This pretty much sums up our day
More rain. Dammit. It's been raining now for three days straight. But Leon was man enough for it. He got us to the park-and-ride on the outskirts of Salzburg (we're in Austria now, by the way), and the bus got us from the park-and-ride to the old town. That would be right by the old bridge that goes across the scenic river, in view of the old castle up in the hills above us. But we only had eyes for the public toilet at the moment.
After taking care of business we hiked up to the base of the fortress, and lo and behold: Funicular! Funicular! Funicular! Lin-Wei made an extremely feeble attempt at suggesting we walk up to the fortress, but you know that fell on deaf ears (and very tired feet). We rode up the funicular with some very smelly German guys and a ton of Korean tourists.
Touring our one millionth castle!
The audio tour of the castle was weird. We had a tour guide but he would just open a door to a room and we'd go in. We'd then plug in the number of the fun fact we wanted to listen to into our audio-thingy, and once we'd listened to all the fun facts, we'd mill about till everyone was done. The guy would sense this, open the door, and usher us into the next room. And that went on for an hour.
We spend the rest of the day, in the rain, touring Salzburg. We saw churches, graveyards (the catacombs were closed on this day only!!), and an odd landing place for a helicopter. For lunch we ate some fast-food seafood at Nordsee, but it was actually quite good. I even got some resting time at a pub while Lin-Wei went shopping for 45 minutes. I must have been really complaining about the walk to be given that token rest.
Salzburg was also alive with the sound of Bonneys
We saw some sites that were in The Sound of Music, and took ourselves off the beaten track to hike along the old town wall (in the rain, of course). It was yet another steep hike to get up there, but it was pretty neat seeing the city from this angle. It was a bit unnerving when we found an area seemingly inhabited by a bunch of homeless people, but no one was around.
More touring of the city in the rain. More walking up and down the streets of Salzburg. Saw a sign only my friend Chek could truly appreciate. Bought some Mozart chocolates, and finally wound up at a sushi place for dinner. More sushi? In Germany!? Well, it was Austria, but whatever.
Salzburg was neat and all, but we'd pretty much seen it all before in other German, Italian, and French towns, and it rained the whole day. I was tired from all the hiking the past week, so for me Salzburg was cool, but nothing to send an hour writing about in a travelogue... er... uh...
One last stop at our favorite public toilet, and we took the bus back to Leon, and the Leon got us back to Bertchesgaden. While driving around looking for food, I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. At the time I thought that maybe it was some automatic speed monitoring system, but I dismissed it almost immediately. <-- !
The beer halls of Munich call
