The Hills are Alive

with the sound of Aaron singing. You guessed it. We are in Salzburg. After surviving a 7 1\2 hr train journey from Prague (5 1\2 hours of sitting in a train followed by 5 minutes of frantic ´quick what platform to we go to´ when we changed trains in Landshut Germany, followed by another 2 hours hours of sitting) we made it to our small noisy hotel in Salzburg. The next morning our first outing was on a Sound of Music tour. Aaron loves this movie even more than I do (and he hasn't stopped singing the songs since we got here). The tour was good and our guide was so funny. It did shatter some of the movie myths, which I won't mention here for fear of ruining it for others (If you do want to know just email me or ask me later). We had a couple of other die hard fans on our tour which was good, and Aaron did his best to ramp up the enthusiasm. He even sung with the microphone on the bus at one stage.

After the tour, and photos by the fountain in the Mirabell Gardens (another film location) Aaron and I went up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress with one of our tour companions, a women Tash from Melbourne. We could walk up the steep path to the fortress or as we did catch a funicular railway. The fortress itself (and its museums) weren't anything really special but the views made up for it. Salzburg and its surrounds are so spectacular. Lots of photos were taken of course.

After saying farewell to Tash, Aaron and I continued to explore the old town of Salzburg or Alstadt as it is known. There is a lot of horse related statues and things in Salzburg and naturally you can go on a horse and buggy ride as you can in most European cities.

Today, we went to the Museum of Natural History which includes an aquarium, which had great fish including baby clown fish or Nemo's as they are probably more commonly referred as, and a reptile zoo. The rest of the museum was good as well, lots of minerals, stuffed birds and animals, an exhibit about water and one about space. We then did more wandering around the Alstadt and the Mirabell Garden again.

Tomorrow we are going to visit a nearby mountain and go up it in a cable car and then visit the Salzburg Zoo.

Then it is off to Innsbruck for a couple of days and then onto Italy. We are really enjoying Salzburg, Aaron has nicknamed it the place Prague should be. (We have been watching to much CNN (only as it is one of 2 or 3 English speaking tv channels we are getting not because we like it) and they have way too many ads for different countries with slogans, Cyprus`the year round island´ and Croatia ´the Mediterranean as it once was` are 2 examples).