8 June 2016
Cliffs
Salzburg has buildings built into cliffs
The old city of Salzburg is built around a series of cliffs.
This makes the layout confusing. Then I discovered one of the cliffs is only a few metres wide, apart from the bit with the castle on it.
The city has a slightly higher population than Innsbruck, 145k compared to 122k, but there are alot more tourists here.
Old tourists, the place is teaming with groups of old people on their last tour of the world before they get euthanised on the way home. This makes progress frustratingly slow.
You are also faced with hordes of people who are in a permanent state of confusion, perhaps marvelling at how the buses here are red instead of green like they are back in Ohio.
Anyway, it might just be because its very grey weather, but I find the place a lot less colorful then Innsbruck, and generally lacking in vibrancy. There were no young people out and about skateboarding / jogging / or whatever, just a bunch of people selling tour packages, and signs pointing to where your hotel you didnt book is. Apparently thats a genuine scam, people turn up at the wrong hotel, get accepted as if they are at the right one, and then end up paying for two hotels.
This is a sort of nice garden. Its free. Tourists enjoy it. They need to mow the lawn though.
More free garden.
Salzburg is yet to cut the locks off their bridge like many cities have had to do after engineers discovered they were at risk of collapsing.
Theres the old city, and the castle on top of the hill.
Fun fact, inside that castle is the worlds oldest railway. Cable pulled, it was used to deliver food and goods from one end of the castle to the other. It is still in use.
Salzburg has these electric buses. Look closely you can see two poles that stick up and hook onto wires.
They are kind of like trams, except they can change lanes, the poles swing from side to side as they change lanes, except sometimes they come off the wire, I saw it happen today.
When this happens the driver gets out of the bus and uses a pole to push it back onto the wire.
China loves these buses too, but they now have really large ones with 3 folds in the middle which are twice as wide as a regular bus. Those however operate on dedicated lanes.
Now we start to see cliffs, these buildings back onto the cliff, but I think you can walk through to the other side of the cliff.
The whole left side of this skinny street is a cliff face.
More cliff, here you can see a lift to the top.
And a facade for the cliff paying tribute to horses that haul Chinese tourists around Salzburg for only 200 euros for 5 minutes.
I only realised it was so narrow when I saw this tunnel.
This is apparently where Mozart was born, or lived, or died. The issue is theres about 50 places making similar claims.
This might not look too big at first, but look closely at the people by the fountain, and the 100 or so portable toilets against the building wall.
Here he is, Mozart. He died for our sins, and his own, of Syphilis, thus preventing Alexander the great from advancing on Hungary due to fears that his elephant army would succumb to the disease spread throughout the region by Mozart.
I finally had a sausage dinner. More potatoes of course. The highlight was probably the sauerkraut. The sausage was fairly plain and seemed to be of supermarket quality despite the restaurants claims they make it themselves.
Many guns are made in Austria, including those used by the Australian army. I presume these are real guns, and that a smash and grab would be very easy to do, the store is closed and they are left on display.
Finally, here is the castle and city photo everyone takes. Theres a sign telling you to take photo now, and so we all did.