Germany & Austria Trip: Salzburg

After Garmish, we headed to Salzburg, right over the border in Austria.

This is the view of Salzburg's Fortress & much of the downtown area.  We ate lunch at a mountaineers hut, and got some fantastic views. 

Our cute lunch spot.

Somehow, I managed to pick the ugliest hotel in the world.  This is only a quarter of our room - I should have gotten some photos of our lime and forest green bathroom...

Salzburg is primarily known to Americans because of 2 reasons - The Sound of Music was filmed there, and Mozart was born there.  The gardens above were in some of the scenes from the movies, but that's our extent of experiencing the Sound of Music.  We were not very interested in being tourists in this city.

This was a cool pedestrian street with special address markers for all the shops.  It was beautiful all lit up for Christmas.

We did successfully find another christmas market, where we again enjoyed hot mulled wine (Brian got extra shots in his) and some of the local fare.

Our last major stop in Salzburg was a giant monastery that also housed a traditional beer hall.  You took your own mugs from a shelf, paid for your beer, rinsed the mug, then brought it to a monk to be filled with beer.  I was picturing guys with brown robes & their heads shaved, but these were more like Rich, wearing an apron and a sweatshirt, happily serving beer up.

There were probably 6 rooms this large full of people eating, smoking, and drinking liters of beer.  No live music like at the Haufbrau Haus, but probably more realistic as to what a beer hall would have been like in the past!


Salzburg was a cute town, but totally overrun with tourists, and things to suck tourists in with.  The weather was also really nasty (cold, raining, and windy) the whole time we were there, so I don't have the warm fuzzies towards Salzburg that some might.  Still, we had an enjoyable time there.