As popular as Salzburg is as a tourist destination, I’m not sure if there was one attraction that I would call a must-see. Maybe the must-see thing there is the town itself, more precisely the Old Town, where Mozart used to roam around, or where they shot some of the scenes in the movie Sound of Music (although I think more scenes were shot outside of the city.) In a map provided by local tourism agency, they define a few different districts in the city. We spent most of our time in two of them: Cathedral District, and the Mozart District.
There are quite a few churches or cathedrals in the Old Town. We walked by most of them, went inside for a few of them; there is one called St. Peter’s, its cemetery reminded me some scenes from Sound of Music.
Most memorable of them all is probably the Salzburg Cathedral. We got there late in the day, like just one hour before they close. So we were taking our time touring the place, then one clergy came to us and told us we should go to one particular room for a special exhibition they were having. He ended up being a little bit like our tour guide, guiding us different rooms, speeding up our tour a little bit. I think he wanted to secure the rooms for closing at the same time. At one point, he asked us where are we from. We told him we are from Toronto, and he just nodded. Wanted to keep conversation going, I added that we were all originally from Hong Kong, then he seemed to be more interested, and started telling us that he has been to Hong Kong, and how much he enjoyed the time there. I think from that point on, whenever someone ask us, we told them we are from Hong Kong; Toronto is not as good a conversation starter. Near the end of our tour of the place, the clergy bid us goodbye with some final words: “Remember, the world is good when the people is good.” I don’t know what Vincent and Naomi think of that, but to me, he seems to be saying, “and since we are all sinners, this world is in trouble”. That is one gentle wise man.
While none of us are big fan of classical music, we managed to visit only one Mozart related attraction, the Mozart’s Birthplace Museum. Although they call this the Mozart district, there are some other things to see (and there are not that many Mozart related things anyway.) We wanted to see the Residenz State Rooms, but they had it closed for some private functions; we did go one floor above where they have the Residenz gallery (not that interesting.)
As much as I like Salzburg (especially walking around in night time) I really wanted to enjoy the Old Town more. I think if the weather was better and warmer, we would spend time sitting in some outdoor cafe and relaxed a little. But it’s been cold and wet most of the time, we forced ourselves to look for places to visit. We visited this brand new museum called Salzburg Museum. While everything there was new and nicely presented, it is more about the history of local people (other than Mozart), and it was just not that interesting to us. Maybe it’s more interesting to local people.
