Salzburg: perhaps Europe’s best-kept secret and my favorite city of all. The world knows Salzburg as the birthplace of Mozart and the home of the famous Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. Yet, for each visitor, it holds its own quiet charm as they get to experience the magic of a smaller city with just as much to do. The city is accessible from Vienna, Prague, and Munich, which makes it the perfect weekend getaway.
If you’re planning a trip to Salzburg, and you’re a fan of The Sound of Music like I am, I would recommend all of the following sites. You’ll recognize many from the 1965 film.
If you love The Sound of Music but are overwhelmed by how to accomplish all of this in one trip, Salzburg tour companies offer a variety of options. A bus tour is offered through Panorama tours for $45/person that takes you to many of the sights listed above. Furthermore, the Fraulein Maria Bicycle Tour offers individuals the opportunity to bike through Salzburg in nice weather to get the true experience of the Von Trapp children.
For the Mozart lover, you can actually go visit his birthplace in the center of the city and tour a museum of his former home. The tickets are 10-15 euros and totally worth it for classical music enthusiasts.
Additionally, be sure to check out both the Salzburg Cathedral and the Hohensalzburg Fortress. Both provide a window into the early history of the quaint city. The Fortress is a little bit of a hike since you can see it from anywhere in the city, so wear your walking shoes before you head up to this medieval castle.
Finally, after you’ve spent the day seeing these sights and taking in the breathtaking Austrian scenery, what’s left to do but eat and drink some traditional Austrian food? Be sure to order some wiener schnitzel, have apple strudel for dessert, and visit Augustiner Bräu for a beer. This brewery is run entirely by local monks and is a can’t miss while in Salzburg!
Otherwise, enjoy your trip, take lots of pictures, and Salzburg is sure to be one of your favorite things!
This is a guest post.
Prague might not be the place you come to find good food. However, if you crave exceptional Vietnamese food in Prague and love to go off the tourist map, then you should visit Sapa, the largest Vietnamese market Prague.
Be prepared for a culture shock. Once you enter Sapa, you feel that you’re no longer in an EU country. Sapa’s rundown and unkempt appearance might make some of you feel unsafe, but there’s more to the market than the crappy environment that will be yours for the next hours.
I lived in Prague in my 20s and still live there.
Easy access to anywhere in Europe. Prague is quite central. If you are based in Prague, you can go just about anywhere. While I was here, I managed to accomplish a mega journey, a big item on my bucket list. I visited all 50 countries in Europe.
Wait! What about surprises? What about just let things happen? (Read “How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza“)
You can forget that dealing with Czechs.
The Czechs are strange kinds of Slavs. They don’t resemble other Slavs I have encountered, who are more slovenly in their habits and actions. In contrast, the Czechs are fastidious in nature, possessing a weird sense of orderliness, not only uncharacteristic for Slavic people, but also for people from post-communist countries.
If you live in Prague, you travel to Budapest. If you’re on an extended Central European trip, you make Budapest and Prague parts of the journey. These two cities are twins, iconic representatives of the former Communist Central Europe.
Seriously? A sound recommendation on how best to run away from home is to find another home and settle down?
When I was a child and then teenager, I fixated on idle boat ride on shallow water and bumpy ship journey across open sea. As I got older, overnight train, long-distance bus and road-trip got added to the mix. In this millennium, online shoutout and social hash tags boat voyage and land transport are shortened to #rtw, glorying round-the-world trip spanning major continents and world cities.
So I didn’t get to driff off indefinitely and tag my vagabonding as #rtw, but I stumbled into another kind of traveling, less roaming and less world-bound. I moved to one region, stayed put and became region-bound. I became Eurocentric.
For starter, this kind of traveling is much easier than the traditional #rtw where you will likely need to sell everything or put everything away, quit everything and do nothing but rounding up the world.
Living in Prague and traveling in Europe have gotten me “addicted” to the coffee and sitting-down culture. I developed a new habit to find small cosy cafés to work or socialize with others.
I’m sure there are many of us who prefer to work in a more unstructured environment different from our everyday’s cubicle station. This goes especially for creative people who need a sanctuary, a nurturing place to boost their creativity, not merely a place to work.
Yesterday at the Czech beer festival, I had a pulling-your-leg kind of debate with three Slovaks about their country’s relationship with the Czech Republic. They told me Slovaks beat Czechs in the world ice hockey championship to reach the final and how Slovaks were proud especially that the losers were Czechs. To that, I joked, “Nah, it’s family. There is nothing nice beating your ‘big’ brother. Your common ‘enemy’ is Russia. If you had let the Czechs win, they might have beaten the Russians. You should have looked at the bigger picture.” “No, they are not the big brothers. We are of equal status. We have our country.” The Slovaks shot back at me. “No. Slovakia was never a country.
I tried an experiment last week: working from ‘home’ without actually being at home. A friend of mine, Vladka, whom I had not met in six years was working in Hamburg and suggested I come and see her. Couldn’t afford to lose any more holiday due to my long list of traveling plan for the year but wanted to see Vladka longer than just a weekend trip, I combined work and pleasure. I spent a week in Hamburg, working during the day and sight-seeing in the evening and weekend.
Some ideas on this list are taken from the Couchsurfing website, under the Hamburg section. Some come from my friend Vladka.
I went to the opera yesterday to see “Othello”, a play by Shakespeare later transformed into an opera by Verdi. I completely forgot the entire plot and remembered only the detail when Othello strangled his wife on their bed; listening to the Italian singing and reading the German sub-title obviously didn’t help one bit. Plus, I sat in in a corner balcony on the top floor where a quarter of my view was block by the balcony in front of me. It was a refreshing experience nonetheless, a complete change of routine in my travel.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
