Ich Bin Ein Jenaer: Salzburg

The next morning we wanted to go to church. We were able to find a branch near the bus station (we were taking the bus to Salzburg, Austria. You have to have an international license to drive in Austria, which none of us have). First, we had an adventure at the parking garage. I pushed the button and the doors opened up. However, there was another door about a car length in. I was hoping that those doors would open when I got close to them. it took a while before we realized that it was a car elevator. It never started moving so I decided to back up, out of the elevator and that’s when the elevator started moving. As soon as we started moving a felt my stomach lurch. That’s a weird feeling to be in a car going that direction.

We made it to church and then made the bus ride to Austria. We arrived at the palace gardens in Salzburg at the same time as a large sound of music tour. The tour guide explained all the places in the garden that were in the movie which helped because I didn’t recognize any of them. I made sure to get pictures in all of those places though. I’m pretty sure the sound of music is just a tourism advertisement for Salzburg. There were several busses with sound of music tours plastered all over them, at the hostels they show the sound of music every night, and most of the gift store fare was sound of music related.

We eventually made our way into the old city and wanted to check out the biggest cathedral, the dom zu Salzburg. As we got to the front of it there was a huge crowd awaiting somebody to come out. I first thought it was the pope. I could see a tv screen outside that showed people walking down the aisle with banners. It turns out that is how they celebrate Pentecost in Salzburg by dressing in their traditional clothes, holding two swords, and marching. I liked the guys that had fox fur on their caps. I would like to be one of those guys. After the large parade exited from the cathedral the large group of people in front made their way into the cathedral. We snuck in to take a look (on the way out we realized they were taking tickets at the entrance) and they were pretty much having a youth rock concert in the cathedral with cool lighting effects throughout the cathedral. We took some pictures and slipped out of the cathedral.

Then we headed over to another cathedral where we heard a lot of noise but we first had to walk through a cemetery to get there. While there we walked to a crypt that a saint had died in and was made a crypt in 477 AD, that’s really old. This other cathedral had people parading out of it as well. When we walked inside there was a choir singing which sounded great with the acoustics.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the fortress on top of the hill. What’s amazing about the fortress is that there has been a dwelling in that location since around 100 AD and had been slowly expanded over the next couple millennia to become the fortress that we see today. Today we walked about 13.5 miles. We took the bus back to Munich, got there around 10 PM and then had to drive an hour and half to our hostel in Berchtesgaden, the home of the eagle’s nest.