These are a few of my favorite things in Salzburg!

Guten tag everyone!  Tara and Katie and I are back from Austria and I have lots of pictures!

It was a five-hour drive from Lumignano to Salzburg.  Some sights:

We made a list of German words that we knew on the way up:

We stayed in Altstadt (Old Town).  Here is our hotel room:

Walking around, we found Salzburg's famous cemetery.  It was creepy!

 We had some authentic Austrian stuff for lunch.  Here is some yummy pumpkin cream soup:

Here is a dumpling:

Salzburg is Mozart's city.  In case you didn't know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a classical composer.  The three important things to know about him (besides the fact that he has the same birthday as me, Bridget, but in 1756 and not 1988) are the following:

1. He was a child prodigy and virtuoso and composed loads of complex music and performed at venues all over Europe while still very young.
2. He was enormously prolific and could churn out complex compositions in short periods of time.
3. His music tends to be archetypical of the Classical period, involving symmetrical melodies, more consonance than dissonance, and regular forms (sonata, variation, rondo, etc.).

  Here is Katie with Mozart:

There is a pistachio-marzipan-chocolate candy called Mozartkugeln.  Salzburg devotes entire shops to it.  Katie tried one, but has not become a fan.  Here it is:

Mozart's birthplace is a big deal, so we walked by it a lot.  We visited the Mozart residence, Wohnhaus, because the guidebook we had said that it was better than the birthplace.  Here is Wohnhaus:

 

The birthplace is on the main shopping street, right next to H&M: 

We came across some kind of protest on the way to a beer hall:

At the beer hall, we tried radishes with salt.  Here is the spicy variety:

More beer hall pictures:

Salzburg has a mountain in the middle of it.  Here it is:

 We parked inside the mountain in a garage that used to be an air raid shelter.  Here is Tara going into the mountain:

A lot of buildings are built into the mountain:

There is a fortress (burg) on top of the mountain:

To get to the top, you could take a funicular (that's like an inclined elevator on a track like a train):

On Saturday, we took the funicular to the fortress.  There was an audio tour and there were a few museums up there.  Here are some pictures:

Here's a toilet:

Here's Katie sniffing an edelweiss:

Other things on exhibit:

There was a marionette museum up there, too!

It just so happens that there are great belle viste  up there:

Then we had lunch:

Here is a soup with sliced pancakes in it (it tasted like wonton soup):

Here are spinach dumplings in pumpkin cream:

Later, we sampled three important Salzburg desserts.  This is apple strudel:

This is a fluffy egg white and sugar thing that had an omelettey skin and and sort of raspberryish bottom:

This is Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with a layer of apricot jam.  It's not really my thing because of the jam (which I'm sure would be delightful without the cake):

The Sachertorte was the creation of Franz Sacher, and is produced and sold for lots of money at the Hotel Sacher in Salzburg and Vienna:

At some point we visited a place that was half cafe, half place to buy prepackaged clothing and shoes and things:

This morning we toured a salt mine.  Before Salzburg ("salt fortress") became a tourist city, its economy was dependent on salt.  We had to wear some wacky outfits:

We had to ride a tiny train (actually a bench where each person had to hold the shoulders of the person in front of them) down into the mines.  We also had to slide down two long wooden slides:

We crossed an underground lake with spooky music playing the background, and we also crossed the border into Germany underground:

We took an escalator out.  Then we drove back to Italy.

Here are some more photos of Austria:

It's a faccia!

 

These signs, and crosswalk signs, were very detailed.

We bought some katzenmilch for Obi.

Guten tag, tutti, from me, Bridget!