Daytrip to Salzburg

After a lot of arguing/contemplation, we decided to daytrip to Salzburg, Austria today.  I initially wanted to go to the town of Füssen (in Germany) to see the famous Neuschwanstein Castle  of King Ludwig II (it’s the castle that Disney’s Sleeping Beauty castle is modeled after), but Paul was more inclined to check out Salzburg since it’s right at the border of Germany and Austria and it’s more convenient to visit it now than during our trip to Austria later this year, when we’ll be in the eastern side, nowhere near Salzburg. 

Although our Eurail passes are only valid for Spain, France, Germany and the Benelux region, we were able to use them to get to Salzburg because it’s right on the border (apparently we could have used them to get to Geneva, Switzerland too because it’s on the border but we didn’t know that and paid for our ticket!). As soon as we got off the train and walked towards old town, I was hugely impressed with how pretty Salzburg is – it reminds me of Lucerne, except there’s no snow on the mountains that surround it.  The buildings are in great condition and there is a large river (the Salzach) that runs around old town. 

While looking for somewhere to eat lunch, we stumbled upon a restaurant called Saran Essbar which is recommended by Rick Steve’s.  We actually decided to eat here because Paul noticed beef goulash on the menu (apparently he loves beef goulash and I had no idea), and we didn’t notice the big poster board about being in Rick Steve’s Best of Europe 2007 and 2008 until we sat down!  It turned out to be the best meal we’ve had in a while – I ordered veal schnitzel which was cooked to perfection and had a wonderful seasoning, and Paul’s goulash was really tender and full of flavour, just the way beef stew should be

After eating, we checked out a store across the street that sells hand-painted egg shells.  There must have been close to a million egg shells, all hand-painted and for sale for between 5-10 euro each!  It was quite an amazing store and I wanted to buy some egg shells because they were so beautifully detailed, but an egg shell would likely get broken as we travel, no matter how carefully I carried it, so I decided against it.

From here we headed to St. Peter’s Cemetery and Catacombs, the oldest Christian graveyard in Salzburg.  It was a nice cemetery, but I’m not sure what the 2 euros they charge you to go into the “crypt” is for – it seemed like just a set of stairs going into the mountain!  We paid and climbed up, but didn’t find anything crypt-like in there! 

As we made our way around old town, we stopped at several churches.  I found  Salzburg’s churches to be the nicest I’ve seen so far and some of the smaller ones made me wish I could go back in time and re-do our wedding in them (and we didn’t have a church wedding because neither of us is really religious)!   The interiors of even the smallest churches were beautifully decorated with fresco ceilings, marble and gold trim, and soft natural lighting.

We stopped at so many churches that we didn’t make it to Mozart’s house until past 5 o’clock, and they stop letting people in at 5 because they close at 5:30, so we couldn’t go inside.  We decided to continue walking and window-shopping for a while, and then went to the Mirabell Gardens on our way back to the train station.  Being a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, there were several couples taking wedding photos here and we stopped and watched them for a while.  We then found a circular gnome garden off to the side, near the playground, and went around taking goofy pictures with each of the stone gnome figures, which was probably Paul’s favourite part of the day!

Although our trip to Salzburg was shorter than I would’ve liked, I’m glad we came here today.  The only dissappointment was not seeing any string or piano quartets randomly playing Mozart’s music everywhere like I had seen on the travel shows we watched before our trip!  King Ludwig’s castle would have been amazing, but hopefully I’ll get another opportunity to see it at some point in my life