Munich is a city of church bells. You can hear them every hour, ringing from every direction, their different tones blending harmoniously with each other.
And if you’re there on trash day, you can also hear the early morning clanking of thousands of beer bottles being dumped into trucks. This of course pairs nicely with the drunk tourists reveling in the streets, pretending they can keep up with the Germans who were weaned on hops.
The original plan was to hop on a bus to Hellbrunn Schloss, a quirky pleasure palace about 20min from the city. We timed it so that we could get in free with our Salzburg Card, which was good for 24 hours from the first time you use it. Our hotel concierge told us exactly what bus to get on & when to get on it. All was going smoothly until the bus arrived & I told Eric to hop on it.
Now here’s the problem: Eric is a smart man & he generally listens to me, but when the back door of that bus opened instead of the front door, my poor logical husband just couldn’t wrap his head around that. We had just been chewed out two days hence for not using the correct door & Eric knew that door was supposed to be the exit (not the entrance). So despite my frantic urging to “just get on it,” we missed the bus. In fact, the bus driver shut the door in my face as I was trying to step on — I even banged on the door before he took off…don’t think he liked that too much.
Thoroughly disgusted with Salzburg bus drivers (& our own ineptitude), we decided to forego Hellbrunn since it would no longer be free by the time the next bus came around. Instead we opted to explore the market & do more walking up Monchsberg. I’m glad we did, because the views of the city from atop Monchsberg are INCREDIBLE! My only regret is that I was wearing jeans, which were fine if I’d leisurely been strolling pleasure gardens…NOT so fine for trekking up & down a mountain in warm weather. At least I had the foresight to wear my boots that day.
Lunch at the outdoor market consisted of mohnstrude (poppy pastry) & brezen mit speck und kase (pretzel with meat & cheese). Eric loved the cheese cutting table.
Before leaving Salzburg, we squeezed in a quiet walk through the cemetary at St. Sebastianskirche. We never found the Mozart burial plots, but we DID see some elaborate tombstones.
We stopped at a cafe for plum pastry and melange (milk coffee) before being picked up by a taxi for our next destination. The cab driver didn’t speak English so it was a quiet and beautiful drive south to Obertraun, which gave me plenty of time to reflect.
My conclusion? I LOVED Salzburg & would visit again in a heartbeat! It’s a romantic city with old charm & a slower pace. Even the tourists who seemed only interested in consuming all things Sound of Music were subdued by the sheer majesty of this place. With good sturdy shoes, it’s also a walker’s paradise. I mentioned Monchsberg already, but there’s also Kapuzinerberg on the opposite side of the river which offers breathtaking viewpoints, an old Capuchin abbey, & a cool fortress wall with watchtowers.