After our usual muesli breakfast this morning, we packed our bags ready to leave Vienna. Our room checkout was 11:00 and our train departed at 12:30, so we had a couple of hours in the morning to do something. Rather than go too far, we decided to take a walk a few blocks to the Museums Quartier, the area of the city where several historical buildings have been turned into various museums.
We passed the large building housing the ZOOM Children’s Museum, the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthalle Wien, and the Mumok, but turned right into Maria-Theresien-Platz, an ornate square with lawns, trees, and fountains. Facing each other across the square are the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Natural History Museum, housed in identical buildings commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1871 specifically for these two museums. The square and the Renaissance Revival buildings are picturesque, and in front of the Natural History Museum is a small bronze statue of a slightly cartoonish elephant, making a cute picture opportunity.
From here we continued east towards the Hofburg. We’d seen the back of this palace on our first day in Vienna, from the Burggarten, but now we entered the huge Heldenplatz square in front of the building. This was tourist central, with multiple large tour groups being herded around by guides. We only had time to briefly walk around and take some photos. We went inside the National Library briefly since there was no entry fee, but the foyer led to carious sections that did in fact require entry fees, such as the reading rooms and the papyrus museum.
With time running out, we headed back to our apartment to complete checkout and depart. We left the key inside as instructed and were out 5 minutes before 11:00. We walked wit out luggage to Karlsplatz to take the U-bahn to the Hauptbahnhof once more. We’d seen a lot of this station now! Once there we stopped to buy some bread rolls with cheese and salad on them to eat as a lunch on the train, and also a pumpkin seed pretzel to share as a snack now. Then we tried to find a seat to sit down. One thing about the large European train stations is that they seem to be trying to actively discourage people from sitting down anywhere, as there are precious few seats. I spotted a free table at the food area, but by the time we’d walked the 10 metres or so to get there, some other people had grabbed it. So we stood at the standing counters and ate our pretzel.
As we ate, we saw some other people start to get up from their table over the counter from us and I told my wife to run around and grab it, then I passed the smaller luggage over to her, then followed around with the larger stuff. We finished the pretzel and M. spotted a cafe just outside the station proper, through an exit door to a small adjoining shopping mall. She said she’d go and see if they had a table to sit at and would message me via our phones if so and I could go join her. After she left, and while I was waiting, a man came and sat down without even asking in the seat facing me across the table. I said my wife was sitting there, but he didn’t understand English and seemed determined to stay seated there. Fortunately my wife sent me a message a few seconds later, saying she’d found a table in the cafe and to come over.
I joined her in the cafe where she was having some coffee and grabbed some iced water from carafes on the counter for myself. A couple of times I left to go check the departures board in the station, and when our train appeared it indicated a delay of 16 minutes, then later it increased to 18 minutes. There were 30 trains listed on the board, and ours was the only one with any delay. Our luck with trains this trip really has been awful.
We decided to head out to the platform a bit before the scheduled departure time anyway, just to be careful, and when we got there the train was already waiting there! We boarded and found our seats, having to kick out a man who was sitting in one of our reserved seats. Although the train was there before the scheduled departure time, the screen on board said it wouldn’t be departing until 12 minutes afterwards—I have no idea why. Anyway, depart it eventually did and we were on our way to Salzburg. The train was a long one, which would be split at Salzburg, the front half (our half) proceeding to Bregenz, and the rear half to Munich. But since we were only going as far as Salzburg it didn’t matter.
The journey began across flat country, but about halfway along we began to see mountains in the distance. And the train started climbing in altitude. We did some sketching to make the most of our time. The countryside switched from farmland to hilly landscapes with forests and streams, making the scenery much more interesting than any of our other journeys so far, except perhaps the river valley and hills crossing the German-Czech border. As we climbed up towards Salzburg the sky was growing dark and it looked like rain.
The train arrived at Salzburg just after 15:00. We walked about 10 minutes to our accommodation, which is apparently an actual hotel, although without a reception desk. We just got a PIN code to enter the building and our room sent to us. As we walked, thunder rumbled around us, and in the last couple of blocks it started raining. We managed to make it into the hotel before the rain really got going, but a few minutes later it was steady.
We wanted to go out for a walk and a look around anyway, so we grabbed our umbrellas and set out. The cooler air here was a refreshingly nice change from the hot days we’ve had everywhere else so far on this trip. We walked down the main pedestrianised street of the Neu Stadt side of the river Salzach. Being Sunday, the shops were closed but some cafes and restaurants were open (though not all).
