The hills are alive . . . with the sound of Salzburg

After a lovely breakfast in Munchen, we hopped on the Autobahn and headed into Austria, going to Salzburg, former home of the Von Trapp family and one W.A. Mozart. Was still raining when we arrived, after a rather confusing detour caused by minor street flooding and some weird traffic plan that wants people to park at a municipal garage and take a shuttle on rainy days. En route to the hotel, near the city's old town, we got befuddled and ended up driving down a pedestrian zone. Luckily, we weren't the only ones.

After a quick lunch at a health food shop (where Kevin was complimented on his fabulous German), we went walking around town. Our first stop was the Mirabell Palace, whose gardens were made famous in The Sound of Music (we didn't do any of the multitude of Von Trapp tours around the region). Even in the rain, the gardens were absolutely stunning.






Kevin and the fountain seen in Do-Re-Mi.
In one area of the garden were all of these great little medieval troll people. Here's one.

After sloshing around the gardens, we headed into the old city for ice cream (there's gonna be a whole separate post on our food experiences) and to just walk around and soak it all up (quite literally, unfortunately). Here's one of the fabulous alleyways in the Altstadt.

I can't remember if this was the Rathaus or the Residenz (yes, another one).

The spouse again, ready to molest an artichoke at the outdoor market. You just can't keep that man away from produce.

Mozart's home during most of his life, now home to the Mozarteum. When we were in Salzburg, the museum was filled with Japanese tourists. One of Salzburg's big tourist products is Mozartkugeln, a sort of truffle filled with pistachio paste and covered in a chocolate layer or two. We got ours at the grocery store, which Kevin (of course) turned into an educational experience. The Mozart house was surprisingly large to me, but apparently the family was well-off when they purchased it and the space included a piano sales showroom.


Because of the weather, we stayed in for the evening rather than heading to one of the nightly classical concerts held at Mirabell during the summer months. Dinner was Indian food, continuing our tradition of eating Indian food across the globe. One of the highlights involved the fact that German restaurants are much less strict about allowing well-behaved dogs inside. A friendly golden retriever owned by the Russians next to us came over and said hello several times during our meal (particularly after he realized we had 5 pounds of chocolate stashed under the table). Since we were both missing the pooches something awful, it was a welcome visit.

Munchen memories

Days 1 and 2 of the trip were spent in Munich, except that it took me most of Day 1 to get TO Munich. The weather was lousy, and so we missed some of the great treasures of the city, the Englischer Garten, in particular. Our hotel was right on it, so we got a bit of a taste of it (the garden has these great fast-moving manmade brooks (for lack of a better term) that run through them, and one passed through the back yard of the hotel. However, it was still too soggy for a hike. Also, we missed the Alte Pinakothek (old art museum) and its Neue brother, which were both closed on Mondays. Let this be a warning to you: Check the hours for attractions before you go, lest you walk a mile across town in the rain to find that your destination is closed.

So, what did we see? Well, the first night there Kevin and I were exhausted after too much travel (he had a long train ride from Wien), so we had dinner at an Austrian place across the street. There, I had my one and only schnitzel. I also learned some important vocabulary: helles for light beer and dunkel for dark beer.

On Monday, we spent a couple hours touring the Residenz, which was the palace for the Bavarian kings. The place was incredible, being a palace and all. The building is also now home to an Egyptian museum (also closed on Mondays) as well as the Bavarian opera and a children's theater.


Part of the gardens at the Residenz: The Germans like their green space.

A chamber trio busking just inside the gates.

The chapel. As you can see, it's a bit ostentatious. Much of the palace was done in the Rococo style, which was developed by folks who thought Baroque was too bland and not flashy enough.

An etched glass flask. Kevin took lots of photos of interiors and objects d'art. However, he took almost no pictures of the great outdoors, which is normally what I take photos of.

Me, sitting in this Roman style palazzo area of the Residenz.

St. George slaying the dragon. You can see the detail from here, but it is completely encrusted in jewels. Those crosses: made of rubies. The dragon: emeralds.

From there, we walked to Marienplatz and a church. We passed this great sculpture along the way. What you don't see in the picture is that across the entrance way is another sculpture that is the exact relief of this one, like puzzle pieces. It was the entrance to a business of some sort.

The old rathaus in Marienplatz. While in the square, we had a tolerable meal with mediocre service. It was a lesson we learned a couple of time -- restaurants and cafes in the shadows of tourist destinations are rarely your best option.

One other stop we made during the day, because I'm a total geek, was the Bavarian State Library, which was open until 2 am. It was much more like an academic library in terms of collection (I went cruising through the biomedical journals to see what they had) and tone. Everyone was quietly working or studying (seriously, I coughed and got the death glare from several tables). I miss that aspect of libraries -- I'm a girl who likes my quiet.

That evening was a special treat. We went to see "Harry Potter und die halb-blud Prinz," which was dubbed in German with no subtitles. I got to stretch my German vocabulary a bit, although I still had a better sense for what was happening than Kevin, since I knew the books. (He thought that "horcrux" was just a German word he didn't know. To force me to practice my German, Kevin made me buy the tickets (he's mean that way), where I learned that in Germany you often buy movie tickets for a specific section or even a specific seat. Dinner, strangely enough, was at a little tapas bar near the movie theater. Tasty food and a great "white sangria." Afterward, we stopped in an ice cream parlor/Internet cafe to check our email and almost saw a fight when the owner tried to kick out two completely wasted college students.

Intro to Europe Posts

OK, I really suck. It's been more than a month since I got back, and I'm only now sitting down to start typing. In my defense, the time zone difference took almost a week to recover from, I had the usual other stuff happening, Kevin started class, and we had dog guests who kept me occupied. I had wanted to use Kevin's laptop to keep up while I was there, but very few hotels had wireless access, or Internet access at all.

