the hills are alive...

jenny and i are in salzburg, austria! we went from a city of 1.75 million (budapest) to 150,000, and we are definitely feeling the difference. salzburg is beautiful - in the foothills of the alps with a river running through the city. there is so much green space here - parks with playgrounds for kids and well-manicured lawns and gardens. it doesn't feel as touristy here - it's hard to find a shop that sells bottles of water, for example, which were on every corner in budapest.

(largest cities in europe: london, madrid, berlin, rome, and paris - 5 points to Q!)

we took the train here from budapest, which took about 6 hours. the train had a screen in it that they updated constantly with the upcoming stops, a map showing us where we were and our current speed. i, of course, watched this screen the whole time. the train's max speed was 200 km/h, which i figured out is 125 miles per hour, which seems FAST. it was really exciting zooming through the countryside, and the train arrived in salzburg only 10 minutes later than it was scheduled to, which we were pleased by.

small world moment: sitting in the seats across the aisle from us were a german man and a chinese man, who shook hands and met when they sat down, chatted away with each other in english during the whole trip - one with a chinese accent and one with a german accent. english was, i guess, each of their second languages. kind of a cool moment.

small world moment #2: at dinner tonight a woman at the table next to us asked me to take a picture of their family, and i did - and we started chatting with them and found out they're from augusta, georgia - about 2 hours from atlanta.

you know how people from georgia are georgians and people from north carolina are north carolinians? people from michigan are michiganders, which has always amused me, but i've found something better: people from salzburg are called salzburgers. haha...

becky has requested photos, and i'm here to serve, so here are some from salzburg today:


jenny and i were wandering through the city today (this is what we typically do when we first arrive - get a little lost.  it helps us get acquainted with the city, i promise), and we found a little path leading up behind an old church.  we followed it (and some older french tourists) along the path and got some really beautiful views of the city.  as you can see, it was a little overcast today, and we got rained on for about 10 minutes, but it stopped pretty quickly.  

this is the same view, but from back in town.  

this one isn't from salzburg, but from a small town in the "lake district" - part of our sound of music tour, that you'll see referenced below.

now, salzburg is the real life location of the events that "the sound of music" is based on, and many of the outdoor scenes in the movie were filmed here.  jenny loves "the sound of music" more than any person i know, and i love it almost as much.  so we obviously forked over the euros and went on a 4 hour sound of music bus tour that took us to a lot of the locations from the movie.  the bus was driven by joss, a german man whom i stealthily photographed here:

and the tour was conducted by trudy, a british woman whom i stealthily photographed here:

if you want to be a sound of music tour guide, you must:

1. have an unnatural obsession with the movie, and be able to quote 95-100% of the dialogue verbatim.

2. have an average to above average singing voice.  trudy played basically the whole soundtrack during the tour, and sang along at full volume, encouraging us to sing, too.  eventually, we all sang along (if someone is singing "how do you solve a problem like maria," how do you NOT sing along??), even though it was EXTREMELY cheesy.  all of us, that is, except joss (who looked like he would rather die than sing) and the british men in front of us who had clearly been dragged on this tour by their wives.

3. own traditional austrian clothing and wear it happily. (to quote trudy, "i own too many austrian clothes to move back to england!")

4. love puns and other bad jokes.

5. have no shame.

if you want to be a sound of music bus driver, you must:

1. be a glutton for punishment, as i'm sure trudy gives the same 4 hour talk twice a day, every day.

2. have no other marketable skills than bus driving, because why would you pick this job if you could do something else?

3. it probably wouldn't hurt to have a slight hearing impairment so you can tune out trudy and the rest of the bus. 

so the question here is: would you rather be joss or trudy?