Last day in Salzburg

Our last full day in Salzburg and so I would like to summarise....

Giving points out of ten for how they handle different challenges:

Litter 10/10 The place is immaculate

Cigarette smoke 6/10 Hard to avoid people's blow-overs. Lots of it

Dog poo 10/10 None to be seen

Charity shops ? None to be seen

Art 8/10 Loads of exhibitions, most of which you must pay to see

Street Art 10/10 Lots of it, amusing, unexpected, good

Ease of getting around 7/10 You must wait for a signal to cross the road

Architecture 10/10 Interesting, well kept, varied

Repairs to the civic structure 10/10  Inconvenient in places but they CARE!

Churches 5/10 Heavyweight, not necessarily v spiritual at all. Dead hand...

Bank machines 7/10 Liable to charge for giving you money

Beggars 6/10 Many many people begging on the street

Trains 10/10 Clean, quiet, modern, comfortable, well used, frequent

Chattiness 8/10 Most people speak English, friendly

Signage  7/10  Sometimes just peters out when you need it

Price 6/10 Quite pricey for necessities.

Pleasure of being here 10/10 Brilliant place for us, at any rate

Today was our last day, sunny, almost too warm for our clothing. 

Hand-made bread in the market. Looked delicious.
We actually bought wild garlic freshly picked a little later on. Delicious.

We loved the street market by the Kollegienkirche, and that church was truly wonderful … painted white all round inside, huge, expensively restored, empty of fittings but full of spirituality, loved it.

    

Amazingly, it has the same basic layout as Newgrange in Ireland.. the entry tunnel (nave), the three spaces at the end, the huge dome over the end....  But my goodness, it's come on a long way. It struck me, the most valuable thing in this valley town is flat land, and the huge number of huge churches bagged almost all of it......

We stroked the noses of the fiacre horses waiting patiently near the Dom.

  

We went up in the funicular to the fortress – so fast!!!! Breezy at the top, the coffee on the terrace was very good, so we ordered lunch and loved being there. 

Strolling round most of the interior was fun... the whole experience is well presented, not too religious, not too military, wonderful rooms and staircases and ceilings and displays. Well worth it (though we did not pay the extra to see the theatre and the Georgian rooms). It's like a whole town up there.

We wandered back to our side of the river, regrouped.... Succumbed to the pleasures of an icecream, which is another speciality it seems.

Walked up what seemed like 50,000 steps to a nice viewing point...

Altogether I made 4 drawings and paintings today, which was a pleasure.

Came back without finding a place for a nifty clubbin' drink, but made supper from left-overs and now packing to leave in the morning.  We only walked about 4 miles today but that included walking up the equivalent of 22 floors - seems like more. 

The main impression I have of Salzburg is how proud it is, how well polished, how clean and tidy. It has a proper spirit! Quite a contrast with Britain right now.

The modern ice age

There's a zone of excitement, of not-knowing, where adventures and learning take place. Not exactly comfortable, but somehow safe-enough for you to proceed. Everyone has this zone but at different degrees of risk. Perhaps it stems from earliest childhood; it's where and how we all learn whatever it is we know. I am not a very risky person, so my zone probably looks tame and dull to more adventurous types... so, you have found me travelling within very civilised countries, where there are timetables and policemen and shops... The unknown element is basically language.   I am not knocking myself here. Millions of people take their holidays in specially built resorts or on self-contained cruise ships, and choose to eat food they completely recognise... It's a global characteristic and has led to whole industries – normalisation.  But I do recognise that these travel journals are not about derring-do. More to do with observing how things are done in other places, what people say, how it feels.

Since my reading material for this trip is the huge heavy paperback book called After the Ice, by Stephen Mechin, devoted to charting how people around the world moved from the old stone age into the modern world... the domestication of cereals and other plants, dogs, goats, sheep; the use of different kinds of stone (flint, obsidian); colonisation of new lands; the shape and construction of buildings; some attempt to describe the spiritual or ritual lives of the different groups.... so while we are here looking at modern 'Austria' I am also (in my mind) looking at the landscape, wondering who could walk where, and when did they. The museum information on show here pretty well starts with the Romans (far too late), though it touches on salt mining, and copper, and trade along the rivers. Their big obsession of course is the archbishop-princes, whose vanity and worldliness resulted in palaces, ornament and ostentation.

