Salzburg: Sound of Music and Mozart

Everyone kept telling us to go to Salzburg, which is just over the border in Austria.  On the weekend you can get a special train ticket that is 28 euro for 5 people round trip from Munich to Salzburg.  We went during the week though with me, Hayley, Camilla, Becca, Kevin and Michael.  Jason didn't go because school was starting in two days and he had to finish the rough draft of a huge paper before going back to school.  Since we went during the week we just drove.  It's about 1 1/2 hours.  Then Eric and I went for a Friday night and Saturday.  So these pictures are from both trips. 

Austria is the tiny, post World War II remnant of a once large and powerful empire that encompassed part of Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain and it's colonies and parts of several other Eastern European countries.  It was under the control of a family called the Hapsburgs from the 13th century to World War I.  They gained control of so much territory by strategic marriages.  One prominent Hapsburg ruler, Maria Theresa, had 16 children that she married into other royal families.  (One of those children was Marie Antoinette.  When she was guilliotined in France it caused a war between Austria and France during which Napolean came to power.)  Then it was the assassination of the Hapsburg heir to the Austrian throne that sparked World War I.

So Salzburg is famous for Mozart and for the Sound of Music.  It's a really pretty city between a rock and river.  Above you can see the river with most of the old city on the near side.  I'm taking the picture from on top of the rock (large hill) that curves parallel with the river.  Here's the view of the hill, and it's fortress, from the other side of the river.

We toured Mozart's house, the one he grew up in, not the one he was born in that you see in the picture.  It didn't have any furniture in it and it wasn't fancy, but it did have several pianos of the time, a portrait of the Mozart family and several original letters he wrote to his family and original scores of his music.  The audio guide told about his life and played his music in the background.  It was really nice.  I had this image of Mozart from the movie "Amadeus", that I saw many years ago.  All I can remember from the movie is an image of a wild haired young Mozart chasing a buxom girl around a piano and giggling.  And that's the image I had of Mozart.  After touring his house and listening to the audio guide I don't think that image is correct at all.  He seemed to be a pretty serious boy and young man.  His father and mother and sister were all musically talented and played together and travelled together to do concerts in the courts of Europe.

Geburtshaus means birth house.

Wherever we travel there are always musicians out on the streets playing with their instrument cases, or whatever, open to receive money.  This one was really good and played all Mozart pieces while we watched.

Eric and I went to a chamber concert in one of the palaces in a room where Mozart himself performed.  One of the pieces they played was "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" or "A Little Night Music".  That's the one that goes:  Da...dada...dadadadadada.   Da...dada....dadadadadada.  Got it?

There really was a Maria who married Captain Von Trapp, who had 7 children, and then they fled to Switzerland when the Nazis took over.  But the children weren't of the genders and ages shown in the movie.  (One of their children was asked "Which one were you?" and he said "I was Liesl.")  Also, they took a train to Switzerland instead of walking and Edelweiss is not the national song of Austria. I was devastated!  But there were a lot of marionettes in Salzburg.  Here's some pictures of Sound of Music sites.

Here's the "I am 16 going on 17" gazebo.  It was given to the city of Salzburg by the studio after the movie was made and they put it in a local park.  This is not where the scene was filmed.  That's Michael and Becca Loveless.

Here's the outdoor concert hall where the Von Trapps performed just before escaping.  Remember the little lady giving multiple bows in the movie with those arches behind her.  This is butted right up against the hill with the fortress on top and is right now being worked on.

Rick Steves says this is the stairway where they sang "Do Re Mi", but I can't picture it from the movie.  We left all our DVD's at home so I can't watch it the movie to verify.

This adorable cemetery is the one the filmmakers patterned their Hollywood set on for the cemetery scene where the family is hiding behind the gravestones.  The cemetery is also right at the foot of the hill with the fortress.  The picture below is what you'll remember from the movie.

The big fortress on the big hill overlooking Salzburg was never really lived in by a monarch and Salzburg was never really attacked.  They think it was because this fortress was there and looked so forbidding.  Of course when Napolean came over they just surrendered immediately.

People did live up there to run the fortress and it was little community that could be self-contained if necessary.  Here is the central courtyard with shops and residences all around.

Here is a room inside the castle that was inside the fortress.  It was a medieval castle, meaning a little primitive.

