· Everyone keep out!!Salzburg, Austria · 22nd Dec 2006 · Posted by Chris
We managed to have a bit of a sleep in as far as the holiday goes then decided to tour around Salzburg a bit. The night before we wandered across the bridge into a really pretty area of Salzburg that had HEAPS more of the little boutique shops we'd seen in the street our 'Pension' (hotel) is on. Wow, what a sight that place was. Row upon row of shops selling everything you can imagine from strange little puppet-like characters to hollow eggs connected with ribbons (the shop had 10s of thousands of them all connected together!) to food stalls selling the famous Frankfurters. An ice-skating rink in the middle of the area provided entertainment for a whole load of kids and Annie managed to ask for a hot chocolate and a hot raspberry drink in German - very impressive! :)
Our eventual destination was a place called the Hohensalzburg Fortress. It's a huge, hulking brick, concrete and stone ... fortress (:P) standing on the top of one of the many hillsides surrounding Salzburg. It glares down from the top as if to say 'Everyone keep out!!', hence the name of this post. The views from up there are nothing short of spectacular, as the photos that we'll upload shortly will show. A guided tour of the fortress took us through a tiny percentage of the many thousands of rooms in the place. It's basically a town within a building, it's that big. It's construction was started in 1077 and numerous drawings show how its size has increased over the years due to the various Archbishops deciding to add on to the complex, each for their own reason. One of them had to increase the size dramatically by adding enormous outer walls during the time of the peasant revolt ... it must've worked too because the fortress has never been breached during its entire history. Amazing!
After the tour we headed back down into Salzburg itself and found some food at place called 'Picnic', a cafe mentioned in one of the guide books published by Lonely Planet and that has become our travel bible on this trip.
It's pretty tiring doing all that walking and gawking so that was about all we fit in on that day. The plan for the next day? Vienna or Munich ... we're yet to decide. :)
Bye for now!
Our eventual destination was a place called the Hohensalzburg Fortress. It's a huge, hulking brick, concrete and stone ... fortress (:P) standing on the top of one of the many hillsides surrounding Salzburg. It glares down from the top as if to say 'Everyone keep out!!', hence the name of this post. The views from up there are nothing short of spectacular, as the photos that we'll upload shortly will show. A guided tour of the fortress took us through a tiny percentage of the many thousands of rooms in the place. It's basically a town within a building, it's that big. It's construction was started in 1077 and numerous drawings show how its size has increased over the years due to the various Archbishops deciding to add on to the complex, each for their own reason. One of them had to increase the size dramatically by adding enormous outer walls during the time of the peasant revolt ... it must've worked too because the fortress has never been breached during its entire history. Amazing!
After the tour we headed back down into Salzburg itself and found some food at place called 'Picnic', a cafe mentioned in one of the guide books published by Lonely Planet and that has become our travel bible on this trip.
It's pretty tiring doing all that walking and gawking so that was about all we fit in on that day. The plan for the next day? Vienna or Munich ... we're yet to decide. :)
Bye for now!
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