Day 6: Leaving Salzburg, entering Heaven

Monday, July 15, 2013

Today's Highlights:

-Mozart

-Salzburg fortress

-Heaven on earth = Hallstatt

This is Robbie again, yesterday's paragraph was a trial run. I have now been given the responsibility of documenting a full day--let's do this. 

We finally got to sleep in this morning! And whoa mama did it feel nice to get a solid 8 hours of shut eye. And sorry to everyone expecting more sleep talking episodes, none last night. I'll work on that. 

We left Bad Reichenhall (the little town we stayed in) to go back and see more sights in Salzburg. Periodically throughout the day, one of us would ask the other "Remember Rosie?" "Yeah, how amazing was she?" "SO amazing." "Yeah... so amazing." This happened probably 30 times.

Anywho, when we got to Salzburg we decided to find out more about this Mozart guy everyone is talking about. He was born and raised in Salzburg. I mean, is he as cool as One Direction (right Ashlyn) or J-Biebs? So we went to his residenz (that's residence in German, FYI. We are fluent now) and found out that it costs 30 euro to go into the place he was born in. So we skipped that part, went into the attached gift shop and listened to some of his pieces played by music boxes. We also bought a 3 euro Mozart with dangly-legs Christmas ornament and a 1 euro Mozart chocolate instead. 

History Lesson: zero

Gift Shop: one

After that we ran into more of Dick and Brenda's missionaries (we had seen two the day before as well)! After getting to know each other we asked them what we should see before we left and they told us to see the hilltop fortress in the center of the town. They helped us find our way there. It's called Festung Hohensalzburg, and dang it is so cool! You can see it in this picture off in the distance on the hilltop. 

It overlooks the whole town--Salzburg is gorgeous. The Salzach river splits the old town from the new and the water is a Havasupai-waterfall-light-blue color. It almost looks like it has been artificially dyed! The city nested between big green hills and rocky alps seemed almost unreal. Beautiful.

We learned that the fortress was made in the 11th century because there was a big power struggle between the pope and the emperor. The head bishop of Salzburg sided with the pope, and knew that his life was endangered because of it. So he had the fortress built in case the emperor came after him or his people.  It was built and improved upon for a couple centuries, and now it's huge! Plus, we got to shoot crossbows. And guess who was better?

Unfortunately we had to leave Salzburg, which we were pretty sad about. Our sadness quickly disappeared though because we arrived in HEAVEN! We got to Hallstatt and Oh. My. Lanta. It is the most BEAUTIFUL place I have ever seen/been/imagined. Take a peek at some of these pics. 

We arrived on one side of the lake and took a ferry across to the town. Angie and I wanted to sing the melody of the traveling scenes from Lord of The Rings. Ok, so maybe we sung for a minute by the ferry with a couple of Asians looking at us strangely.

I can't even paint a picture of this place using words (Angie is good at that kind of stuff). So I hope the pictures do it justice. We only had time to check into our hotel, walk the pier, and eat some delicious fleischknudel (meat-stuffed dumpling), sauerkraut, and kaiserschmarn. As we were walking the pier, there were swans everywhere. Are you kidding me?!? Swans? This place is perfect. Some were getting a little too close for Angie's comfort. She quickly got used to it and became comfortable with her swan friends as we were dangling our feet into the water.

In Utah we feed ducks, in Hallstatt we feed swans.

We luckily get to stay here for two nights. Tomorrow has some fun adventures in store. Schlaff gut!