The line from one of the Fades in Hercules keeps going through my head when I see this picture.  "Indoor plumbing, it's going to be big."

This is an instrument of torture.  They would put this on a persons head and then put them in the stocks where everyone could see and mock them.  They had different masks for different occasions.  Maybe this was the one for lying?

Here's views while coming down from the fortress.  The little building with the black roof in the mid-lower-left of the picture is right in the middle of that little cemetery.

The building on the right side of this picture is Salzburg's main cathedral, the Dom.  It was very beautiful inside and had some unique (at least unique to me so far) paintings on the ceilings.  Some of them were monochrome paintings done in shades of blue and some in shades of red.  Then others were done with all the colors.  It sort of made an interesting geometric/color pattern that was pleasing.

Here is a public horse wash.  You just walk the horse down the ramp into the water and give him a bath.

Down those steps is an old-style bakery with to-die-for rolls hot out of the oven.

Rick Steves says this is a symbol of a blessing given to the church or house.  The 20 at the beginning and the 10 at the end show that this (church in this case) was blessed in 2010.  The C, M and B stand for the names of the three wise men:  Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar

This was in a garden at one of the castles.  It was called the Dwarf garden with many statues of dwarves.  I took a page out of Becca, Hayley and Camilla's book and tried to imitate the statue.

We thought this was a great picture of an old church being used for large, modern advertising.

So German! (or maybe so European!)

I was returning to my car after a big grocery shopping trip and saw a man standing near the front of my car with his back to me.  I was wondering what he might be doing to my car.  (Can anybody guess?)  Then I saw him make zipping up his pants motions and he turned around and walked away.  (I was parked so the front of my car was by some trees and bushes.)  Can you believe it!!  Some man was peeing in the bushes in the grocery store parking lot near the front of my car!  When he turned around I just gave him a level look but he wasn't embarrassed at all.  It's actually not the first time I've seen a man peeing in public but never before in such a crowded place.  Eric says that someone told him that for men in Europe the whole world is your urinal.  I wish I had gotten a picture.

In the same vein we have a little phrase we use now when we're driving and we need to make a rest stop.  Everyone goes "Oh man, do we have to pay to pee here?  How much this time?"  Eric even makes it into a little song that Miles then picks up on.  It's great.

For three weeks we had three teenagers visiting us from the US.  We tried to keep them busy seeing the sights and we even took them on a trip to Paris.  One time we were in Salzburg and we wanted to go in to a fortress.  We had already climbed a huge steep hill to get to the entrance so all the kids sat down while I went in to buy tickets.  When I got them I looked around and the way in was right at the exit to the ticket buying place.  I would have had to squeeze my way past the rest of the ticket buyers still in line to get back to where the kids were and then we would have had to squeeze back past the ticket buying line again to get to the turnstile that let us in.  There was no one sitting at the turnstile to take my tickets.  (What would you do?) 

So I went through the turnstile and beckoned the kids to come through.  As they came through they kept asking me if I had tickets for them.  I said I had all their tickets so they could come on through.  The ticket seller must have been questioning them as they went by and the people in line were looking at them like they were cheating so I showed everybody all my tickets and kept beckoning them to come on through.  Finally the ticket buyer came out of his little room and started shouting at me.  I showed him the tickets wondering why he couldn't remember that he just sold me 6 tickets.  He was shouting things like "It's not that hard!" and "you have to show me the tickets!".  I said "There wasn't anyone sitting here at the entrance to show the tickets to".  He grabbed the tickets out of my hand and started separating them at the perforation and showed me exageratedly how to give a ticket to Hayley and then give a ticket to Camilla and so on.  So I said "what do you want me to do now."  He threw the tickets back at me and threw up his hands and said "Just go!" 

Whew!  I was so upset I had to go sit down by myself for awhile (after climbing up some more steepness to finally get to the fortress at the top).  While I am used to being a criminal offender in Germany this was Austria.  And the police in Germany were much nicer than the ticket seller.  I wish Rick Steve's had warned me about all the rules pertaining to turnstiles in Austria. (I got angry again just writing this so I was being sarcastic there for a bit.  The rest of the time was very nice and Eric and I are planning a short trip to Salzburg this weekend because he didn't get to go with us that time.)

