The Great Adventure (Part 2)

So we left for Salzburg, Austria on a regional train from Munich. It was quite a beautiful train ride, what with trees and mountains everywhere. I like that stuff. Getting in relatively early in the evening was nice, and it allowed us a bit of time to decompress from the craziness of Germany. Salzburg is very much a mellow kind of place, and that was just what we needed after Berlin/Munich. That night when we got in we ate at the hostel, sat around watching about half an hour of The Sound of Music, and kind of just getting everything together (including our minds) so we could have a productive next day. This mostly meant going to bed really early. Day 4, then, began somewhat early in the morning and we set upon Salzburg. We started by visiting the Mirabell Gardens which, like so much of Salzburg, was made famous by The Sound of Music. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about sightseeing spots from movies as such, but these gardens and the other places were interesting and nice in their own right. It didn't hurt that the city was untouched by drunk Germans and busy streets. There were pretty much only older people, so I felt a little more distinguished than I did being an American at Oktoberfest. Distinction by association, I suppose. We visited about half a million churches in the Old Town, of which one (St. Peter's) was truly outstanding. The others were decent, but St. Peter's Church was a cathedral with great artwork, a huge organ, and graves. Everything I look for in a church, in other words. A large portion of the morning and early afternoon was dedicated to the fortress that overlooks Salzburg. We walked the 750 meters straight up, and took the funicular down, but while we were there we visited a couple different museums that they have inside the museum. These were by and large a good use of time. I always think it's kind of cool to learn about a certain segment of history in a place where it actually happened. I haven't visited that many places like that in the U.S.A., which is probably just because I grew up in Arizona where besides cowboys nothing old has ever happened, but it makes me appreciate those types of museums anyway. The one lame thing about that fortress was that it was attacked several times over the course of its history and was never taken, but they surrendered it to Napoleon without a fight. Seeing it, I definitely thought they could have held Napoleon off, but what do I know. All of this sightseeing and such was nice, but the problem was we had to burn time until midnight because that's when we would be taking the night train to Bern. To this end, we started just walking everywhere and ended up walking up a mountain that happened to have a monastery on it. This was a good place to spend an hour or two, so that's exactly what we did. We were able to see out on the Old Town and the river and the mountains around the city, so it was a pretty cool place to just sit. At the end of this sitting extravaganza we were hungry, so we went back to the hostel and ate. Then we sat there for a few hours, the last couple of which we spent watching the Sound of Music. They really loved the Sound of Music at this hostel. I can tell this because it was in the DVD player the entire time we were there. Finally, midnight came around and we headed to the train station to go to Switzerland. And in this transitional way, Day 4 sort of came to an end and turned into Day 5. Day 5, however, will have to be another post. Switzerland awaits.