Salzburg and Eagle's Nest

Yesterday we had a morning tour of the city of Salzburg. Our guide, although looking like a female Captain Von Trapp was not very good. I'll start with bullet points from Carla, our tour director:

• Salzburg means "salt village"
• Centuries ago is was ruled by bishops that were also deemed as princes. They were very rich because they owned the salt mines and traded with salt. Salt was considered white gold because it preserved food.
• Salzburg is known for its summer musical festival in late July and August and also has wonderful Christmas markets in the winter.
• Mozart was born here in 1756. Everyone in his family were musicians. He died at the young age of 37 from what they believe was an infection but because primitive medicine including bleeding a patient he died from that.

Now on to the RANDOM bullet points from Liesl (at least she had a cool name):

• The town dates back to 700 AD
• There are 150,000 inhabitants
• St Peter's was the first monastery and the convent used in the Sound of Music
• The Von Trapp family actually started making their money singing well before they left Austria.
• They didn't leave via the mountain. They left by train to Italy where the captain (actually the barron) had money saved from WWI where he was a very successful submarine captain. They lived there for 2 weeks and then took a boat to London and then on to New York where they eventually settled in Vermont. 
• Mozart left 800 pieces of work in his small life. He did his most famous compositions while living in Vienna.
• The old town of Salzburg was mainly sparred from the bombings during WWII because the train station was outside of the city. The St Peters church did get a bomb dropped right down in the middle though. I didn't listen to most of what the guide said during the visit to the church because there was a amazing choir singing and it was better :-)
• During the bombing of WWII people went into the mountain to hide. Now there is a parking garage in that area.

For those like me who LOVE the Sound of Music I was a little disappointed however the movie plays 24/7 in our room and as I'm writing this we are watching it. I recognize a lot of the scenes now!

Today we went to the salt mines in the morning. After suiting up in our mining gear we took a mine train to a place where they began to explain the process. Really cool but no time to explain it all. I highly suggest you google it. The FUN part was the two slides we got to ride down as part of the tour. We also got to ride a boat through a salt lake in the middle of the cave.

After the mines we headed up to Eagle's Nest which was were Hitler had a home high in the mountains that was given to him on his 50th birthday as a place for retreat. It is 6,000 feet up high in the mountains surrounding Salzburg. It really does remind you of a place like the last scene of the Sound of Music where they climbed over the hills.

Tonight the Mississippi group is headed to a dinner that includes a chamber orchestra playing Mozart!