Connect the Dots!

View European Travels 2010-2011 in a larger map


Travel is still on my mind, so while I sort photographs and write up posts about my various summer adventures, I thought for my first entry since returning to the United States, I would share this map of my European peregrinations. If you click on the link, you can see the entire map and also descriptions of what I was doing in each place. First stop: Copenhagen (September 2010). Last stop: Warsaw (August 2011).

Auf wiederschauen Österreich!, part 10 of 10

An entire shop dedicated to Mozartkügeln (Mozart balls).

Friday:

Me: Es regnet.  (It’s raining.)

Today we have two goals: to visit Mozart’s birthplace, and to see the historical musical instrument museum, both near each other in the old part of Salzburg.  Although the one is fairly expensive, the other is cheap and comes with entrance to the historical toy museum, too.  The Geburtshaus Mozart museum is actually located in the very rooms Mozart’s parents occupied for 26 years, in a building on the Getreidegasse, now famous as a shopping district.  DH is disappointed that the apartment was filled with display cases; not even the bedroom is furnished as it might have looked then.  (In fact, the bedroom/birthroom was staged as an odd sort of shrine, with some of Mozart’s personal effects in black column cases in the darkened chamber.)  We compare the various portraits of the composer, read excerpts from his letters, and ooh at the collection of set and costume designs for his operas.  Okay, I am the one doing the ooh-ing, as I’m particularly taken with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s designs for Die Zauberflöte.  If you’ve seen Amadeus, you may  remember the star-strewn sky in front of which the Queen of the Night sings her famous aria.  That detail in the movie is historical but a-chronological, as Schinkel’s production was staged in 1815, but the movie obviously takes place before Mozart’s death in 1791.  (Rather a lot of that movie is true-but-not-true; DH is planning to write a blog post about it.)

The historical instrumental museum has all manner of old keyboard, wind, and brass instruments.  Many were quite strange, like the combo violin-hunting horn (below); the bassoon with the sea dragon head (below); and the ocarinas that look like porcelain ray-guns (really--you'll have to take my word on this, as I don't seem to have a picture of them).  We eat lunch while listening to musical examples and descriptions (in English!) of many of the instruments.  Then it’s upstairs to the toy museum, with a train collection, play rooms for children, and a special exhibit about circus toys.  In the film room we watch (a dubbed) Danny Kaye escape from a circus lion cage, a fairly malevolent Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck short, and the Poochini cartoon I’m sure I saw on tv as a kid—the one about a dog magician who conducts a snobby tenor in Figaro’s famous aria while plaguing him with questionable ethnic and regional stereotypes, including a brief blackface episode.  Thoroughly out-museumed by now, we purchase an Advent calendar designed like the manuscript for “Stille Nacht” and head out into the rain, looking for a Konditerei.  Down one of the numerous alleys we find a quaint little place where we enjoy hot chocolate and a generous and truly delicious slice of plum tart.  (I have discovered that I love plum tart.)  Although it was good to sit in the warm and dry, we have to get back to the hotel, pick up our bags, and travel 5 hours up to Frankfurt, where we have a hotel room waiting for us a few minutes from the train station.

 

Saturday:

Him: See you on Skype!

DH gets up at the first alarm, grabs his bags, and walks to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station), where he catches the Strassenbahn to the Flughof (airport).  By the time I am finishing breakfast and similarly heading to the Hauptbahnhof, his flight to Heathrow is taking off.  I take the train to Fulda and change to Dresden.  By the time I am back in my apartment 6 hours later, he is somewhere over the Atlantic, on a 10-hour flight from Heathrow to DFW, where some of my relatives come to visit with him and see our pictures during his 4-hour layover there, before finally flying home again.

Although we walked a lot and had a fairly ambitious itinerary of sights, I think it was an enjoyable vacation.  DH would have preferred to “do Austria” without jet-lag, but he was happy to travel together.  It was certainly a mental break for me.  For just one week I stopped thinking about my dissertation all the time, and I will be sorry to get back to the grind.  Probably the catch-up reading I’ll do this weekend will light my fire again, and then there will be the sprint to Christmas/New Year’s.

The poster outside our Pension room is the closest we get to The Sound of Music.

Auf wiederschauen!

This isn't Mozart's Salzburg anymore, part 9 of 10

Thursday:

Mozart hated Salzburg; he found it provincial.  Although today it is a Mozart- and Sound-of-Music mecca, in his time this settlement nestled along the Salzach River was a salt-mining town and garrison.  The picture at left was taken from the fortress that overlooks the Altstadt.  I can’t get over the fact that the Festung Hohensalzburg was a fortress built by and for the various princely (arch)bishops who ruled here.  I am familiar with the Church’s secular and political Macht (power) up into the early-modern period, but the obvious militariness of it all is even more disturbing than the fact that they’ve set up a jail cell as a torture chamber, even though no prisoners were actually subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques here (the German audio guide makes this point twice).  Most of the rooms are pretty much empty, although there is a smallish museum of period material culture (furniture, tableware, jewelry, instruments).  In the gift shop I notice a sign the says the speedy Bergbahn up and down the plateau will be out of service beginning in January, in order to make improvements and decrease the ride time!  I guess it's a bottleneck during the tourist season.

There is also an unrelated Marionette Museum tucked in one corner.  Because the marionette theater is not playing anything the nights we’re in Salzburg, I make it point to stop in here.  I associate stringed puppets with Central Europe, not because of the Sound of Music, but because on my first trip there (to Prague in 1994), my brother and I were quite taken with the marionettes a street performer used.  In a box somewhere are the puppets on which we spent our precious souvenir money, a witch and a wizard.  And anyway, Richard Rogers got the idea for the "Lonely Goatherd" scene from the puppet theater that was founded here in 1913 already.  (The one at Schloβ Schönbrunn in Vienna may be older.)  Unsurprisingly, Mozart operas are a staple of marionette theater in Austria; you can see as at right as Papagano and Papagena from Die Zauberflöte.

We are traveling after the usual tourist season (which ends with October) and before the holiday season, so we thankfully miss most of the crowds.  Normally both DH and I bemoan the bleeding of Advent into the fall (the Christmas chocolates appeared in the grocery stores in Dresden two weeks before Halloween!).  However, we are grateful this one time that merchants are catering to tourists and have started the holidays early, because it means we get to “do” Christmas together this year after all.  And in fact, the Christkindlmarkt opens on the squares around St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Residenzschloss today.  We ogle the rows upon rows of straw, glass, and painted-wood decorations which would be adorable if it weren’t so obvious they were mass-produced.  We try a Schneeball (left) and a Winter Zauber (an alcoholic hot chocolate too strong for our tastes).

Then it’s back to the hotel to warm up and nap before going out for dinner.  We first try the traditional Austrian Stuberl next door, but it turns out that it is most authentic in its smokiness, something I have quickly come to associate with Salzburg, because it seems like someone near us is constantly smoking.  Austria is governed by the European Union’s smoking regulations, which require that restaurants have smoking and non-smoking sections (the “club” next door is apparently exempt).  However, of all the restaurants we visit with separate sections, not one ever actually closed the doors between the two sections, so it seems Europe is where much of the United States was ten years ago.  We are happy to live in a state that has gone smoke-free, because we are both fairly sensitive to smoke.  So we quit the Stuberl for the restaurant on the corner that is smoke-free, almost empty, and serves Austrian, Italian, and Indian cuisine.  We consume a yummy candle-lit meal of tortellini and schnitzel.