However, the call of the ice was strong... Having met a delightful Scottish implant dentist and his wife on our first morning here, who were here for the skiing but had come down into Salzburg for a couple of days because the weather was inclement up there on the slopes, we were inspired to seek out the snow for ourselves and with bright sunshine and cold air we set off on the train. Everything is spick and span.

  
Amazing scenery!

    

How swift and smooth, how well-managed! Up we went through the (O-level Geography, thank you!) U-shaped glaciated valleys, and out at St Johann im Pongau. (Austrian station names are just as amusing as any that Britain can fling at you, even if you can't speak German).

There we found a handsome young man with skis talking to a taxi driver and they agreed to let us share the ride up to the gondola. The full price was €30, so we travelled for 10 each. Out at the bottom of a lift called Flying Mozart.... Andrew asked if there was a price for seniors and the man said 'Nice try!' (I think he added 'Grandpa!') 

 

We shared our lift up with two glowing older Austrian ladies with their skis. Then up and up, bumping 20 or 30 metres above the rocky snows, not as high as the spindly pine-tree tops, and with a stependous view appearing as we climbed. Up and up, five, ten minutes. I was thinking – the Austrians are great engineers, this cable is NOT going to snap. We hurtled towards the mid-station, FAR TOO FAST, but at the last moment the gondola slowed to a near stop. Then up again...

The Austrian ladies were – frankly – astonished that we had never been skiing. They questioned us quite deeply – what about our children? Did they not ski? We had to say no. Lamely I said we didn't have many mountains in the UK, and our children went swimming, sailing, travelling.... The ladies were politely silent. They were radiant with health... one had been born up there, skiied all the time in winter and went hiking and cycling in the summer. I thought maybe this is how the Ice Age people were, unexpectedly radiant. (Probably not, but who can say? Stephen Mechin's book is already out of date regarding attitudes, as far as I am concerned. He allocates duties to men and women in a consistently depressing way, and ignores any such ideas as matriarchy.... ).

Up to the top, where we took stock, standing on the metal grille, listening to the thumping music, watching the hundreds of people dotting about skiing, or strolling or … what does a happy crowd of people do? 

   

I was terrified my Skechers shoes would slip me over, but gingerly we made our way out onto the crispy granular snow … We did not fall. We went very slowly to the cafe/resto where people were sunbathing – something I knew about but had never seen or quite fully understood – but the sunshine was HOT and the air clear. 

  

We ordered lunch which came swiftly and hot. (How do they get all the stuff up there – in the gondolas? We fantasised about a normal road leading up the other side of the hill....) I made some paintings, the music was thumping, the views were distant and shining. This was my first experience of the world of skiing.

photobombed by the Flying Mozart sticker on the gondola

  

After a while we went back down – solitary of course as everyone else was careering down the hill on those broad smooth causeways, swish swish, from side to side, evidently having a fantastically good time. Am I too old to take up skiing? It looks such fun.

A bus and a taxi and a stopping train took us back to Salzburg... a very irritating man was on his phone laughing and laughing all the way – for an hour. He chatted and sniggered for at least an hour. What on earth can be funny for that long? Who on earth was he talking to? Not a girl... his mum? a bloke? a colleague? He was in his late 30s, fat. Impervious. At what age do we decide how we are going to laugh? I think it's a learned thing, we copy someone we know, or what we think adds something to our status. (Back to that zone of learning.....).

We are already getting familiar with the city... the zone of learning has widened around our sense of belonging... 

          

So we adventure through a sunny gateway and find a beautiful formal garden with huge swags of box hedges and recently planted swirls of colour – pansies, mostly, and bellis. It is the garden of the Mirabell Palace (the archbishop-princes again), and it has a stupendous staircase leading up to The Marble Hall where they hold concerts nowadays and weddings. 

