The Hills are Alive...

10/7/2009

Today we were did probably the most stereotypical touristy things that you can do in Salzburg, Austria and loved every second of it. Like I said last night we bought a combo ticket that allowed us to do both the Sound of Music (follow Maria’s footsteps) and a salt mines tour. This was going to be a very full day for us so we woke up pretty early for the first time in a long time. Breakfast at this hostel has been one of the better breakfasts that we have had since Munich.

We started the morning with the Sound of Music. This bus tour took us to all of the outdoor sites of the movie. Our tour guide was a fantastically quirky English woman named Sue. We saw the 16 going on 17 gazebo, the abbey, the church where they got parried, the lake and back of the house. While we were on the tour we learned all these neat facts about filming the movie, heard the real story of the actual Von Trapp family, in addition to getting a great tour of Salzburg and the surrounding countryside and towns. Only the outdoor scenes from the movie were filmed in Salzburg, the indoor scenes were filmed in the studio in Hollywood; and as one would think, the directors did a lot of funny shooting with locations so make it work for them but it doesn’t exactly match up in real life.

Here are some fun facts that I learned while on the tour. The song Edelweiss is not an Austrian national song, it is an American song that was written for the movie. The edelweiss flower is a protected flower now because it was tradition for a man to climb a mountain and pick the flower for the girl they loved and bring it back to her. A lot of flowers got picked and a lot of men died this way. The national color of Austria is a beautiful, warm yellow, which is why there are so many walls in Austria painted that color. Eventually the real Von Trapp family settled in Stowe Vermont, and there ended up being ten of them total. One of the younger children (their names or gender were completely misrepresented in the movie) still owns a lodge there. The way the Sound of Music got to become the fantastic movie happened in the following way. The real Maria wrote two books about her family, those books were the inspiration for a German movie, the German movie was the inspiration for the Broadway play, which was finally what inspired Hollywood to make the great movie with Julie Andrews in it. Salzburg is also the home to Redbull and Sworski crystal. I did not buy any sworski crystal, but I did buy a dried out Edelweiss flower as my souvenir from Salzburg.

Towards the end of our tour we stopped in a charming little town in the lake region, mountain, countryside of Austria. This was where the church that they used to film the wedding scenes was located. This was also where a fantastic apple strudel café was located, so Katherine and I had strudel for lunch, because naturally it is one of Maria’s favorite things. The town was truly precious and the surrounding area was breathtaking.

I love the geraniums everywhere. It seems like flowers grow extremely well, easily, and in abundance here. I just love it when they have them in boxed on their porches so that it looks like the flowers are cascading over the porch railings. In generally I really love the old country style of architecture with the wooden beams and peaked roofs. I love being in the Alps. It kinda reminds me of a mix of Alaska and Colorado, but with a bunch of really cute, nice, elderly folks everywhere that just want to chat and enjoy life. The water in all of the rivers is so clear and blue, the grass is green, and with the coming of fall the leaves are changing into vibrant wonderful colors.

The second part of our day was to go on tour of a Salt mine. This tour picked up right where the Sound of Music on dropped of, so that was convenient. We got into a smaller van that was extremely warm and moderately uncomfortable to sit in. Our van driver was a whackadoo named Harold. Harold wanted to be the best guide he could be, but after having such an awesome tour guide like Sue, Harold’s enthusiasm was a bit annoying and his driving was terrible. We also had the weirdest family in the van with us. They were from Australia. It was an older man, who literally had a coat of white hair sprouting out from his back, his middle eastern wife, who was all of 4’10 and the husband kept calling her darling in a moderately dominant way, and their hyperactive son Daniel, who the father kept telling him he was a “handsome boy”. Needless to say this family bothered me way more than Harold did.

Being so warm in the van, I just wanted to take a nice little nap on the way to salt mines, but Harold jerky driving prevented that. The mines ended up being a pretty cool experience. We were given these mining jump suits to dress in and took a tram into the depths of the mine. We saw how the whole salt mining process worked, even live feeds of the miners at work, saw a very cool “mirror” lake. A lot of being in the salt mine reminded me of Lord of the rings. They tried to incorporate some laser shows into the mining tour, which didn’t really fit in, but was still pretty cool. Our tour guide clearly favored the Germans on our tour because he would talk for miles in German and then say one word in English. The Germans would laugh at something funny he said and nothing he would say in English would be funny. I understand German might take a little longer to speak, but come on not that much of a difference, whatever. My favorite part of the tour were these slide that we got to slide down, which I guess is how the miners used to get into the mines. At the end of the tour we were given a sample of “the best salt in the world” and then had the opportunity to buy some pictures they randomly snapped while we were on tour (on the tram, going down the slide, etc). We did not buy the pictures because they were entirely over priced, but Katherine’s face in all of them was too priceless.

After the salt mine tour we enjoyed a nice beer by a nice stream and waited for Harold to return and pick us up. The beer was called Jubilee or something to that effect. It was an amber beer and ok. While I do respect the Germans for their beer drinking skills, I think I like Belgian beers better for their tastes. If I could put a boot glass in my pack without breaking it, I totally would. Once Harold go there, he had to do some errands and Daniels mom gave us a false alarm to get in the van. So we went back to finish our beers and it was a good thing be did, because it was then that Katherine realized she almost left her camera. I like it when things work out for the better like that. On the way back into Salzburg, Harold really wanted to stop at the schnapps makery place and let us all try the Schnapps. It was pretty good so I didn’t mind the stop except they wouldn’t let me use their restroom, which irritated me (On a side note, I think it is completely ridiculous how they charge over here to use public bathrooms, and its not that cheap, and I don’t ever carry my wallet with me when I got to the bathroom so it is a major inconvenience, and I normally just end up begging the worker person to please let me go for free). I tried a Hazelnut, peach, berry, and “bishop’s ladies” flavors (whatever that means). Daniel’s dad bought a whole bottle of schnapps and when his little bug eyed wife asked how he was going to get it back into Australia, he responded that it would be gone by then (wink). I wanted to vomit. What a weirdo creep.

Harold very nicely dropped us off close to our hostel so that we didn’t have to walk far back. We decided to spend the rest of the night at the hostel. We decided to but the dinner they were serving there for a pretty reasonable price. It ended up being the most balanced meal we had eaten in a while and not bad tasting at all, so I doubled up on everything, especially salad and chicken for protein. Going back for seconds, I had a little run in with the cafeteria lady and the language barrier made it very hard for me to explain that I had already paid. She got really huffy with me, but eventually we got it straightened out. I just had to use my old dishes for seconds in the buffet line, kinda bizarre but whatever. We also saw Daniel and his family eating dinner at the hostel too. We spent the rest of the night watching the Sound of Music and pointing out all of the things that we learned today. My mom sent me an email about the swine flu, so naturally I got paranoid. Thanks Mom, but I am doing a lot off the things that the list says to do to prevent swine flu. Salzburg got an A plus in our book and tomorrow is a big day of traveling.