Our European Holiday Day 7 - Salzburg

Today was a mostly relaxing day, which was a nice break from the craziness of the last week!  We slept in until around 7:30 and then packed, ate breakfast, and said goodbye to Venice. We took a cab to the train station on the island, which meant we were able to see a small piece of Venice one more time. From there, we were on the train for most of the day. The train ride was beautiful. Northern Italy has many small towns and the beginning of the Alps. It was lovely.

We crossed the border into Austria and Villach was our train station. We knew this was going to be a tight connection because we only had 5 minutes between trains. However, our train from Venice was slightly delayed and it looked like we were going to miss our connection. A nice worker on the train told us not to worry and that we could use our same ticket to board the next train, the only downside is the next train was 2 hours later, which wouldn't get us to Salzburg until nearly 6:00 PM. Fortunately, there were a lot of passengers on our train who needed that connection and so the second train waited for us. We quickly changed trains and then we had another 2.5 hours to reach Salzburg.

The train ride is Austria was gorgeous. There were so many Alpine towns nestled into the mountains. Every town had a church with a large bell tower and homes all around. There were also farms with cows, sheep, and crops. It was so pretty to drive through the towns. Neither Eric nor I did much on the train besides stare out the windows in amazement.

We arrived in Salzburg just before 4:00 and headed to our hotel, which is right next to the train station. We checked in and set out to find dinner. Finding food in Salzburg is a little harder than in Italy where there were literally restaurants on every block.  We found a place that our hotel recommended and it did not disappoint. We started out with a pretzel, which was so hot that we both burned ourselves tearing it apart! We both ordered schnitzel as our main course, mostly because it was the only thing on the menu that we knew was... It was delicious. And we finished off with a warm apple strudel and warm chocolate cake for dessert. The cake was identical to what you might see at a restaurant in the U.S., however, I have never had a strudel like this one. The apple filling was warm and the crust was flaky and delicious. The apples were completely mashed, so it wasn't like an apple pie. It was divine.

After dinner, we headed towards old town Salzburg. We had both noticed several people wearing traditional Austrian/German clothing (lederhosen and traditional dresses). We both figured that they were dressed that way for some sort of tourist restaurant or something. However, as we got closer to the town square we saw more traditional dress. By the time we got to the town square, we realized there was a giant party going on. There was delicious-smelling food, crafts, booths, carnival games, and carnival rides all set up in the town square. Many people were wearing traditional clothes regardless of their age. It was so much fun. We later googled to figure out what was going on and discovered that it was St. Ruperts Fair. St. Rupert was the patron saint of Salzburg in the eighth century and every September there is a festival in the town square. It's been going on for centuries. It was so much fun. We ate too much at dinner to eat any of the food, but we are going back tomorrow night and eating snacks for dinner - yum!

The Salzburg Cathedral is right at the heart of the town square, so we took a walk around the church. It's a Baroque-era church from the 17th century. It's really pretty. After that, we wandered around Salzburg. It's a beautiful city - we found some cool bridges and walked along the river. We talked to a few locals and they were all so nice. Salzburg is a very different city from the cities we visited in Italy and it makes us excited for the next leg of our trip!