    

The grandeur is almost unbelievable, but this time, rather pretty..... (What does this have to do with Christianity?)

There's a huge old aviary in the gardens, with a massive wire dome on the top – now all converted to a useful little art gallery (dome not visible from inside). Rather an amusing show of work by a radical artist called Peter Fritzenwallner with iron 'figures' looking at his own paintings, and a video purporting to show businessmen objecting to art works in public places because it makes a mess.

Among many rather fine statues there's a larger-than-life marble of Copernicus who challenged the orthodox with the idea that the earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. He was born in an area which was once part of Germany but is now part of Poland, and this accident of geography led the Nazis to take him as an excuse or hero of re-conquest... they wanted this towering figure of mathematics to adorn their thinking, so they commissioned a complaisant sculptor called Joseph Thorak to make him in marble.... It's a workaday thing, and tellingly located behind a huge wall, near the toilets. Four other stone statues near the gate on the town side seem to depict a fierce argument about who has the best deodorant.

We took a quiet drink in a little square near the river called Platzl. We have been watching the workmen lift and re-lay the thick heavy flagstones over the last few days. 

  

They use a little digger-crane with a marvellous battery-powered vacuum-suction lifter on it. It's hard to see why they are doing it, but the standard of workmanship is superb. In fact the whole city is teeming with repair and restoration projects – statues and fountains being uncovered after the snows, churches being buffed up, pavements remade. Obviously the massive flow of tourists pays for all this, but the outcome is a gleaming city, and everyone benefits. People expect higher standards, it seems, than we do at home. Alas.

Differences like these were also true in the Ice Age, apparently. Ways of doing things.

But every single person we spoke to – the coffee waiter on the train up to tht mountains, the young man from Stuttgart who shared his taxi with us, the ladies in the ski lift, the taxi driver taking us back to the station, the waiter bringing the spritzer at Platzl, they all talked about Brexit and what a disaster it is. A unifying theme.

Technology

There's a chain of shoe-shops in Europe called Foot Locker, which were once (hilariously) called Athlete's Foot. We shrieked every time we saw their outlet in Calais. Eventually someone must have told their board of directors so they renamed it. It's a superb example of how dangerous it is to use a foreign language to market your brand. We have seen a couple more examples in Salzburg: ultra-smart boutiques selling very glossy stuff. One says 'You know it's impossible' on the window. The other is actually called Second Hand. Er, I hope not, at those prices.

At the art galleries yesterday I found I was just not able to take everything in. I had to stride through various suites of rooms, even though I wanted to stop and read and study the artefacts... I was aware of consciousness overload. There is just too much. I had to focus on just a very few things, and those were identified very quickly and almost randomly, a gut reaction. I was weighing up the price of entry (so much to see!) against my ability to appreciate it all. The same thing is happening with my holiday reading.

My study book on this trip is a very weighty volume called After the Ice, by Stephen Methin, published in 2003. I find I can't read it for more than a short stretch, partly because it's so heavy, and partly because there's so much to think about as you go through it. It is really carving into my deep and wide lack of understanding of how modern humans came to live the way we do. … It starts about 20,000 BC and moves forward to the present day.... I was gobsmacked to learn that the origins of farming were not, as I believed in the Fertile Crescent as bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but in what the author calls West Asia, and I would call the Eastern Mediterranean – modern Israel, Jordan, Negev, Syria. The ancient tells and mounds, the story of Jericho (who knew?), the villages buried under the sea, the differences between wild and domesticated cereals (and later goats and dogs), the way archaeologists have found their evidence and made their deductions, it is rivetting stuff. One message comes out so clearly – the planet's see-saw into and out of hot and cold periods must make us look at the current global warming scenario in a savvy light. It's also fascinating that the rampaging excavations by 19^th century researchers – the grand old men of archaeology who dug so enthusiastically into the ground – did so much damage and was in some ways no better than the looters who often followed them. They did not have access to the radiocarbon dating, the pollen analysis and microscopy that we have now.. and we have to wonder what techniques will come along in future. The main message is that those 'stone age savages' were as ingenious, devious, violent, lyrical and organised as we are ourselves. I doubt we could do as well as they did, given their resources and how dependent we have become on (say) electricty, plastic, transport, money, etc. You can't go back.

