Where We're Going

Where We're Going

Sunday 15 June 2008

The Cow of Music, Fingerlos Cafe & brooms with glasses

We caught an early train to Salzburg and arrived to beautiful blue skies and sunshine. Despite having looked for a hostel months in advance we were unable to find anywhere to stay (unaware at this time that the football was on) and it had looked for a while as though we would have to remove Salzburg from our itinerary, until I was reminded that my Granny Kate's brother and wife live here. We contacted him and arranged to stay with him here, at Schloss Leopoldskron. Some of you might recognise the Palace, as it was used in the filming of The Sound of Music! It is a really beautiful building. We knew we would enjoy Salzburg, but having somewhere so magnificent to stay really does help!

The palace is only 15 minutes away from town so we checked in and headed straight back out again. The streets were flooded with Russian and Greek football fans and it was impossible to get a real sense of the city when it was so full. We walked through the old part of town, over one of the bridges and through the Mirabellgarten, which was also filmed at, and found ourselves in a dwarf-filled garden. It wasn't so much a garden as a patch of grass with a path lined with stone dwarves circling it. There were lots of people taking "wacky" pictures of themselves with the dwarves but we refrained from doing so. I could not resist, however, having my photo taken with one of the huge stone unicorns we later spotted. I expected that picture to be my favourite of the trip, little knowing that the actual best picture of the trip was waiting for me just around the corner... Sat on a bench were not one, not two, but THREE NUNS! I know some of you will no doubt shudder with embarrassment at what I am about to tell you, but I simply couldn't walk past them without asking to have my photo taken with them. Even with my poor German I was able to ask them and they laughed, I think in disbelief that I would want to have my photo taken with them. They shuffled up, I sat down and we chatted in broken German/English about our trip and they chuckled when we told them England weren't in the football because they are rubbish. I wanted to hug them to say thank you as we left, but wasn't sure how appropriate that would be. If only they had sung to me, my Nun Quest would be complete.

Skipping through the streets, as only a nun-obsessed Vixie can, we reached a fairly dull looking modern area of town which we would have walked straight past had we not noticed what looked like the Crystal Dome from The Crystal Maze. Never wanting to miss a good photo opportunity, and obviously not having had enough excitement so far, we stepped into the "art" and had obligatory photos taken. Thinking things could not get any better we walked up a street where two women were playing badminton, right in the middle of the road. Salzburg is an odd place.

Because of all the football fans it was hard to get through town and see it properly, so we walked back to the Palace we'll be calling home for the next couple of days. When we got back we saw lots of people in wedding attire. Wondering how awesome it would be to have your wedding in a palace, we remembered how perfect our own wedding was (even sans palace) and went to bed happy and content.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Waa! RSS reader just said 13 unread posts, they weren't there before. Must catch up. Apologies for any comments on old posts coming up!