the sound of music and the sounds of music

I must confess that I didn't realise that so many people read this blog. Given my penchant for using this blog as a vehicle for capturing every imaginable whinge, I'm somewhat embarrassed that people take the time to read my diatribes on trains and why I get annoyed at people who don't move fast enough getting on the Tube. But yes, I am pleased all the same.

Having said that, I am probably going to alienate even more people by saying that despite me living on the footstep of Europe, I was (a) too bored (b) too lazy and (c) too cheap to organise some traveling for over the Easter break. I'm finding that even long weekends away can be quite taxing on the ol' boy - the stresses of having to arrange everything, then shelling out money for it, then calculating how much money I lose by not working (I don't get paid for Bank holidays as a contractor), then wondering how I was going to fill in the days wandering around oh, Austria or France or what have you.

It was Frances however who goaded us in to action when we saw that cheap flights to any European destination was disappearing by the minute. By luck, we found some cheap flights to Salzburg in Austria. Salzburg wasn't a place which was high on my priority list, but browsing on the net, decided that it was worthwhile to have a look - though pretty much persuaded by the chance to go on The Sound of Music tour. As always, Taffy's over-active mind imagined him running down the mountains, twirling his outstretched arms, singing, a la Julie Andrews, but with a far more scratchy and pitiful voice.

The week before Easter was unexpectedly busy - and became ill again. Unfortunately my illness warranted a visit to the a NHS Walk-In centre where I spent a cumulative total of 3 hours of my life waiting to see a nurse in a very overstretched and busy centre. At one stage it looked like I would have had to bail out on the holiday, but I got a bit better and it was off to Salzburg. Fortunately our flight out of London was with British Airways - for the uninitiated, a full-service airline such as BA compared to the horrors of Ryanair is an absolute blessing with an enormous cloud hovering on top. Our flight was delayed for an hour, but as Frances is a Qantas gold frequent flyer, she was able to take me into the lounge where I drank wine, ate a full lunch and then proceeded to pilfer snacks and dinky little cans of drink from the fridge to enjoy from our train from Munich to Salzburg.

Unfortunately it was too expensive for us to fly direct to Salzburg airport, so the closest airport was Munich which had reasonable fares. I'm always impressed with the Germans and their efficiency - plenty of non-EU passport checkpoints (where the immigration officer asked me whether I was going skiing - I almost laughed in his face) and a beautifully clean and fast train to the main station in Munich. Although, a nice German man had to help us out with the train tickets, and when we were forced to make an unexpected change in the middle of nowhere, I impressed myself with my ability to navigate the (admittedly easy to understand) subway system. An even bigger bummer we missed the train by a few minutes, forcing us to shelter in the train station food court (where I again impressed myself by remembering my German to ask for Lebekas Semmel which I enjoyed eating the last time I was in Munich) to wait for a slow regional train. We got to Salzburg... eventually... where the only sound was the rain thundering around us.

Salzburg however, is a very picturesque city. Walking from the hotel along the river was really nice - the snow-capped mountains in the background and pretty little (and very expensive) houses lining the river. Of course, there were the usual annoyances such as not being able to find a decent place to eat which wasn't filled with cigarette smoke, and the ubiquitous Mozartklugen chocolate balls being advertised everywhere (and yes, I did succumb). Being my first day on holiday, I had a large breakfast of ham and eggs and then apfelstrudel with vanilla sauce and a coffee. I felt ill for hours afterwards.

Feeling rather bloated and over-indulged, we traipsed through various churches, ate an enormous donut pretzel for lunch (well, I lie, I shared half of it with Frances) and watched men play chess on a board painted on the ground. All in all, it was a lovely morning, but clearly we were waiting for the main event. The afternoon rolled around and it was off to the hills for the Sound of Music tour. I'm not someone who usually likes kitsch tours such as these (ok, I lie again, I love it), but I really must say that it was a lot of fun. We saw the back and front of the Von Trapp house (2 different locations), the pavilion where Liesel and Kurt sing "I am sixteen", the actual Abbey were Maria used to live (incidentally dating back to the year 700 or something like that) and the church where Maria and the Captain got married - yet again, not the actual church where they got married, but a church in a small town outside of Salzburg. The tour guide was hysterical, although towards the end I was thinking that it was more due to his mental state doing this twice a day, every day. Some funny titbits I learnt on the Sound of Music was that most Austrians hate the Sound of Music, that the Von Trapp family actually escaped Austria in a train to Italy and then moved to America, that had the family climbed the Austrian mountains at the end of the movie they would have found themselves in Germany and that Gretel nearly died in the boat scene when all the kids fell out of the boat into the water.