Today we are going up to the mountains to see the snow. Train, bus, gondola. I hope we have warm enough clothing, but the sun is shining.

How being green is dangerous....

As a direct result of Salzburg’s green policies there are some unexpected risks to life and limb. That is to say, cyclists whizz past you from all directions - supposedly in their own lanes but often having to cross the pedestrian footpaths, change lane, or get across the many squares and Platzen … and they are almost silent.  Larger and even more frightening, the trolley-buses come swift and silent to their allotted stops and if you happen to be too near the kerb, you can get a terrible fright.

On the other hand, the tourist experience is pretty good. The dog poo clear-up rate is first class, and after we saw a fiacre-horse doing a poo at the traffic lights it was less than 30” before a horse-poo clear-up man came along to make it all clean and tidy, finishing his works with a bucket load of bleach water. I don’t suppose any of the smart shops want any kind of poo walked into their gleaming stores.   On the whole, the pedestrians are fantastically obedient to traffic light control… even when all the vehicles have stopped, they wait and wait and wait for the green man to light up to allow them to cross.   I wonder how long we’ll be able to saunter across any English road at our leisure, how long it will be before European (or American) ideas of pedestrian control come in.  I savour every journey across a road away from lights, or even blatantly ignoring light signals.  Rebel, me.

Today we tried and failed to find the Mönchsberg lift up to the top of the cliffs…. I was sure it was NOT the dilapidated tiled square-section pipe we could see, but we had no idea what we were looking for. Heading back to the centre we called in to see St Peter’s Church as someone had recommended it, and I wondered if it was any kind of improvement on the sterile and horrible Dom.  We looked at a postcard before we went in - a glorious sequence of columns and paintings…..  

But there were great works going on outside the door, and we had to ask if we could look inside.

The whole interior was a mass of dark scaffolding and planks, clearly a huge renovation project in full swing.  We crept away again, through a delightful cemetery between the church and the cliff - there the graves are marked with ornamental iron crosses and swags, and everything is lovingly tended.   

  

At the far side of the graveyard is a reconstructed watermill, now used to create electricity and run a bakery making monkish black bread.  

We headed to the city Museum, one of the old palaces lovingly and stylishly converted to modern galleries and there feasted our eyes on the work of Arik Brauer who - since the war - has devoted his life to painting about the sorrows of women - poverty, torture, martyrdom, ingenuity, labour.  The paintings are magnificent and thought-provoking, starting with a version of the Mona Lisa aged 80. Wonderful.   

In a separate part of the building is a lovely 19th century panorama - a 360 degree landscape painted from the viewpoint of the fortress… marvellous painting, inside a cylinder 5m tall and about 26m all around.    Excellent. Must have pleased the archbishop-princes.   We also learned that the long long period of their rule was known as ‘absolutist’. They had complete powers of life and death over all the local citizens, every aspect of their lives was in the hands of these prelates. The taxes were high. There was no law or justice or privilege outside the control of the rulers, who claimed to arbitrate over all of life and all of the afterlife. The labour was hard, the control was - really - absolute.  No wonder the inside of the cathedral (dom) is so ghastly. It’s all about ego, power, pomp, glitter, swagger, here-and-now.  I am SO pleased with myself for having felt that within a few moments of going inside.  It is truly ghastly.  Anyway……. 

We took lunch in a Polish restaurant, the only one in Salzburg, open for 3 years in the fierce competition of 743 other restaurants in the city. The owner said there are officially just 1000 Poles in Salzburg, probably twice that number in fact, so his marketplace is small.  The food was delicious, freshly cooked and traditional, and we particularly like the soupy stew served in a loaf of bread. 

