Salzburg Austria - Aug 23 to 25, 2009

Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart. This is also where the movie, The Sound of Music took place. You can feel the rich musical heritage throughout the city. When you walk down the street the buskers aren't the usual talentless hobos, haha. They are professional violinists or string quartets. They all have CDs available for sale and you actually feel an urge to stop and listen. One band in particular caught our attention. Mainly because of the instruments they were playing. A Bayan (Russian Accordion) 2 Balalaikas (like a small guitar with 3 strings) and a Balalaika Bass (like a stand-up bass with 3 strings). We had to look online to figure out what they were playing. The sound was incredible. Jess has another instrument he is determined to play now. Hmmm, that must be about 7 instruments now, maybe he should just finish learning the banjo first!


We spent 4 nights in Salzburg. The first night we did the usual evening exploring. On Monday we visited the Salzburg Fortress, on Tuesday we did a day trip and we had to use Wed to rest. We are getting worn out!

We're getting ahead of ourselves. The first evening we started by walking through a beautiful garden. Salzburg is on the footsteps of the Swiss Alps, so the scenery is breath-taking and the city's pride really shows. We also walked through the old city centre and checked out a few of the churches and old buildings.



Monday was a busy but very fun day. We had to do some laundry in the morning so we didn't get the earliest start, but we got to the Fortress as quickly as we could. We spent the majority of the day there. The view from the top tower was incredible. You had a 360 degree view of the mountains and lakes. The fortress was built by 17 successive arch-dukes. Each one fortified it further and further. It was supposedly impossible in bust into. It has never been invaded, but was given up to Napoleon without a fight. We had took the guided tour and spent a couple hours walking around on our own.








Tuesday we needed a recovery day so we slept in, got did some grocery shopping and took it fairly easy, enjoying Salzburg for the rest of the day.

On Wednesday we did a day trip to Gunzburg, Germany. Why would we go to Germany? Because we didn't have time to make a very important stop... What is so important about Gunzberg?? That's where Legoland is!! The details will be in the next post.

Vienna Austria - Aug 21 to 22, 2009

We arrived in Vienna Friday night. We got in fairly late so that evening all we did was walk down the main street and take a few pictures of the older buildings at night.


Vienna is a very beautiful city, full of parks, museums and history. We really only had one day so we didn't even scratch the surface... We decided to start at the imperial palace.

The palace has a bunch of museums inside so we took in a couple of them. We started with the Armory Museum. It is home to a massive amount of weapons and armour from throughout history. It was an excellent collection and we both recommend it to future visitors.


Next was the ancient musical instruments museum. The collection contained countless, priceless instruments that were hundreds of years old. It will take too long to go into the details, so instead here are some of our favorite pictures:





There were a lot of different types of violins. They even had "practice" versions that were small enough to fit in the pocket. Obviously the sound was not the best, but they worked great for students (very affordable and they could practice anywhere).

We also found a "new" instrument, the Baryton, that basically fell off the map in the 1500s. Jesse is now determined to either find one, or build one (hahahaha) and learn how to play. The best way to describe it would be similar to a 7 stringed, fretted cello. It also has a second set of 12 strings below the first set that vibrate when the top ones are played. The back of the neck is also exposed so the player can use his thumb to pluck the lower set. The museum had recorded music samples to listen to.



The 2 museums basically took up the entire day. It started raining that evening so we didn't get to see as much of the city as we hopped. Vienna was home to Beethoven, Mozart, and most of the major composers of the time, but we didn't get to see any of it... If we have the opportunity we would really like to return and spend a few days taking everything in.

We ended our evening with a stop at Zanoni & Zanoni for an amazing ice cream concoction: