Mozartburg, the city where Salz was born.

Today is a holiday here in Germany (before anybody asks, not Memorial Day) and so yesterday a few of us took a day trip out to Salzburg. Salzburg is the city that Mozart was born in, and they take that very very seriously. Around every corner you see Mozart plaques, memorabilia, souvenirs, or just plain portraits. And then for the actual sites you can see his birthplace, where he lived, bars he frequented, where he once took a dump, I mean the city really takes that man seriously.

The collection of people was Sergey, Manu, Siham (very nice Algerian girl from our research group), and MS (short for something that I don't really remember actually, but he's from Paris). We started off in a garden with a live Orchestra that was quite good, and a series of statues of Hercules wrestling Antaeus representing the four elements.

We moved on to walk around the city, climbed up to the main tower of the castle (and when I say climbed, that is definitely what we did) had lunch at this place with a beautiful view towards the top of the area where I also took pictures which I used to make the panorama with that I'm attaching to the email. It was really quite a beautiful view... and it's a beautiful little city.

There were a few exhibits inside the castle area that we visited. After that we walked back down, had a short rest at some cafe type place down near the city center and then eventually continued on to climb some last little mountain to see what the view would be before heading back to the train.

Other than their obsession with Mozart, Salzburg really was a great city... and I would gladly go back sometime. It was just very peaceful and quiet... relaxing even. More so than Munich is I can say. But it also had some character to it, and history. We found a cemetery and some catacombs on our climb up to the castle that were very nice and interesting and I imagine that if we spent more time there we would find more little hidden pleasant surprises.

And the people were really nice, most of them seemed to be able to speak any language you could throw at them. Our group kind of confused them I think and so a waiter tried to give me my total in French and I just stared at him. But other than that after hearing us speak once they would speak English to me, German to Manu, French to Siham and MS, and either German or English to Sergey depending on who.

Overall it was a nice day, and a little email can't describe it at all. I posted pictures on my picasa. The last picture is a panorama from near the spot we had lunch. The quality on picasa doesn't really do it justice so I've attached the "medium" quality version I have which is still quite large. It was a really amazing spot. We had to wait on the girls to go to the bathroom at that spot and I just spent the entire time we were waiting taking pictures of that view.

Until the next time I do something interesting...
Shane