I spent four days in Salzburg, a Disney city of castles, ramparts and crenellations nestled in between pastoral green mountains, on top of which happy mooing cows and happy yodeling farmers in decorative leather shorts undoubtedly go about their business of making the entire town look as traditional as a cuckoo clock. It is quaint. It is picturesque. Salzburg's a dinky little town, only the fourth-largest city in the country after Vienna, Graz, and Linz, but is deservedly famous for its architecture and natural beauty. A stubby wall, dotted with stubby moss-covered towers, climbs up and down the slopes of the cliffs, defining the natural boundaries of the city. A huge white castle sits proudly on the highest hill. The wide Salzach River gushes through the valley just down below. (In my case, it had clearly been raining upriver just prior to my visit, because the river was swollen and brown.) Proud cathedrals sit on either side.
It is also famous for being Mozart's hometown. I know that it is Mozart's hometown because the tourism board here wastes no time in telling all visitors that it is. He lived and worked here for most of his professional life, playing the organ in the church and writing a storm. About 15 years ago I came to Salzburg with my family all the way from the states to visit Salzburg and watch a Mozart piano recital, since my mother is a classical musician. We fell asleep from jet lag. It was embarrassing for all of us. Concerts featuring Mozart's music are available almost every night, and the city certainly has a higher per capita population of musicians lugging string instruments from one place to another than any other city I have spent time in. One of the key Salzburg treats is the Mozart Ball: a confection of chocolate, nougat, and available at any sweets shop in the Aldstadt's high street.
I was surprised though to find there was less of the stereotypical brats-beer-pretzel trinity you would expect on the high street, as well as anywhere in the old city. The best lunch I had was at a pan-Southeast Asian noodle place called Uncle Van. We found a shop selling nothing but decorative painted eggs. We found a shop selling trinkets, tankards and cuckoo clocks. Austria is full of grandma things, and the high street was mostly boutique clothes shops and tourists and tourists and tourists.
People from all corners of the world choked these attractions to the point of casual immobility. We were staying just outside the center in an Airbnb and had to walk a gentle two kilometers along the river to the old city, and it was immediately apparent when we arrived in the old city, because I could no longer move along the sidewalks. Salzburg was rammed with tourists. All of them were gaping slack jawed at the old market street of Dinky Austria, the wrought iron signs, at the narrow streets. Mass tourism defined the things I was supposed to enjoy in this town. Most guidebooks recommend that you go to the Mirabelle Gardens, the Dom cathedral, and the Hohensalzburg Fortress. The things I actually enjoyed going to were an abandoned mini-golf course, a big chess set, and a bizarre salt mine just outside of town.
The Schloss Mirabelle was featured in the Sound of Music, a movie about an Austrian nobleman's kids and their wacky nanny, set at the dawn of the Second World War. Curlicues of flowers run along the lawn, and big dopey cupids flank unicorns and other noble figures from history frozen in stone on the borders of the gardens.
One day, many years ago, Julie Andrews sang "Do, a deer, a female deer" in these gardens, and made them impossible for modern travelers to take unmolested selfies upon. My girlfriend and I were unable to get the requisite romantic selfie of ourselves without other tourists in the frame, so we gave up and gave in to campiness, trying to get as many others into the picture as we could.
After leaving the Schloss Mirabelle, while wandering around the city, my brother and girlfriend and I found a sculpture garden with only three middling sculptures in it. Then we discovered an abandoned mini-golf course in a park, and a companion shuffleboard/mini-golf course, where all the holes were set up on tables. As there were no balls, and the shed was locked up, we picked up handfuls of tiny white rocks and careened them up the ramps at the tabled mini-golf course and counted arbitrary points. This was very fun.
I was excited to check out the Dom cathedral, a magnificent baroque behemoth in the middle of the town, but they were charging an outrageous amount to get into a concert there at that time, so I skipped it. Someone had put out a giant chess set in the square, and my brother and I played a quick game, to the amusement of several Russian kids on a summer school tour. Two old Austrian guys shouted out advice to us in German. I speak no German.
On the day we were supposed to head up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress, the sun cleared, and we meandered through narrow cobblestoned European streets into a long snaking queue. Everyone was already lined up for the funicular ride up to the big castle on the hill, and we conservatively estimated it would take ten trillion hours to get up there, only to be herded about like cattle once we got there. We opted instead to check out the Salzwerk just outside of Salzburg in the hamlet of Hallein.
The Salzwerk, or salt mine, is what made Salzburg prosperous in the middle ages. For the non-German speakers in the audience, like me, Salzburg means "salt fortress." Millions of years ago, continents shifting around cut off big puddles of ocean, and hundred-degree temperatures over millions of years evaporated said puddles, leaving behind great deposits of salt. Now all those deposits are under the mountains. I learned all of this from a weird, weird film shown to me inside a mountain.
Perhaps Austria's most bizarre tourist attraction, the Salzwerk has been inviting guests to explore the mines for the past four hundred years. Groups of Europeans are shuttled into the mine in groups of 54, because that's how many fit on the logjam train at a time. They exhort you to put on brown mining pants and a white hooded lab coat, for protection I suppose, and then shoot you with your family along rails deep into a mountain, where ages ago, Sazlburgers blasted salty bits out of the earth. Then, you go on a slide to a lower part of the mine, and then, you go across a salt lake in a tiny cable car boat. During the boat ride, they play funky pentatonic music and light up the salty chamber with pink rainbow lights. Then you go on another slide, and cross the border underground into Germany for a spell. Inside the earth, you get shown a series of historical reenactment films about the Archbishop of Salzburg, who built all of the most famous buildings in town with his salt money. These films have slapstick humor. Imagine watching slapstick humor between two 16th century monks deep beneath the surface of the earth with a bunch of German and Austrian tourists. Nothing on this tour makes any sense. I learned next to nothing about salt mines, or Austria, or the Archbishop. When the tour ended, and we emerged blinking in the weak sunlight, I wondered if I had ever hit upon a tourist attraction I had enjoyed un-ironically.
And indeed we found it: Augustiner Brau, a monastery-turned-food court at the edge of the old city. It is a 1000-seat complex similar to Bomotiada, where Austrians of all ages gather in five different vaulted halls or in the gardens outdoor to drink traditional yeasty Bavarian beers and eat pretzels, bratwursts and whatever else tickles their fancy that is available from the food court inside. I embraced the crowds - at least here they had built space for them. I finally had found a spot to sit under the oak trees, munch a pretzel, and relax.