In general, I had a terrific time, despite the weather and hormones working against me. It rained the first 3 days I was there, while we were in Munich and Salzberg. Then, the weather got very hot and humid, which is tricky in countries where most hotels and restaurants don't have air conditioning. Culturally, it was interesting to see nations that are Western yet very different from the U.S. And, I did get to pick up some German (who knew one of my first words learned would be for whole-grain bread?).

The travel went well. Singapore Air gets my vote for great airline. I think that was what flights were probably like in the 1950s. I didn't have any major delays, and I missed a couple of biggies (the helicopter crash in New York, and a shut-down terminal due to an unidentified bag) just barely. In the second instance, we were very lucky, because Kevin usually waits until the last minute before boarding so that he can smoke. This time he came through security early. Had he been about 30 minutes later (his usual schedule), he would have missed the flight, because security was shut down due to the problems on the other side. Several people due on our flight missed it for that reason.

Driving wasn't so bad, except for a 3-hour drive that turned into a 6-hour trip after my transatlantic flight. The problems were caused by rain, heavy traffic (apparently, the Netherlands was camping in Bavaria that weekend -- all of them), and construction (with their stringent labor laws, nobody's doing work overnight there). Oh, and the Islamic version of a family of guidos jumping in front of me at the rental car counter. But coffee provided the boost I needed. Then I managed to miss a turn when I came into Munich, and got lost. After about 15 minutes of driving around, I managed to find a street that had been in my directions. I got to the hotel, after not seeing my husband for a month, and he was . . . asleep. My blood sugar was dropping, I was crashing, and I shoved him awake and immediately started yelling. I will probably be hearing about that until the day I die. (In his defense, he had been anxiously waiting for me, especially since there was no way for us to contact one another without cell phones, and fell asleep.) A shower, a nap, and we were in better spirits.

So that I can get this down in a somewhat orderly fashion, I'm gonna write this from city to city, since that was how we traveled. Of course, there will be the occasional digression, 'cause I am the queen of the non sequitur. (Ooooh, shiny . . . )

Summer Reading Program Book #9

The Watchmen, by Alan Moore

Considered to be a seminal work of graphic fiction (or any fiction, for that matter: Time named it one of its top 100 books of the 20th century), The Watchmen is a story of fear on the brink of apocalypse, of collateral damage in life as well as war. It takes place during an alternative 1980s, in which Richard Nixon is president, costumed heroes once fought crime, and a scientist who fell into a reactor is all that keeps the world from nuclear war. The picture is bleak, even in times of peace. But Moore's words, wonderfully illustrated by Dave Gibbons are as thought-provoking now as they were 20+ years ago when the book was published.

Summer Reading Program Book #8

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute

A Cold War classic from the late 50s, this is a novel about the horrors of war, being able to predict your death, and how individuals deal with the two. The book takes place in southern Australia in the early 1960s, 2 years after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere. Due to wind patterns, the radioactive particles are slowly making their way toward the South Pole, killing country by country, town by town as the cloud moves south. Among our cast of characters are an American submarine captain who was in the Pacific when disaster struck, an Aussie naval officer and his wife, a scientist, and a farmer's daughter who never got her opportunity to leave small-town life. As they and those around them wait for their inevitable doom, the reader has an incredible view into human nature and living in the face of death. And, hopefully we will all learn the book's lessons about the idiocy of nuclear war (though no one knows for sure, educated guesses are that the one that happens off-stage here was started accidentally, in what was basically an international pissing contest).

Summer Reading Program Book #7

Dog on It by Spencer Quinn

Dog on It's Chet joins Midnight Louie, Mrs. Murphy and Tee Tucker, Randolph, and a host of other four-legged clue sniffers in this mystery novel. Here, our canine narrator is a private detective (and failed police dog) with his human partner, Bernie, living in Arizona. A missing honors student leads us into a case that left me guessing until the end. Along the way, we meet a variety of characters, canine and human, and pick up some insight into topics ranging from the suburbanization of the desert to custody loss. The relationship between Chet and Bernie rings true, and the anthropomorphism (except for the thinking in complete sentences in English) is comparatively minimal. The worst part of the book were depictions of animal abuse and scenes from a kill animal shelter -- I had to skip over those parts, including a chapter in which Chet is separated unwillingly from Bernie. The next one should be coming out next year. I'm looking forward to it as much as Chet anticipates a visit to the barbecue shack.

Back from vacation

Returned on Sunday from my 7 days in Germany and Austria with Kevin. I meant to blog about it while I was there, but wireless access at hotels was fairly rare (the free kind, that is) and Kevin was too busy tending his Facebook farm to give me much time on his laptop. I have been too jetlagged and tired to string sentences together since I got back to post anything meaningful, but I hope to have some concrete details and photos up by the end of the weekend.

Suffice it to say that I had a very enjoyable time on my first visit to the Continent. I got to practice what little German I have, saw the beauty of Bavaria, drove through the Alps (literally, between the mountain passes and the tunnels), ate some wonderful and not-so-great food, got to experience similar but foreign cultures, drank a great deal of beer, and toured cities that go back 1,000 years.

Of course, there were some downsides. We were driving across 2 countries that make it transportation via auto rather difficult (to encourage public transit use), had various delays, and got lost on multiple occasions. Both trans-Atlantic flights made me think I was flying Screaming Baby Airways, and the differing travel styles between me and my spouse led to anxiety for me and some tension. But all in all, I'm glad I went. We're already planning our next trip over, which will have to wait until after Kevin graduates and finds gainful employment.