Walkabout: Salzburg: "We are 16 Going on 50 (Everybody Sing Along!)"

You'd think the Sound of Music was released just yesterday, not in the mid 1960s. The Von Trapps are on bus stops, billboards and, of course, tours, tours, tours. Sure, that Mozart guy was born here and there's his residence and music school and all, but you don't hear a lot of tourists singing the words to his songs...am I right or what?

Salzburg is beautifil with its gardens, music and music school of Mozart and the fortress high above that's best reached by finicular. Still, at times it kind of comes across as a village that was taken over by Disney...or maybe it should be to sort the logistics out a bit. Once you escape the bus traffic and bus parking to get to the old city, what you find in July is throngs of people packed into narrow streets to see "the real Austria," which looks amazingly like "Epcot Center Austria." 

Having just come from Vienna, a large city with a wealth of history and sites to see, I was amazed to find what I thought was going to be a quaint Austrian village so packed with people. Big (Vienna) turned out to be small and relatively free of crowds. Small (Salzburg) turned out to feel big, because parts of it are just so packed with people and their modes of transportation. There are times when the log jam of European and (now that we are up north) Asian tour groups just makes you want to escape back across the river for the quieter streets that aren't of interest to tourists.

Still, there's a lot of charm to Salzburg. It's nice to eat at an outdoor eatery with tables perched on pebbles. The food wasn't as good as we encountered when we got off the beaten path in Vienna, but it was still good. Nearby Hungary has contributed goulash to most menus, so there's a little more flavor to be found if you get tired of breaded, fried meat. The beer, as we continue to move north from Europe's Beer Equator, continues to improve with some very nice Weiss Biers.  

Linguistically Speaking

Okay, we admit, we're confused. After attempting to be polite and say "Please, thank you, check please, beer please, etc." in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German and now Czek, we are coming across as a bumbling mass of miss-matched languages. We say "bitte" for please and then go right to the "grazie" for thank you. We are starting to get some concerned looks from the locals. Still, one must press one, however confused we appear to ourselves or to others.