Getting to Austria from Italy entails crossing the Alps and transitioning from one language, culture, environment, and cuisine to another. Suddenly you're surrounded by German instead of Italian. Museums are highly organized instead of pell-mell. People are exercising instead of smoking cigarettes. It's puffy coat weather and menus feature potatoes and pork instead of pasta and pizza.
Our train adventures took us through the southern Austrian city of Villach, where we had a cup of tea along the crisp, clean, blue Alpine river that runs through it. This is what it looked like:
We approached our week in Austria as a bit of a vacation. Since we'd only be staying in Salzburg and Vienna three days each, we didn't have time to settle into these Austrian cities and establish a routine the way we had in Italy. We decided to be tourists.
Salzburg has a large, busy, thriving newer city and--across and down the river--a laid-back, cobblestoned, quiet old town, which is where we stayed. Cars could not access our street, and it was a relief after Florence to not have to worry about traffic.
Salzburg is best known for being the birthplace of Mozart and the film location for The Sound of Music. We focused on the latter (although we did watch the new Pedro Almodovár movie "The Room Next Door" in the Mozartkino theatre down the street). We walked around the nunnery where the convent scenes took place. We tried to walk around the building where the Von Trapp family lived so we could see the gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sang to each other. (Apparently, America, not enough of us learned our lesson about Nazis from that film!) Turns out, a hotel purchased that building and the land around it and installed a gate through which no one but registered guests were allowed to pass. So, no gazebo for us. But we did have a lovely walk back through the outskirts of Salzburg, which was filled with green fields and little waterways, lots of bicyclists, and children walking home from school.
The hills are alive ... with sausages and goulash.
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