Well yesterday we just got a coating of snow overnight, but today it snowed pretty much all day with a total accumulation of a couple of inches.  Still that didn’t stop us from having a good time.  In the picture above is the Castle we visited yesterday.  We first went to the Salzburg Museum.   The museum is quite new, it looked like it had opened in just that last few years.  It was pretty nice, although since Salzburg is rather a small city (only about 150k people) there really isn’t a whole museums worth of interesting stuff.  They tried anyway though, and as such we got to learn about a seemingly random women who lived 100 years ago and wrote some poetry.  They did have some cool stuff though, particularly the 30′ tall 360 degree panorama of what the city looked like around 1850.

Salzburg sits on a river between two large hills, which make it a great strategic point and combined with the nearby salt mines explain its existence as a small town even in roman times.  On the one side is the fortress we visited yesterday (and also in the picture above), on the other side is a monastery.  It has no fancy cable railway, instead there are a whole bunch of steps.  We climbed up them in the snow and got some great pictures of  the snow covered city.  We also went to mass this evening, and St. Sebastians, a rather small yet incredibly beautiful church on the newer side of town.  The mass was in Latin, except for the homily, which was in German.  Jess’s Latin is better than mine and she was at least able to get some of the prayers, where as I could only get phrases here and there.   The only misstep of the day was when Jess accidentally got both the shrimp and the lobster at lunch, resulting in a rather expensive lunch. However, if the worst thing that happens on our trip is that we spend an extra 20 bucks on lunch, I will be overjoyed.

Last night we drove into Austria.  I was a bit nervous about going through customs but it turned out to be ill-founded as well, there weren’t any.  The EU seems to becoming more like the US all the time, as this trip was just as eventful as driving from New Jersey to New York.  When we woke up in our lovely hotel and looked out the window though, we were surprised to see a decent coating of snow on the ground.  I was very glad to have rented winter tires for our trip through the Alps, as I doubt this will be the last we see of the white stuff.

Salzburg is very nice little city, although a bit touristy.  We seemed to have more difficulty finding good places to eat here however, and the places we did find were filled with people smoking.   I’d forgotten how awful it is to go to dinner with someone smoking right next to you, it just makes all the food taste worse.

Salzburg only has 150,000 or so people in it, so its easy to walk around, and thats what we’ve been doing.  Today we walked through much of the old city, which besides for the names on the shops hasn’t changed much in a couple hundred years.  From there we took the cable railway up to the Fortress Hohensalzburg, which sits atop a large hill to the south of the city.  Its a huge fortification that looks pretty much impregnable, and not surprisingly has never been taken by force.  Of course for some reason they just surrendered it to Napolean.  After lunch we went over to the Cathedral Dom, which was originally built around 700 AD, and then rebuilt again in the 1500’s, and rebuild again in 1959 after it got blowed up in WWII.