I was so disappointed when the tour ended that I hadn't managed to run down a mountain, singing (erm... screeching) "the hills are alive", so France and I resolved to continue the fun at the Mirabell Gardens where many scenes of Maria and the children on their big day out were filmed. I now have photos of me jumping up the steps (singing "do-re-me"), marching with outstretched hands on the fountain, and running through the big trellis. Frances and I had so much fun that the rest of our tour group (who had followed us to the gardens after the tour) started to copy us. It was very funny though, watching everyone else's interpretation of it. Save, perhaps, the American tourists - we overheard one lady say that she had been on the tour 4 times - it was enough to make Frances and I spit out our Mozartklugen chocolate balls in mirth. Then there was the quintessential American tourist dad - complete with baseball cap, Goretex jacket, bumbag, camera bag strapped to his belt, aviator sunglasses and he was dressed in a way which looked like a Ralph Lauren truck had backed into him. But enough of poking fun at innocent American tourists, I am sure that Australia would refuse to let me back in the country had they seen the antics I got up to in the Mirabell gardens. These memories of course, will become a few of my favourite things.

But how are we going to solve the problem of filling up the next day, with the ice caves closed?

Our first stop on Sunday morning was the birthplace of Mozart with the most aggressive ticket counter woman I have met for a long time. I shouldn't have been surprised at how monumentally sh1t the museum was. In one room, they had upside-down paintings to symbolise how "Mozart turned music upside down" (yes, really), a cot with an ashen white plastic baby (supposedly Mozart as a child), and a replica piano. Definitely worth our 6 euros and the 15 minutes we spent there. Later in the day we went to Mozart's residence located in the Neustadt which was far more interesting. They had old documents and music sheets, and a great audio guide. I usually skip through audio guides, but this one was great in that you got to sample a variety of Mozart's works through his life - including ones that I had never heard before. On one display there was a pile of books which reached the ceiling - it turned out to be the collection of every single one of Mozart's compositions. I guess it never fails to astound me the genius of Mozart - at the age of 4 he was already composing quite complex pieces of music! A far cry from my own experience at the age of 4 - throwing building blocks at Toby, demanding food and sleeping. Yes, I am genius.

Our next few stops was at the Residenz gallery which I thoroughly enjoyed - a collection of modern and renaissance art arranged according to the theme of colour. Frances was unimpressed, but I thought it was great. We also visited the Salzburg Museum. I quote an earlier email to Rob about it:

"...was horrendously boring and unstructured - a collection of crap put together in this new fangled postmodern building. Putting shit together in a nice building does not compensate for having a stupid collection. The toilets however, were very swish."

In adding to the number of museums and sights we visited to clock up maximum value on our touristy Salzburg Card, we breezed through the very strange Fortress with its incredibly boring exhibits, save for the display of torture instruments. They needn't have put out the torture instruments - the museum was boring enough as it was. Other non highlights included the Festival Hall tour which we did where the tour guide spoke for 30 minutes in German, and then a good 45 seconds in English (or so it felt that way). Annoyingly, the Hall where the Von Trapp family had won the singing competition was closed - which meant that our original reason for doing the tour was gone, and we were forced to listen to incomprehensible German about some random lighting system (from what I deduced from the hand gestures).

Finally, having finished everything we had wanted to see I dragged Frances to the Museum of Modern Art where I was a bit surprised how small the collection was. We did end up having an icecream at the restaurant there and got stubbed about 20 euros for 2 icecreams and some water. We were not impressed. Dinner however was a cheapy affair at some random pub - we got a mixed dish to share for 2 which ended up being this enormous pile of meat including 2 big schnitzels, so we were happy.

That final evening it started to snow. At first it was very beautiful in the snow, and then it got cold and miserable as my feet froze over and my coat started accumulating more and more snow. The next morning it was still snowing a blizzard and I was a bit worried about our flight being delayed while standing in the bus shelter, washing the bin in front of us accumulate snow. Fortunately, the Austrians were clearly used to being snowed in and there were no delays - just the usual mass confusion and pushing and shoving to board the Ryanair flight.

But it was back to London where joyfully, the trains weren't running on Easter Monday, leading to a 2.5 hour journey home. But the day wasn't to end with me collapsing into a pile on the couch - Nick was arriving that afternoon and I have been given my instructions, in that he "hadn't come to London to drink tea, old chap".

The sounds of my marching orders, clearly.