More Salzburg

Salzburg, Austria  August 1, 2015

There is a lovely pedestrian only street in the old town of Salzburg with lots of wonderful shops. This is where we started our Saturday.  We did some souvenier/gift shopping and lots of browsing as well as people watching.  We found one shop that was filled with nothing but eggs.  Real eggs that had been blown out.  We assume some ingenious Austrian came up with a way to do this with a machine.  Half of the shop contained eggs decorated in all manners for Easter and the other half for Christmas.  There were the old fashion heavy cardboard egg cartons all over the store so you could pick out your eggs, place them in the egg carton and be assured that the eggs would arrive home safely, in one piece. The salespeople were adamant that this really does happen.

Our first sightseeing stop was the Salzburg Dom (Cathedral).  This Cathedral was built in a baroque style as oppossed to the gothic style of the other great Cathedrals we have visited. It was refreshing for us to see a different style.  We made another great find outside of the Cathedral.  Regular readers of our blog are aware of Lynda's fascination with cemeteries.  Even Tim finds it interesting to see how different cemeteries are from one country to the next.  Well, the cemetery outside of the Salzburg Dom moved very quickly to the top of our list of favorite cemeteries. It really is beautiful and it is still a working cemetery.  We saw several grave sites where a dearly departed had been buried this year.  To add to the beauty, there were contempary wooden sculptures interspersed among the gravesites throughout. The sculptures were all done by the same artist and there was a small display of his work in the chapel on the grounds.  This was one of those lovely surprises we encounter while traveling that keeps us coming back for more.

Our next stop was the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This was the first of two lhomes he and his family lived in in Salzburg.  Mozart was a true child protigy.  By the age of  5 he could play both the piano and violin and by 8 was already composing.  This first house had only five rooms with both of Mozarts parents and his sister sharing a bedroom along with young Wolfgang.  We experienced a new wrinkle in the travel industry at this site. Immediately after purchasing tickets, there were instructions for downloading a free app to your phone that was your guide through the house/museum.  The second Mozart house we visited also did this with an audio app.  Mozart's father took  young Amadeus on grand tours of Europe showing off his son to the royality of Europe. By all accounts Mozart was a happy child, albiet, an extremely precocious one.  As Mozart grew older, his father realized that Amadeus and his sister could not continue to sleep in the same room so the family moved across the river to a larger apartment.   We visited both houses and the second home was much grander then the first.  We heard no explanation that would indicate if the home had been significantly upgraded after the Mozarts left it or if, in fact, it was that much nicer then their first. While not wealthy, Mozart's father as well as Amadeus himself were well to do.  We won't bore you with further facts.  If any of you by chance have seen the movie, Amadeus, keep in mind that much of whats in the movie is not true to fact. Shocking, we know.

The Mozart theme for the day continued into the evening as we attended a Dinner/Concert of Mozart music. The dinner/concert took place in a beautiful second floor room of a local restaurant. The concert was presented by 5 string players and a soprano and a bass. They opened the evening with selected arias from Mozart's opera, "Don Giovanni". After our first course of a lemon chicken soup with a cheese curd dumpling, the musicians performed selections from Mozart's, "The Marriage of Figaro". The main course followed consisting of breast of Capon on a wine reductions sauce, potato gratin and carrots. The concert portion of the evening finished with selections from "The Magic Flute".  Dessert followed.  It was a fun evening. The musicians were top rate and entertaining and the food was excellent.

This morning, Sunday, we awoke to rain and fog.  The plan had been to drive south out of Salzburg to the Eagle's Nest, a home on top of a mountain that Hitler occupied during the war. This home is at 6000 feet and has spectacular views which we were sure would be hidden in the clouds. Instead, we visited the Salt Works at Brechtesgaden.  This is the oldest  salt mine in Europe if not the world. The mine was begun in 1220.  Sometime in the distant past this area south of Salzburg was flooded and contained a huge salt lake. Later, as the Alps were formed, the rising mountains covered the lake.  When it was finally discovered it was salt deposits. The tour took us by train deep into the mountain where the whole mining procedure was explained.  From the 1200's through to the 1900's miners used pick axes to extract the salt from the mine.  With the introduction of machinery a system of injecting spring water into the salt deposits is used now to bring the salt to the surface. A brine is formed with the introduction of water.  This brine is eventually pumped to the surface where the water is evaporated leaving the salt.  Visiting the salt mines was a good plan B for a rainy day.  After the tour we went into Brechtesgaden, another delightful Alpine village where we sat with a drink and watched the world go by.

Tomorrow's weather is suppose to be much nicer so we will head back to Eagles Nest first thing in the morning and then start winding our way back towards Switzerland.

Until the next posting, Guten Tag.