Around The World Without Flying: Back to Salzburg

Last night I went to another great concert in the famed Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna, though this concert was held in a different part of the palace from the venue where we went as part of our river cruise.

I have been so busy I am still yet to catch up with my posts. As luck would have it with the timing of my independent travel, however, I came back to Salzburg today for a couple of days, so I thought I will talk about that before talking about the rest of the places we visited from the river ship and that I have experienced since.

The train trip from Vienna to Salzburg took three hours, and I saw some wonderful scenery from the train - bluish mountains in the background, vast fields of very green crops waving in the wind, a great lake, forests of magnificent tall trees of the richest greens, and delightful little villages nestled in front of forest areas. This clearly is a very fertile country with extensive agriculture. I am pretty sure I also saw an example of a field being used for aquaculture as well. Again, land had not been excessively cleared for agriculture - there are copses of trees across all the farmland and forests still protect the land from erosion and high winds.

The train itself was ultramodern, and the ride very fast and smooth, as has been the case for most of the trains thus far. (The big exception, of course, was that memorable overnight train trip from Milan to Paris, which I spoke about in an earlier post.)

I have already travelled thousands of kilometres by train in Australia, and at least a couple of thousand kilometres altogether in the US and Germany when I travelled in those countries before I had to stop flying. I now am starting to build up the kilometres on this trip - across Italy, France, the Netherlands and Austria. (I think we passed through some of Belgium and Switzerland on a couple of those journeys as well.) I do think that train trips are the best way to see a country - when you are flying you see precious little. When all my train trips on this odyssey are done (so many still to go!) I will write a post about train travel In Europe, England and Canada and compare the different journeys. I hope that will include some helpful advice about catching the trains, which can be quite a challenge.

Anyhow, when I arrived in Salzburg, imagine my surprise when I discovered my hotel is down the same long narrow street that Mozart’s early dwelling was. You may remember that I mentioned that in my first post on this lovely city. Then imagine my further surprise when I found I had been upgraded to a full suite! I have included some photos of it. How lovely it is to be in rooms with some ‘character’ instead of the inevitable minimalist design in hotels with their very plain greys, bones and browns and ‘flat’ designs that have no personality and no richness of texture and colour whatsoever . . . (I really appreciate these things now I have had my cataracts done.) On the other hand, I would not want to see the purple rooms in that weird Florence hotel again!

To celebrate my good fortune, I went out and tried something that had been strongly recommended to me by my tour guide last time I were here from the river ship. This is called a ‘Salzburger NockerIn’. And of course I had it in ‘Cafe Mozart’, a lovely little cafe on the first floor of a building close by. It turned out to be a dish with three mounds of soft hot meringue over slightly cooked cranberries. It was huge! The three mounds represent the three mountains around Salzburg.

I was astonished when I ate it though. The soft meringue was exactly the same as the meringue I bake just before I serve my version of lemon meringue pie except of course in this pie, below the light and fluffy meringue with its light brown ‘crust’, there is a very tangy hot lemon mixture. (It has lots of lemon zest and lemon juice in it.) This is my grandmother’s recipe, and I must say I like it much better than the cranberry version, but it was still very nice and interesting to try the Salzburg edition. The other cakes they had on offer looked very decadent . . .

If any of you would like my grandmother’s recipe, which I have modified a tad, let me know and I will send it to you when I get back home. It is always very popular . . .

Enjoy the photos!

Inside the magnificent Vienna central railway station.

Inside the train - in the first class carriage.

Inside the bar area of my hotel.

My apartment in the hotel has a lobby, a separate toilet (and bidet), a main room with this lounge furniture, a desk and a huge bed, and a bathroom with both a shower and separate bath.