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.