Just a few days later I was at a huge Fred Meyer-type store back in Munich shopping with Miles.  We were turning a corner where there was a shopping cart just sitting in the middle of the aisle so we had to go around it (and it's not easy maneuvering those 4 wheel-drive carts).  We were part of the way down the new aisle when a store worker started shouting at me in German and pointing back at the cart that had been in the way.  She was using a floor cleaning machine and was also pointing at the floor.  I was very confused at first and probably had a blank look on my face.  I finally understood that she was cleaning the floor and the empty cart was meant to keep people from walking right there.  There were 2 or 3 people walking down the aisle just in front of me and in back of me but she chose me to yell at.  Finally she threw up her hands and did that great huffing sound that we mothers know how to make so well.  I timidly murmured "I'm sorry" and kept walking.

Well I just stewed on that while I finished my shopping and the unfairness of getting yelled at when I had no idea what the empty shopping cart was supposed to mean and obviously other people didn't either.  So when I was done I found the store worker and walked up to her (very calmly) and said in English "It's not good for business when you are so rude to people like that.  I don't know if I ever want to come to this store again" and turned around a walked away.  She wouldn't look at me or talk and kept shaking her head.  I thought that would teach her to at least make sure the object of her scorn could understand German before she lit into them.  :)  I felt a little better, especially since I waited long enough that I could handle it like a mature adult instead of throwing a tantrum, but I still wondered if the better course would have been to just forget about it.  Oh well.

Anyway, these are the exceptions to the mostly very nice people we always deal with.  Some things are just so foreign to me (funny that, when I'm living in a foreign country) that I have to write about them.  Can you imagine living in a place like China where the language is so much harder and the culture is so much different.  Or South Africa where my parents lived for 18 months.  I didn't fully appreciate the stories they would write us.

Here's a great picture of very patient Michael being used as a pillow by both Jason and Kevin in the car on the way to Neuschwanstein.  We went there the day after they got here from the US so they were all still jet lagged.

Trip to England Part 2: London, Wesminster Abbey and Tower of London

The first thing we visited in London was Westminster Abbey (where all the kings and queens are crowned).  It is right across the street from the Parliament buildings and Big Ben, the big clock tower, is at one end of the Parliament buildings.  (The two towers are one end of the Abbey and the other end is visible just to the left of Big Ben.)  I didn't get a good picture of Westminster Abbey so this is one I found online.

Here are some policemen guarding the entrance to the Parliament buildings.

Right across from Parliament is a huge group of demonstrators.  The big sign you can barely read says "Capitalism isn't Working".  (I don't follow all the political nuances in England so I don't know exactly what they're trying to say.)

We couldn't take pictures inside Westminster Abbey.  It seemed like a typical, beautiful and ornate church, (not Catholic, Church of England) but it was incredibly cluttered with tombs and memorial statues. There were the important tombs of kings and queens (like Queen Elizabeth buried in the same vault with her half-sister Queen Mary, King Edward the Confessor, many others) and there were many famous artists, musicians and writers either buried there or with memorials there (Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, TS Eliot, Tennyson, Shakespeare (not actually buried here), Handel, Dickens, Laurence Olivier).  Their place is called the Poet's Corner.  It seemed like there was no space on the floor that didn't have someone's memorial plaque on it.  There were many beautiful statues for people I've never heard of, mostly military types. 

As we were walking to the Abbey we saw a group of young boys in school uniforms walking there too.  We thought it was a school field trip.  It turns out it was the boys of the Abbey Choir.  We got to hear them practicing.  They are 30 young boys, all educated at a special school just for them, along with 12 adult singers.  They were wonderful.

When we finished at Westminster Abbey we took the Tube over to the Tower of London.  It turns out the Tower of London is not a tower, but many towers, a medieval castle, walls, a moat (drained) and many other buildings.  It's a whole complex!

It's right on the Thames river.  The whole wall in the foreground is along the river.  The drained moat goes around the other three sides.  The castle in the center (called the White Tower) was built by William the conqueror as his very protected residence (he was a conqueror in a conquered land after all).  It was the residence of the kings for quite awhile.  Ann Boleyn lived here before being crowned queen and then she was imprisoned and executed here later on.

This is a view of the moat area outside the walls.

We're on a walkway towards the towers at the entrance to the complex.

Here's the "Traitor's Gate" where people were brought by boat to the Tower and brought inside.

