Salzburg

the bus ride to Salzburg was nothing short of epic. it was so painful dunno if i want to talk about it, it was a good couple of days i will never get back. put it this way, i finished my book earlier than expected. anyway, i got into salzburg about 11:30pm and boy was i glad to find my hostel, i couldn´t wait to hit the hay. i think i´m coming down with a cold, but i figure if i keep ingnoring it, it might go away.

Salzburg gots is name from its salt mines (supposedly 'Salz' means salt) you can do a tour of them, i didnt bother because i saw some saltmines in Poland and i figured how different could they be. Salzburg is famous for a couple of reasons, Mozart came from here and you see a number of coffee houses, resturants and hotels named after him. the funny part is Mozart hated this place and couldn't wait to get out of here so i think its funny that people here are trying to make a quick buck out of him. the guy who invented Red Bull came from around here, supposedly he is one of the worlds richest men and considering he's in his late 60's he's one of Austria's most eligible bachelors. just be carefull what he puts in your drinks ladies. i wonder why red bull gives you wings? But of of course its 'The Sound of Music' that is probably its biggest darw card. I feel a bit embarresed to say this, and i know that my friend Iona (who might add here obsession with the movie is a little unhealthy) would kill me for saying this, but i´ve never actually seen 'The Sound of Music', i know, i know, its a classic but it never walked passed the whimsy section at the video store so its never crossed my mind. luckily for me, the hostel i stayed in played it daily so i had the chance to get filled in. while i was watching it, obviously a lot of the songs were familiar but it kept thinking of 'Chasers war on everything' and the segment they used to do called 'if life were a musical' god i love that show. but also i was reminded about how there is a part where the Nun is talking to Maria and it sounds like she drops the C bomb. the line is 'what is it you can't face?'. you fill in the blanks as to what it sounds like (click here if you wanna hear it for yourself.). now that i had watched the film, (by the way, i think i felt my manhood shrivel the longer i watched it) i was ready to do the tour. to be honest, i really wanted to do the tour, mainly because i'd heard about how many crazy fanatical people (people like Iona) go on the tour. it sounded like a bit of a laugh so i signed myself up. there were a couple of wierdos on the the bus but not as many as expected, but they did sing along with all the songs, actually the tour guide was the worst affender. we saw the main point of interest in the movie like the house, which is actually two houses, they were shot in a way to make it look like they were one house, ah the wonders of Hollywood. one of the houses is now owned by Harvard University, up until recently they still had the gazebo from the film there, but it became tricky to study due to the amount of tourist going there, so it was relocated to a park up the road a bit. the gazebo is locked these day becuase some woman tried to re enacted the scene from the movie and fell and hurt herself (Iona, was this woman you? i'm putting nothing passed you) all in all it was a pretty good trip, i got to see that 'Sound of Music' fans are a different breed and i also saw a bit outside of Salzburg too because the wedding scene in the movie was done in a church elsewhere, i thought it was kind of strange because the church in Salzburg is quite nice and in someways better. who knows why? i think, the funny part about this whole 'Sound of Music' thing is, i was speaking to the girl that worked at the hostel about it and she was saying that hardly anyone in Salzburg has even seen the film, her included, and they play the film every day.

Salzburg itself is really pretty and not very big at all, quite walkable actually. it was snowing while i was here which gave it that little bit of magic (oh my god, did i just write magic? i'm sounding more and more camp by the minute, look what the sound of music has done to me!) its streets are really beautiful. the old town is full of shops (some of which are actually built into the side of a rock face) they mainly sell tradional stuff like hand made shoes or really big names. but in the new side of the river i found a couple of shops that were really cool. in one of them they had heaps of quirky items, one in particular caught my eye. it was a toaster that doubled as a lamp, who knows why you would want a toaster lamp, but it was interesting.

There a huge fort up on the hill and from what i can gather it was built for the Archbishops here becuase they pretty much governed this place, so what they said goes. its really quite massive, i think i heard that it was one of europe's biggest. becuase it perched right on the top of the hill the view from the top is stunning, while i was here Salzburg was covered in a blanket of snow. i found out while i was there they had a giant organ in the fort that was pretty much used as a giant alarm clock. it would ring out in the morning to wake everyone in the town up, and at night it would ring out to tell everyone it was bed time. hows that!? all i could think of was whether or not it was loud enough to cause an avalanche. getting back to the Archbishops for a second, one of them didnt really take to the whole celibat thing too well and his 'lady friend' ended up having 14 children to him. he ended up having a place called Mirabelle built for here, the gardens of Merabella are meant to be quite nice, at the moment it looks like a field of white. i saw photos and in summer they do look beautiful, they also feature in the 'Sound of Music'.
I noticed that there mad about puppets here, i saw a couple of puppet shops. i thought it was funny when i heard that the puppets that were in the 'Sound of Music' were doing a tour of the states at the moment.

I've noticed the longer i go, the shorter my blogs are getting, some people probably thought this day would never come. i can hear them now 'finally, Trent has written a blog that hasn't got a word count of 10,000'. maybe i'm running out of interesting things to say, or maybe I'm getting lazy. it could be a combination of the two, hopefully its still worth your time to read it.

i really enjoyed it here, in fact, combined with my memories of Vienna i really liked Austria, even though i thought Vienna was a little bit straight. but overall i think its a really beautiful country, i'd love to come back here one day. so i think the plan is to go to Switzerland next, unless a better offer comes up. i think my trip in Switzerland may be a quick one due to how expensive it is, but i'll just have to wait and see. more soon!