Kim Richards

Salzburg Day 1

We saw a hot air balloon shaped like an urn at breakfast. We also watched horse drawn carriages pass by and took one on the way back to the hotel after a long day of touring. In part to rest our feet and in part to enjoy the view as he drove us through all of the old area of town. There’s a number of pictures from the carriage as we passed by them.

Dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I had a Chinese Chardonnay/Reisling by ChangU which was very good but the topper was the warm rice wine (a rose) they served us after dessert. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before but most restaurants we’ve been to in Germany and Austria serve you a shot of some kind of alcohol after the meal. At the Greek places, it’s Uzzo.  Sometimes Schnapps, others it’s a fruit liquor or amaretto. You have to tell them ahead of time if you don’t want any.

The clown in the picture was very cute. We wondered at first if he were mechanical or a life-sized marionette.  When I took his picture, he threw me a box of candy—gummie pizza.

We visited Hohensalzburg and a couple of churches on the same day. I’m going to post those separately over the next few days so the pictures don’t get overwhelming. Especially Hohensalzburg, which contained several museums and a marionette museum besides the normal arms and castle antiquities or architecture.

Salzburg means “salt town”. Throughout Salzburg’s history, the Church and others made money by selling the salt mined here. It’s a beautiful amber or rose colored. It surprised me to find lamps and statues carved of the salt.

We also looked at a lot of items made from the stone, Amber, so I suppose it also is found here in abundance. Useless trivia fact I learned while researching my Amazon women story:  amber is the only stone which burns...because it’s made of petrified tree sap. It’s also common to find insects or leaves encased in the stone. I’m glad I knew that before we came here. It made the displays more interesting.  We’re beginning to run into places which don’t allow you to take pictures; just so you know what’s up when I talk about something that there aren’t any photos of.

Here’s the pics for today: http://s105.photobucket.com/albums/m203/sharrisselva/Germany%20trip/April%2015%202008/