Back home from our eight day Christmas market blitz with three of my favorite, high-energy travelers. We all sing together, and one is the director. This is concert season, and we had exactly nine days off over Thanksgiving if we headed to the airport straight from rehearsal and got home with one day to spare (recover, plan next rehearsal, or cushion any travel emergency!) We also needed to begin our trip in Salzburg, where markets open a week earlier than most of the German ones. This was much speedier than my usual trips, and I wouldn’t have attempted so much so fast if I didn’t know each of these locations well. Bottom line: we played hard and had a blast!
Finished our rehearsal at 2 PM on Sunday before Thanksgiving and taxied out from ATL on Delta to Munich by 6 PM. Seats in Comfort, but that’s relative…. Nobody slept much. Landed at 9 AM, bought our Bayern Pass using the Deutsche Bahn app, took the elevator down a floor to the S/U-bahn station, and were on our way to Salzburg. We were traveling (relatively) light and had one train change on the way. Ready at the door for the exit, we weren’t quite fast enough leaping over the gap, and last one out got slammed by the doors closing. Kaboom! And there went her phone, six feet under, to the track below us! It landed safely between the rails, but too far down to reach.
Mary speaks respectable German, but the guy in the control booth’s only suggestion was to come back tomorrow as there was nothing he could do, with trains coming every two minutes. That wasn’t the right answer, so Mary found three guys in bright yellow ‘Sicherheit’ (safety) vests and explained her predicament. One located a long-handled grabber; they all met us at the tracks, waited for a break between trains, then grabbed her errant phone. We thanked them profusely, might have taken a selfie, and were soon on the next train to Salzburg. Disaster averted.
Salzburg
By early afternoon we had dropped our luggage at the always friendly Weisse Taube, my favorite hotel in the old pedestrian city, and were sampling gluhwein and checking out the market stands in what is blissfully uncrowded Salzburg Chriskindlmarkt on Dom on a weekday afternoon. Salzburg has the most gluhwein choices of any market I’ve visited. Especially love the ones made with white wine or Prosecco. Need to work up to the red, gradually. By sunset we were clip-clopping through town behind a matched pair of white horses driven by a young woman, the second generation of carriage drivers in her family, who gave us the highlights of Salzburg history as we rode along.
[In the US, especially in Atlanta and other hot, touristed cities, I am adamantly opposed to all forms of carriage horse trade, but in European cities like Salzburg the horses are obviously valued and well cared for. There is no comparison to how they are treated in Atlanta.]
Brats or schnitzel was a difficult choice for our first dinner, but both were outstanding at Zum Zirkelwirt. Glad it was a short walk back to our hotel; we’ve been awake for hours.
[In the old city of Salzburg there are relatively few restaurants, and if you don’t want more stand-up brats at the market, give your hotel a few days’ warning to find you a dinner reservation.]
Tuesday was our introduction to German breakfast - leisurely and extensive at the Weisse Taube, with good coffee and conversation. Our hotel is a block from the ice skating rink by the Mozart statue, where the kindergarteners skate in the mornings, pushing big plastic animals to help them balance. We started our day at the wonderfully-curated Christmas Museum by the ice rink, and made it to the Dom for the noon organ concert. On to the oldest bakery beside the water wheel for bread and cookies, through the famous cemetery with the Catacombs and massive Hohensalzburg in the background, into the tiny church in the cemetery, and then to the famous Stiftskirche St. Peter around the corner.