Here is a memorial at the spot where the few executions that took place inside the Tower were carried out, including Ann Boleyn.  That's a glass pillow on top.

Here are some of the many houses inside the complex.  Several employees and their families live in these houses currently.

The main castle (White Tower) partly being restored.

A water closet (loo, bathroom) in the White Tower.  This was primitive living.

One of those ceremonial guards standing in front of the building where the crown jewels are kept.  He has the same uniform as the guards at Buckingham palace.

We saw the crown jewels, which were fabulous.  There were many crowns, some made specifically for certain kings or queens, some for different occasions.  There were also ceremonial swords, sceptres, orbs and even a spoon for anointing the monarch's head with oil.  The main crown, the Imperial State Crown, has a very large and famous diamond in it, a large sapphire and a large ruby.  It also has numerous smaller jewels and also some pearls from the earrings of Queen Elizabeth the first.  It is really heavy and Queen Victoria had a smaller, lighter crown made for her everyday use.  When she attended state functions she wore her small crown but the Imperial crown was always present, usually carried on a pillow near her.

The Tower closed before we could explore everything there.  In fact, there were so many things we didn't get to see in London that I hope we can go again.

Trip to England Part 1: Versailles

I really do mean to finish our trip to Italy because Rome and Pompeii were such interesting places, but I wanted to post about our trip to England first.  In the US Hayley belonged to really good choir and they do tours every summer.  Every other summer they go abroad and the other summers they stay in the states.  They compete at music festivals all over the world.  Hayley's first tour was to Oregon.  The second tour was to England and Wales but then we moved to Germany and she couldn't do it.  So I sort of promised her that we would go to England when her choir was there so she could see them.  So that was the impetus for our trip.  It was going to be just Hayley, Camilla and I, but then Eric didn't want to miss out so he came along.  Jason was in charge at home with Rand's help and under the very loose supervision of an adult friend of the family that was our houseguest during that time.  Jason and Rand did their job excellently and the house was spotless when we got home and the little kids had no complaints.

We decided to take the night train to Paris and spend the day there and then take another train the next morning through the chunnel (Channel tunnel) to London.  So we spent that first day at Versailles.  The palace at Versailles is very grand, very huge and is the inspiration for many copycat palaces in Europe. 

Versailles is the palace that Louis the 14th built in order to get away from the gritty, government life in Paris.  But the court just followed him to Versailles and it became the center of French government.  Louis the 14th is known as the Sun King and reigned for 72 years, the longest reign in Europe ever.  (He lived longer than his son and his grandson.  His great-grandson became Louis the 15th and reigned after him.) He was a very able King and it's said that he kept his nobles entertained and out of his hair at Versailles while he ran the country.  He was one of those deified kings who reigns by divine right and is only a little lower than God himself.  There were statues and paintings of him everywhere including this painting with Mary and Jesus and others all pointing to his painting, to show how important he was.

This is him dressed as a Roman

This is him showing off his fabulous hair.  (I think I remember reading that when he started to lose his hair he started wearing wigs and that's where the fancy wigs with long hair fashion came from.)

This is the famous Hall of Mirrors (another room copied by other monarchs) where the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I was signed.  On one side are arched windows looking out over the ginormous grounds and on the other side are arches with mirrors, which was unique at the time. 

Window side: you can see Eric in an orange shirt leaning out and trying to accommodate me and be in the picture.

The mirror side: you can see a reflection of me taking the picture with Eric and Camilla standing next to me.

The grounds are almost as spectacular as the palace.  They are 2,000 acres and include a manmade canal like the canals in Venice.

The girls insisted on rowing for us.

Louis the 15th came after Louis the 14th and then came Louis the 16th who was married to Marie Antoinette.  They're the ones who were beheaded during the French Revolution.  After Louis the 14th died neither of the two kings that followed him were as good at ruling.  They would rather use Versailles as an escape from their responsibilities.  In fact they built other palaces way back in the grounds to escape from Versailles.  Marie Antoinette had a whole complex where she could go to pretend she was a simple dairy maid (without doing any real work).  One of those two kings built this palace, called the Grand Trianon, as his personal escape from the court at Versailles.

It's not small!  In fact by the time we had toured the main palace, wandered the huge grounds, toured Marie Antoinette's domain and finally found this palace hidden in the way back, we were so tired we didn't even go inside!