  

Then we went back to find that elusive lift … and went further than we had in the morning, and there it was…. an ordinary sleek modern lift in a shaft with no way to see the sights as you go up, but - once you get to the top, there are spectacular views along the river each way, and to the mountains.   We looked at an installation on the clifftop - by an American called James Turrell, an elliptical chamber with a hole in the roof and a nice granite bench all around the inside… you can sit and contemplate a section of the sky. Very peaceful and contemplative.  We strolled round some of the exhibits in the Moderne (art gallery) - photographs and paintings by Ernst Kirchner (whose work was later regarded by the Nazis as degenerate, and who committed suicide in 1938 in Davos); and a mixed show on the important of language and art - rather poignant in the age of fake news and establishment lies.     

An ice-cream in the panoramic restaurant would have cost too much, so down we went to the cheaper streets.   We explored a shop called Interior - like going to Habitat in the old days!  Bought 4 little egg-cup things… like we have in the apartment. These have an egg-holding central dip and then a handy surround for your spoon, toast or whatnot.  Stylish - and - four for the price of three.  Then we found our ice-creams, and ate them sitting on the river embankment wall, picked up some herbs and croissants to bring home, and here we are.   Again we walked about 7 miles and felt more familiar with the whole layout of the city.  We are obedient to the traffic lights, admire the cyclists, have yet to ride a trolley bus. Maybe tomorrow. 

The sound of music in Salzburg

-->

I woke up to hear blackbirds. Walking from our very friendly and useful hotel (first night stop) into the city centre to our self-catering apartment, we were pulling our cases along the wonderfully named Paracelsusstrasse.... past the tangles of trolley-bus wires overhead, past the regularly seated beggars (every 50 yards), watching the street-cleaning going on, getting money from a huge bank, working our way down through the smart shops to the entrance to Steingasse. That means Stone Lane, and it's an ancient riverside road, once the main thoroughfare, and now a tiny cobbled steep narrow deep canyon between huge old houses which batter backwards to let light in. 

Having established ourselves, we went out into the city – to admire the bridges over the swift river Salzach (I wonder if that's Salz (salt) + Aa (early river name, as in N France).....

We had a late breakfast in a small cafe and met a Scottish couple who were here to ski – the inclement weather had brought them into the town but they recommended going up to St Johann and then up to the gondola to see the snow. He is an implant dentist, she works with him. They looked radiantly healthy.

We wandered about. The funicular up to the massive fortress costs €19 each and includes a compulsory payment to go into the castle... no way to just go up and down. We heard a few people asking for that (like us) and being baffled. The amber on sale next door is eye-wateringly expensive - €100 for a tiny thin necklace, €8000 for a bracelet.

Dublin is famous for its doors, but Salzburg loves its doors too... some are ancient, some are just wonderful.

  

Into the Dom (cathedral) to be met by a barking woman who makes sure that men take their hats off, says she was born in Bedford, and can't understand why Brexit is going ahead. The cathedral is one of the most depressing and migraine-inducing places I have ever been – a colossal monument to vanity and aggrandisement, with every surface covered in indifferent works of art – carvings, paintings, scrolls, brackets, admonishments, and clutter. It is all about pomp and grandeur, nothing remotely to do with Christianity. I hated it. 

  

The only thing I liked in there was the modest little staircase leading up to an organ console (one of 4) at the south side of the chancel or apse. 

 

The dom is part of a palace belonging to successive generations of archbishop-princes – rather like Durham.

Outside the streets are thronged with groups of foreign students and school children – Chinese, Japanese, French, German... The shops are full of luxury goods (Steiff bears up to €20,000 I guess), dirndls and lederhosen, gleaming trainers, jewellery, handbags. Nearly everyone we meet speaks good English. Nearly everyone raises Brexit, shake their heads.

We called into the Tourist Info, walked up towards the schloss, saw the distant snow-capped mountains, had a hot chocolate in a very smart place near the university (converted motor-works), and then eventually back again to the apartment – about 7 miles walk and very gentle. We cooked our supper of Kaspressknudln and Sauerkraut (bought from a deli near the uni), and crashed out.

