The Hills Are Alive...With the Sound of Music!!!

I got up at the crack of dawn this morning to meet Audra at Peterskirche to begin our journey to Salzburg. We bought our return train tickets at the station and then a little while later got on the train to Mannheim and then waited for our train that would get us to Salzburg…eventually! There was this crazy old German lady at the train station and she came up to the old couple who was sitting at the other end of the bench and started yelling at them. They didn’t know her and tried to ignore whatever she was saying. Strange. I slept most of the way and thankfully nobody sat next to me. It took around 5 hours to get there, but Bavaria is amazingly beautiful and we saw some beautiful scenery as we drove through Munich and into Salzburg.

We walked around Mirabell gardens not knowing that Do-Re-Mi was filmed there and took some pictures before finding our tour bus and eating a bit of lunch. I had brought a sandwich with me, which saved a few Euros! We made some American friends (a family with two kids, mostly talked to the dad who was really interested in what we’ve been doing in Germany) while waiting for the bus. The tour bus had Julie Andrews and the kids singing on the outside and was filled with almost all Americans. Our tour guide was insanely corny and not many people laughed at his jokes, but he tried. One of the jokes he told came as we were driving past a golf course. He said, “When you play at this golf course, they give you two pairs of socks, in case you get a hole in one.” I had to laugh at that…and a few others, but mainly because I could hear my dad telling them too! I learned that there was a movie made by Germans about the Von Trapp family, but that Roger & Hammerstein created their own musical that really had very few similarities to the actual story of the family. A movie was later made and Austrians and Germans didn’t like it because it was so different from the original. This is one reason that very few Austrians and Germans even know about the movie.

We saw the lake where they were in a boat and then fell in and it was so pretty with the mountains and the big white fortress thing in the background. The backyard was only used from this building because it was too complicated to film inside. They combined a few different locations and then put them together. Pretty interesting. We also drove past the place where Julie Andrews ran to the Von Trapp house and sang ‘Confidence’ an also where the kids played in the trees (same place). Then we got to go to the beloved gazebo that is unfortunately now locked because an 80 year old woman broke her hip when she fell while jumping from bench to bench a few years ago. It had to be moved from where it was originally filmed (the backyard that I mentioned earlier) because tourists were constantly jumping the fence and making too much noise while they were trying to hold lectures and other important things inside. It caused too much of a disturbance and since they didn’t want to just get rid of it, they moved it across town. Hollywood had built it just for that scene in the movie and they were going to destroy it after filming, but the people just loved it so much that they ended up giving it as a gift at the end.

The sky was super blue without any clouds. There were tons of hang gliders flying around at the top of this one mountain. I can’t imagine the view from up there because it was picturesque from the bus! We went up into the gorgeous mountains and were able to go on some type of bobsled ride on these cool little chairs. It was so much fun. You sat down on your chair and then the guy connected it to this lift and you rode up backward. The view was amazing and then once you got to the top, you had to get off and another guy put your chair on a new track that went down. You controlled the speed by moving the lever between your legs forward or back. I think I could have done that all day. You could make a killing off of something like that. I’m thinking that I’ll start a little business in the states! They could even do that at ski places in the summer. Oh the possibilities!

We later went to a little town called Mondsee where the wedding scene was filmed. We checked out the tourist shops and also ate some great apple strudel with vanilla eis and sauce. Four hours had already passed and we drove back into Salzburg. They played music from the movie most of the time on the bus and we had fun singing along. They also had a bar and I got this favorite Austrian soda thing that kind of tasted like ginger ale mixed with something. I kept the can to add to my collection. When we got back Audra and I walked around Mirabell gardens again and took a ton of pictures. There were flowers everywhere and we posed in the different places that had been shown in the movie. We walked across the river and found the Augustiner beer hall and had dinner and a beer in the huge beer garden. It was a really cool atmosphere and we hung out there for awhile before walking around. We ran into these two guys on the street who asked us a question about the game later that night, but we didn’t know. When he found out that we were Americans, he kissed us both on the cheek saying that he had always wanted to kiss an American girl. Haha.

After walking around the town and finding Mozart’s birth house, we lfigured out where all of the people that we had been seeing were going…to the public viewing of the Russa v. The Netherlands game. We joined and I had to throw away both the can that I had saved and another empty bottle that I was later going to fill up with water. I could have checked them, but would have felt like a moron checking garbage! There were a ton of people there and the atmosphere was great, but of course nothing compared to when we watched Germany play Portugal the other day. At around 10:30 we started making our way to the bus that would take us to the train station. We were both really tired and couldn’t wait to get to sleep on the train. We had reserved seats, but the whole train was a sleeping train and we had been put in separate rooms and decided to go somewhere else since there were a few other people inside that seemed like they weren’t going to be sleeping. We found an empty room and even though the guy who had a reservation in there came in a little bit later, he said we could stay and we crashed (but not before I put my camera and wallet in my coat pocket…just in case!!)

I really liked Salzburg and would love to go back again sometime. I had forgotten just how beautiful Austria is and could see myself living there or at least vacationing there for awhile! Audra and I had fun, but since we don’t know each other that well, I think it would have been better to go with a good friend. I had to laugh at some of the comments she made like, “I love how Catholic they are here!” She said that because in Bavaria and Austria they say Gruss Gott as a greeting…but really it doesn’t have anything to do with God. She also made a lot of comments about how things were in German there and how she was so surprised to see so much German. That is the official language of Austria! She said that she is used to seeing a lot of things in English in Heidelberg. I don’t know what she was talking about, but I just ignored most of her comments like that because they held no truth! Oh man…It worked out though since going on the Sound of Music tour was on my list of things to do in 2008!