Greetings from Vienna. We just arrived after a train ride from Salzburg, a very expensive train ride I might add, though the train did reach 200km per hour at one stage.
Yesterday we had a wonderful stroll through Salzburg, while Larna hummed songs from the Sound of Music in my ear. We even saw an old nun in the Stift Nonneburg (Nunnery) above the city, which is apparently one of the locations for the film (I have not seen it since a kid.) Despite the guide book telling us Austrians are not the friendliest, we found the people of Salzburg to be very friendly and cheerful. We also visited the house where Mozart lived, saw two statues of Mozart (one with him sporting, bizarrely, a pair of breasts), the Mozart University and numerous other places named after the composer...funny that, according to the Lonely Planet, Wolfgang could not wait to get out of the town and left when he was 24.
On our last day in Munich we did a fantastic walking tour of the city. Our guide was Canadian but really well informed. Among the things she showed us were two discoloured squares on a wall. These used to be plaques put up by Hitler to commemorate the Nazis killed in the Beer hall putch (there were 20 names on the plaque but five were not even members of the party). During their reign, anyone who walked past the plaques had to do the Nazi salute, so many people would divert down a nearby alley to avoid having to do so (only 37% of Germans voted for Hitler). Of course there was an SS guard standing in the alley taking down names of those who came down the alley. if you came down one times too many and it may have meant a trip to Dachau. A great and horrible story and one "hidden" from normal view.
We are spending the next two nights in Vienna and then head to Budapest for at least 3 days before exploring some of the smaller towns of Hungary.
(I tried to post pics...but the damn computer won´t let me! Pics of Salzburg to come!)
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