We didn’t go too far in the rain, turning back once we reached the river without crossing over to the Altes Stadt, but we looked at restaurants and found one called Das Gablerbräu that had a traditional Austrian menu with some acceptable vegetarian options. We made a reservation for dinner at 18:30. On the way back to our room we stopped in at a cafe called Ratio Coffee Roasters so my wife could have a coffee. I was a bit peckish after the single bread roll for lunch so had a slice of the delicious looking raspberry poppy seed cake. It was indeed delicious, with a tangy icing and a dense, moist cake.
On the way back to the room we decided to go to the nearest open supermarket to get some milk for breakfast with our remaining muesli that we brought from Vienna. Being Sunday, most of the supermarkets were closed, but I found a SPAR Express a few blocks away from our room and we walked via that. We discovered it was in a petrol station, which was fine, except they had completely run out of fresh milk! They had some UHT whole milk, but I suggested we wait until morning and I dash to the nearest supermarket (only a couple of blocks from our room) to buy some fresh low fat milk then. So we’ll do that in the morning. But the detour did give us an opportunity to engage in our favourite travel pastime of exploring back alleys and places where sane tourists would never go.
We had about an hour and a half in our room before dinner, so did some more sketching and also looking up things in Salzburg. We left again to head back to the restaurant. We were shown to a table nestled in a corner beside the open front door. The waiter came over for our order but we had only decided on drinks and some bread to start, so ordered those. The waiter seemed concerned that we’d only ordered bread and asked if we’d like meat and cheese with it, but we said we still needed to look at the main dishes and would order those in a minute. It wasn’t entirely clear if he understood, or if he thought we were crazy for going to a restaurant and ordering nothing but bread.
A younger waiter came out brandishing a plate of bread, but offered it to the wrong table, and my wife tried to wave at him and say it was for us, but he didn’t notice and left back to the kitchen. Eventually the bread came back. Then later the same waiter came out with two main dishes and offered them to the same table he’d offered our bread, and they turned him away again. The waiter came over to us, but the meals weren’t ours either. Again he left confused back to the kitchen. The service really seemed below average. I was afraid when our meals came he’d offer them to everyone but us! But he managed to get it right, thankfully.
My wife ordered the Kasenocken, cheese spätzle with fried onions. I tried the Wildertopf, a stew of venison and vegetables, served with spätzle. It turned out that “vegetables” meant mushrooms. I did find one tiny piece of carrot, but essentially it was all meat and mushrooms. But it tasted good, with tender meat in a rich sauce with a hint of tomato and black pepper. My wife’s cheese spätzle was very cheesy, with long strands requiring some manipulation to bundle into a forkful. It was perhaps a bit too cheesy, she said.
After dinner we went for a walk across the river into the Old Town. This was very cool, as the Old Town exudes charm from the well-kept old buildings that line narrow pedestrian streets, opening out into several squares with impressive views of churches, towers, and the castle looming above the city on the rocky hill nearby.
There were a lot of restaurants in this area, and also any people walking around. We explored a bit and then decided to turn back home. We went a different way, heading north to cross the river on the pedestrian bridge instead of the road bridge. This led us towards the gardens of Schloss Mirabell. We went in to have a look in the cloudy light just before the sun went down.
The gardens were beautiful, mores that the ones at Bratislava Castle. And here is also the Pegasus Fountain, made famous by the scene in The Sound of Music where the children run around it while singing “Do, Re, Mi”.
And in fact as we approached the fountain, we could hear people singing the song. As we watched from about 50 or 60 metres away, a group of people copied the performance, running up to, then around the edges of the fountain as in the film, then up to the steps nearby while singing the finale of the song and copying the movement up and down the steps. It was a fantastic performance. And then after we approached close to the Pegasus Fountain, they decided to do it all again, this time with one of their own group filming the others. With the warning, I also filmed them doing this performance, and it turned out pretty well. I went up to the group afterwards—it was six people, apparently from the same family—and told them how wonderful their performance was. They were speaking German amongst themselves, but thanked me in English. One woman said it was very difficult, singing and running at the same time!
From here we walked back the shortest way to our room. We got in and had showers before resting up. The rain continued outside. Hopefully it will stop for tomorrow when we have our whole day of exploring Salzburg ahead of us.
