monday, july 9

this morning we had a four-hour walking tour of the inner city. our guide's name was Erne, and she knew EVERYTHING about the city. the little cafe we ate at yesterday is the oldest in Salzburg (though we didn't know that at the time); the chocolate shoppe Furst was the first to have perfectly round chocolates--called Mozartballs--developed for the world's fair and which are still made by hand; the numbered bricks on the ground in the plaza are for saturday market stalls; and so on. Apparently she had to study for two years and then take a big test in order to become a city guide. below is a picture of the smallest house in salzburg, built in an existing alleyway. to the left, where all the flowers are is the oldest cafe in salzburg (the one we ate at yesterday), and to the right, but out of the picture, is the chocolate shop where they make mozartballs.Our first stop was the Mirabell Gardens, pictured below. the building in the left of the picture is the Mirabell Palace, which was built in 1606 for the prince's concubine.
this was a site used in filming "The Sound of Music." to the right you can see the hedge arcade that maria and the children run through while singing, and the stairs that the picture was taken from were the ones that the children learn to sing on. here i am with my cousin lauren and aunt paula on the stairs:
the gardens extend back a ways; you can see the dom in the background of this picture:the statues are really awesome too, and they have a lot of symbolic meanings. i won't get into it here, but if you are really interested (i am guessing nobody really is), i can tell you later. after the gardens, we passed by the house that mozart grew up in, which has been turned into an archive of sorts. they still have most of mozart's original sheet music, written in his own hand.

after that we walked to the dom, then took a tram up the cliff to the castle. below is a picture of the valley below the castle, and in the second picture you can see the fortress wall:we learned about the fortress, which is more like a city than a castle. apparently people still live on the castle grounds! our guide said that artists come and live in the little houses, such as the ones in the picture below, and give art lessons and hold art classes. in the castle! why did i even go to byu? i could have studied in a castle! i think the tree in the picture also holds some significance, but i forgot what it is.
the picture below is on the other side of the castle, and i took a picture of it because it is just a door. set into a wall with no perceivable way to get in or out, seeing as how it is about three feet off the ground. plus, it looks really awesome.
and this is a picture of the city from the other side of the castle. you can see the dom, and if you look really closely you can see the giant chess board. the river is the river salz, so named because the rocks make it salty. and somewhere on the other side of the river is our hotel.after the castle tour we walked to the house in which mozart was born (shown below). the interior has been completely redesigned as a conceptual art piece, which i thought was really cool, but it was not much appreciated by the others. inside there are framed locks of mozart's hair and sheet music and even a little wallet. there was a lot of his hair displayed, and it made me wonder: did they know he would be this famous, to warrent displaying his hair? is that why it was cut and preserved so well? also, would it be unethical to clone mozart from a lock of his hair? it could be an experiment on his talent as a musician: he was great in the eighteenth century, but how would he fare in the twenty-first century?after the geburtshaus, a small group of us walked to a marionette theater and watched a show. they showed excerpts from three of mozart's operas (something i don't remember, don giovanni, and the magic flute), combined and condensed. it was pretty fun. at one point there were twelve marionettes on stage, and only six people doing the marionetting, meaning that each person had one in each hand. and no body got tangled up! this is the fairy queen in the magic flute. just look at that detail!when we got out of the show it was pouring rain! buckets and buckets of it. and of course we had to walk back to the hotel (no cars allowed in the inner city). as we approached our hotel, we realized there was something wrong: we were trapped on the wrong side of the street! the streets had been closed off and secured for a big european bike race (not the tour de france). we got to the street just in time to see the bikers race by in the pouring rain. after most of the bikers had passed, we snuck across the street to our hotel, where i promptly changed out of my wet clothes and dried my hair.

we ate dinner, then headed back to the castle for a "hidden corners tour." it took longer than we thought it would to get back, so our tour was a bit abbreviated. on this tour we saw: a room with portraits of the archbishops (boring), the torture room (small), and the kitchen (big, but ruined by all of the lame questions people asked). below is a picture of me being held in the torture room (not the kitchen):we also saw this strange plastic painted cow on the castle grounds:turns out there is a story behind it. apparently during one war (i can't remember which), the castle was under siege and was cut off from all incoming supplies. the people in the fortress were running out of food, but did not want to let the enemy know that they were desperate. so they took their one remaining cow, painted it black, and paraded it around the walls so the enemy could see it. the next day, they washed the paint off and painted the cow brown, once again parading it for the enemy to see. they did this for a few days, and eventually it worked: the enemy believed that the people inside the castle had enough food to withstand the siege, and they eventually gave up and left.

so that was supposed to be the end of our tour: we had a concert to go to in the castle, and not much time. but there were a few of us that were not satisfied. we came to see the hidden corners, not the kitchen, so we paid our guide a little extra and he took us to see some pretty cool hidden corners. for our first stop the guide took us down this really dark, scary staircase underneath the fortress to a cave:in the picture, the left wall is the outer wall of the fortress, and the right wall is the inner wall of the castle. this secret cave had been hollowed out and stocked with provisions by one of the kings in case an impending attack came to light. next, leon (our guide) took us to the organ room. this organ is really old (500 years!), and really loud when you are standing right next to it. oh yes, our guide turned it on for us. it plays every morning at 7:00am, and on some days, if it is quiet, it can be heard from the inner city. it is a player organ and the music it plays was composed by mozart's father.by then, it was time for the concert to begin, so we thanked our guide and ran to the prince's chambers to listen to some of mozart's music, played by a quartet. this was definitely in my top three experiences in europe; it was amazing. in the quartet was a violoncello, a viola, and two violins (a pianist came out for a few numbers, making it a quintet). and to think, i almost didn't get in! the group had gotten tickets before the tour, and most people were already in and seated by the time we got there. three people that had gone on the tour and weren't planning on going to the concert apparently decided they wanted to see the concert, because three of us were the last to show up, and they said there were no more tickets left for us, someone had already taken them. they let us in anyway (thand goodness). throughout the concert i kept moving closer to the front (i did it discreetly, and didn't disturb anyone) in order to watch the musicians. the first chair violinist was playing so fast that at times it was hard to catch what her fingers were doing; they were flying. and the musicians looked like they weren't even trying, like this was a walk in the park for them. totally worth it.