The wonderful thing is that although the whole thriving tourist industry here rests on two great artistic events: the life and works of Mozart, and the ever-youthful movie The Sound of Music, for both of which you can go on full day tours or more, the really wonderful sound of the city at this moment is the song of blackbirds. When I heard that first one in the morning I did not realise that that is the real sound of music in Salzburg.  They are everywhere: on the towering rocky cliffs on either side of the river, in the gardens and parks, squabbling in the trees, on the rooftops, everywhere. And they are singing. From before dawn to after dusk. Exquisite.

Trains in reality - travelling and good fortune

Many years ago, when the children were small, we took a day-boat out onto the river at Ely in the Fens, and it took only a few minutes puttering along between the reeds before the engine packed up (or the prop got completely fouled by weeds) and we stopped.  The children were scared, started crying (though we were in no danger) and it was quite an adventure to get them safely onto the bank through the reeds, and along the track back to the boat-hire office. The two men who owned the business were like tiny wizened gnomes, very sanguine and amusing, and they handled the situation brilliantly, reassuring the children and saying 'You will never forget the day you were shipwrecked on the Great Ouse!'

This excellent philosophy stood us in good stead yesterday as we launched onto our great train journey (First Class) across Europe. The luxury booking was a first for us, all the way from Faversham to Salzburg, but of course buying a first class ticket does not inoculate you against happenstance.   The train to Ebbsfleet (Eurostar connection) broke down at Rochester with complete lack of power. Only by leaping off and eventually finding a taxi did we get to the continental train on time.

We hissed along to Brussels having a 'free' breakfast on the way, and changed without difficult to the Frankfurt train...

  

but for some unknown reason, that decided to stop short of Frankfurt and leave us at the Airport Station - where we missed the next connection.

  

We had a wait under the amazing asymmetrical glass domed roof, and found we were too late to reserve new first class seats (which of course we had already paid for) for the next leg. Luckily there was space, though we didn't know if at any stop a pre-booking passenger might arrive and turf us out....    Then at Stuttgart we realised our wait was taking too long. The police arrived. More police. More waiting, and our chance of getting the Munich connection was evaporating.  The delay was caused by a drunk on our train... he had to be arrested.   

Munich - a huge huge station, and we got there with (theoretically) enough time to get from platform 19 to platform 4 to board our properly booked last leg. But... we were at the back of a 12-coach train, the platform was crowded, and platform 4 was in a separate part of the station ... too far to reach in 6 minutes. 

So, another wait, and another one, as a completely different train came and went at platform 14 where the last train to Salzburg sets off.    Ah! At last, onto this last one, into a small smart compartment, through the dark night, and so missing all the mountain scenery we had hoped to see.   At Salzburg the googlemap thing was really confusing, and a huge pavement improvement scheme outside the station didn't help... we ended up inside a wire cage about half a mile from the station with no visible way out.  Heroically, Andrew prised some of the panels apart and in one bound we were FREE!   The suitcase wheels clanked along on the cobbles. The pavements were staircases (agh!).  But the hotel was still open!  Hoorah!  (Thank you! )  I kept thinking of the boat-hire-men on the Ouse...  We were safe, we eventually got there, we bought reasonably ok food along the way, actually it was all fine.  OK, it had all taken a VERY long time... sixteen hours door to door.  And we were tired!  But we had a lovely shower and crashed into bed.   We like the Hotel Modus, and recommend it.

It's in Paracelsusstrasse. (What a name). Here's the letterbox on a neighbouring house

So this morning we set out to find our little apartment in the city centre...

   

and here we are, in a house 500 years old, on Steingasse (Stone Lane) which is a prehistoric track, once a main road and now pedestrianised and chic.

  

 
This is the handle on someone's front door!

  

  

We have lovely music (5 stations), lots to look at, and four days to enjoy ourselves. The architecture is stunning. There are beggars stationed every 50 yards ... older chubby foreign ladies smiling... how do they do it? Are they managed by some sort of gang-master?  I need to prepare for them with some small change.  After my experiences in Brighton last weekend, I can see this is a huge problem, global... how the fortunate respond to the poor.  We are fortunate. So fortunate.  We travel first class.