Austria sure is different than we imagined it!   🙂  Actually, you do see shirts, for sale, all over that say, No Kangaroos in Austria.  Haven’t seen anyone wearing one…  So far we have not bought a lot of souvenirs.  I did get a Mozart T-Shirt that I liked while we were at the Fortress yesterday.  Speaking of Mozart…

Wow, they sure play up their native son here.  Everything in Salzburg is Mozart.  You’d think he was famous or something.   We did go to his house today.  It was quite interesting.  Everyone knows he was a child prodigy.  What I didn’t realize is that he was the Brittney or Lindsey of his time.  That is, he had a stage parent.  His father Leopold, himself an accomplished musician, composer and teacher, carted poor Ludwig’s butt all over Europe putting on concerts, more like exhibitions, for, well, cash.  And boy did they cash in.  It was the family business.  And it had its ups-and-downs.  Anyway, the tour of the house was interesting.  And of course they sell Mozart Balls (not what you are thinking!) in the museum store.  Mozart balls are all over here; they are chocolate balls wrapped in foil with guess-who printed on them.  This is truly a tourist town.

Yet, we’ve enjoyed it quite a bit.  Today we walked quite a bit including repeating all of yesterday’s walk plus much more.  We did the same in Munich.  You see so much more, and learn a lot more, on the second day.  Once you know your way around a bit, it’s more fun.  Today was cold and rainy, like Seattle in February.  So we paced ourselves and took two rest breaks for coffee and pastry.  Good thing we walked the rest of the time.

We also saw the Panorama of Salzburg.  It’s a 360 degree painting of Salzburg and the surrounding area circa 1829.  It’s about eight feet tall and maybe 60 feet in circumference.  They also have a cool high-tech version where you manually place a touch screen over a large (flat) wall-mounted version of the panorama.  It reads the x/y coordinates of the screen and shows the 1829 and 2003 versions of that spot.  Really cool.

Alas, our (or my) German is not fooling anyone.  I bravely ordered tickets to the Mozart House in German (zwei Erwachsene, bitte/ two adults please).  The woman at the booth looked at me and said, “Oh, English”.  Of well, I tried.

Tomorrow, more driving.  We’re taking a road trip to Hallstatt, about 80 km away.  I brought an iPod adaptor over.  Yesterday we were listening to Sprinsteenin Germany and Austria.