Guten Tag from Salzburg!

It was a great time to be in Salzburg as it is the middle of the world-famous Salzburg Music Festival.

Our first stop in Salzburg was the Mirabelle Palace and Gardens. At the palace we were able to see the concert hall where Mozart frequently played.

Outside in the meticulously manicured gardens, we saw several places shown in the Sound of Music. The gnome shown here was patted by the children and the horse statue is shown during the scene as well.

The Sound of Music is certainly still engrained in this city. In fact, the hotel where we stayed had the DVD on constant loop!

After grabbing a Sacher Torte and expresso (well known dessert, but I didn’t love it since it wasn’t overly sweet or moist!), we enjoyed a walk through the beautiful old town on our way to the music festival.

Since I play trumpet and was in the Ohio State Marching Band, I enjoy classical music (particularly if it has lots of brass :)). I have have always wanted to go to the Salzburg Music Festival which is held for 6 weeks each summer and features concerts with some of the top symphonies and conductors. I was excited we could design our trip to be in Salzburg during the festival and found tickets were very, very popular! We bought tickets over 4 months out when the tickets went on sale, and the concert sold out almost instantly!

We are used to classical concerts in the US in which we are way below the average attendee’s age and many people dress fairly informally. This was definitely not the case for Salzburg Music Festival! Nearly all the men were in suits and women wore either formal gowns or formal historical dresses (we were so surprised to see that historical dresses (think Sound of Music dresses) are actually still worn!). Needless to say, we definitely felt underdressed in business casual!

The concert hall was packed, and many of the people there were in their 20’s and 30’s. We had even opted for the less prestigious concert featuring Mahler 4 versus the premiere concert Meistersinger (I wasn’t sure if Emily last through the 5.5 hour Meistersinger concert so i went on my own in Chicago :)).

We grabbed more dessert and coffees after the concert but noticed a big change from Italy and Spain. We nearly closed out the cafe at about 11:30 PM – this would have been very early in Italy or especially Spain!

On our next day in Salzburg we headed out of the city to a little town called Hallstatt which is nestled between a beautiful lake and mountains. We had planned to spend the day hiking but it was a rainout. However, we still got to see the view (albeit a bit rainy) and had a pretty lunch overlooking the water before heading back to Salzburg.

We enjoyed some traditional (and delicious) apple strudel before going to another concert – this time at a church featuring 5 organs playing concurrently which only takes place one time per year.

Our night finished with an exciting trip to a laundromat! The cool part was that the same machine both washed and dried. While this resulted in us accidentally drying a couple of items that were not supposed to go in the dryer (whoops!), it was a neat idea!