We got into Salzburg at 12:45 and took a very roundabout way of getting to our hotel, even though it was pretty close to the train station. We finally found the Markus Sittikus Hotel, and it sure doesn't look like a 4 star hotel to us. The whole room including the bathroom is smaller than the sitting room at our last hotel (I guess we really did get an upgrade there!). It feels like a kid's room with twin beds against opposite walls. Small but functional? At least it looks into the garden and not over the road. We are at the point of needing laundry, but balked when they told us it was 6 euros per shirt. Okay, we'll have to rinse some things out tonight and hope they dry in 2 days. It's very humid and muggy here.
We had some free time in the afternoon, so we decided to explore Salzburg a bit. Mirabell Gardens is right across the road, this is where they filmed the Doe-A-Deer song with Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.
We crossed a pedestrian bridge over the River Salzach into the Old Town, with small alleys and narrow houses. The first thing we came across was the house where Mozart was born. We walked along the narrow cobbled streets and decided to take the funicular up to Hohensalzburg Fortress. It was built in 1077 and is perched atop a hill, there were great views of the town below us. The fortress guarded the city successfully for over 900 years. It included a small marionette museum where we could see some of the puppets, a chapel, a torture chamber (apparently they only stored the torture devices here and did the actual torturing elsewhere), and a walkway that used to be the top of the fortress wall.
After spending an hour at the fortress, we took the funicular down and made our way into the Cathedral, built 1614-1628 by Italian Santino Solari. It was destroyed by fire more than once, rebuilt and expanded. It was quite expansive.
We went down into the crypt which we always find interesting. This one had the tombs mounted into the walls. There was also a room dedicated to a very odd art piece. There were 12 ghoulish sheet metal figures attached to the wall, and a shadow of a ghoulish figure moving across the wall.
We also found another church, the Franziskanerkirche. Then we walked back though the Old Town and found a restaurant near our hotel. Nothing exceptional, except that we had to flag someone down to chase a bee away from our table.
We went back to our hotel room and hand-washed some shirts and undies. For some reason our portable clothesline didn't get packed, not that there would have been room to hang it in the tiny shower anyways.
We sat in Mirabell Gardens for a bit, reviewing the story line for our show. We went to the Marionette Theatre for a showing of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). It took Wagner 26 years to write this opera. It is 16 hours of music across 4 operas, but tonight it was condensed, thank goodness, into 2 hours. It is the story of a ring of gold that holds power, and the fight to own it. There is something in there about a reforged sword as well. Hmmmm, gotta wonder if Tolkien ever saw this opera??? The marionette work was awesome, we were surprised that they were only 3 feet tall (the dwarf was only 2 feet tall, and the giants were played by normal sized people). We didn't understand the language of the singing or the narration, we're glad we read about the plot beforehand, although there was a side screen which provided short explanations of what was going on. The most recognizable piece of music was Ride of the Valkyrie, which anyone knows once they hear it.
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