Salzburg City Tour

Later on Thursday, the 14th, we took a walking tour of the city of Salzburg. We were able to meet the guide that had no idea our group existed in the morning for the afternoon. We didn’t see quite as much as I would have liked- we mostly stood outside of places where our guide told us the lengthy history of whatever it was we were standing in front of. But the city’s beauty more than made up for it, and we had Friday free to go and explore whatever we wished. So it all worked out.
We went to places like St. Paul’s cathedral, the Salzburg fortress (which mostly just looked like a great white castle), places where Mozart lived, the oldest restaurant in Europe (operating since somewhere around 803 AD) and a few places where “The Sound of Music” was filmed. We did get to take a tram (an extremely crowded one) up to the fortress, thankfully so we didn’t have to climb the massive hill. It was pretty sweet, and we did get to see a lot of the city.


Thursday night we also had the chance to go to a marionette presentation of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” The puppets were wildly entertaining, and so was some of the translation. Every scene or so there was a description of what was going on in five different languages, just for those of us who couldn’t understand the Italian it was presented in. Some of the phrases we thought were hilarious were “stage a passionate love scene,” “pay court to,” and “as Susanna luxuriates in the garden” (apparently “luxuriating” is singing to yourself, but that was news to us).