them.  Thankfully Hitler &  the Allies didn’t bomb this place. 

This place is all about the Hapsburg dynasty and how they managed to keep their firm grip on the long rule over the Austrian and Hungarian people for such a long time.  They built palaces and municipal buildings and museums that cover the city.  There are loads of tourist here, many Americans as it was in Salzburg.  Actually this is a huge tourist destination.  We heard many different languages while walking around the city.

We stayed in the ‘inner ring’ of the Old Town, where most everything is and easy to get to.  It doesn’t take long to understand the lay and how to read a map.  We were able to get across town in about 20 minutes on foot.  The main church here was damaged in WWII and has been rebuilt, most of the damage was to the roof.  The roof is very different from any big church or cathedral we’ve seen before.  It’s a colorful mosaic of tiles that were individually purchased by people to pay for the restoration.  They’re currently cleaning the outside, the stone tends to get black from the elements and pollution over time.  The inside is just as dark, almost scary dark too.  The windows were all replaced after the destruction too.

Of course this ended up being more about the food and drink.  We had some wonderful meals and snacks.  We took little coffee breaks when we found a pastry shop we liked and had these wonderful little finger sandwiches with tiny mugs of beer.  We enjoyed local beer with sausages again.  On our last night there we had our fill of Austrian fare so we went for Italian.  It was time to change it up. 

We had to visit the Nosh Market while there too….if ever you go, don’t miss this place.  I shows you just how diverse Vienna is with all the cross culture in their foods.  They have the usual Viennese/Austrian stalls but here they have Turkish and Asian to name a few.  It’s a long line of food stalls lined up over what was once a river now covered over.   The amount of spices there is unreal!

We found fresh falafel 5 for 1 Euro and a little tub of humus and had a feast sitting on a curb under an awning waiting for the rain to stop.  It doesn’t take much for us to enjoy the moment.

The Hapsburgs were very interesting when it came to death.  They actually had parts of their bodies removed, placed in different locations throughout the city.  The heart went somewhere and the guts somewhere else while the ‘body’ was put into these metal coffins and placed in a crypt under a church.  They’re all there, this takes about 2 hours to walk through as they have so many coffins! 

I can’t imagine how long it takes to dust these things.

They also amassed a huge collection of stuff like gold & silver plates, fine china that is still used today for state events.  They have loads of table furnishings that would make most other monarchs jealous. 

They also managed to have some pretty amazing jewelry as they were around before many of the kings and queens.  They even have a crown from the time of Constantine.  They have a crib that was used to cradle the emperors of Rome.  They have cloaks that are in mint condition dating back to the 1100’s!

I think Michael Jackson might have been inspired by these.

We saw where Freud had his practice and where Marie Antoinette was born and lived before marring that French King.  We saw a church that was built by a King to pay tribute to God for the end of some plague over his city.  We again ate our way through cafes as we made our way around the city.  We stat in parks to rest our feet or to wait for the rain to pass over us.  We saw a butterfly house and had some very good ice cream after a heavy meal.  We saw an amazing collection of paintings in a beautiful building built to show how much wealth the royals had.

Lets just say we saw and did a lot of things in the 3 days we had in Vienna.  There’s so much that we didn’t get to do, I guess we’re saving it up for our return visit.