We didn’t go out on the 29th,
so my account resumes on the 30th, when we took a train into Salzburg
and looked at the Salzburg fortress.
Salzburg was very pretty and
interesting, but it was also very crowded, because we happened to go on the
first day of a festival. This particular festival involved old cars and country
music, which we found to be quite amusing. The crowds made it hard to take
pictures with a couple of the more famous landmarks, like this fountain.
Once we’d reached the main part
of the city, we bought tickets to go up and look at the Salzburg fortress. No bird
demonstrations in this castle, but the view was much more beautiful, and this
castle’s history did not seem to be as sobering as the last’s. There wasn’t a
real torture chamber since the castle hadn’t served as a court.
The first room we looked at was
my favorite: the salt room. Since the castle no longer needed to store any
salt, the room had been lined with portraits of all the archbishops who had
owned and made improvements on the fortress. We could also look at models of
the changes each archbishop made to the castle’s architecture.
The audio guided tour took us up
to the top of the tower, where our already-amazing view was improved, and we
could look down on the whole city of Salzburg.
I also got to stop and see the
castle’s mechanical organ, nicknamed “The Bull.” Tom and I peeked through a
small cloudy window to get a look at it. Because the hallway was so narrow, we
were soon pushed along by the rest of the crowd.
We ate lunch at pretzel and hot
dog stands, which were all very, very good. We stayed and looked around the
town for a couple more hours, then left to go back to the train station to get
the right train back to Zell am See. When we reached the main roads, though, we
found a bike race had closed most of the streets, and the bus we’d planned on
was out of commission. We crossed the river and walked for a good mile and a
half before we found another stop.
The train ride back, which was
spent sitting down, was much enjoyed by everyone in the group.
No comments:
Post a Comment