Day 3: Munich Trip

I woke up at 5:15 this morning again to catch a train. I was trying to make the 6:20 train which would get me in To Salzburg at 7:50. The tour started at 8:45 and was only a 15 minute walk from the station. It was perfect.

I got to the train station, open my ticket app, and see that my trains been cancelled. The next one brings me in to Salzburg at 8:42. Yes, I've been running and training for the army but doing a 15 min walk as a 3 minute sprint is ridiculous.

I get to Salzburg and run out of the station; who knows, maybe they'll start late. I get to the tour site at 8:55 and they tell me I missed the departure (I guess the German discipline and Swiss precision trickled into Austria) but they just switched the order of my tours so no worries. Instead of starting with the salt mines and doing the Sound of Music tour in the afternoon, I'd do the reverse.

As a big fan of the Sound of Music (it's one of my 4 favorites on Letterboxd) and perhaps an even bigger fan of learning the behind-the-scenes trivia of my favorite movies, this tour was a delight from the get go. I spoke with the family around me on the bus; the mother had seen the movie upwards of 350 times, so no matter how much I was enjoying the tour, she was in heaven.

We drove through Salzburg to a barrage of information presented to us and shooting locations from the movie pointed out. At our first stop, the lake which was used as the backyard of the house, an elderly couple asked me to take their picture. I noticed that the camera options were written in Hebrew, so naturally I struck up conversation with them. I told them I'd made Aliyah, that I'd be drafting soon, etc. We spoke in Hebrew and continued speaking throughout the stops. Again, family.

At our second stop, the relocated "16 going on 17" gazebo, I noticed a girl with a magen David necklace and approached her to tell her I respected her and appreciated she was wearing it out. I'm drawn to Jews and Israelis for a very simple reason: it's comfortable meeting and speaking with people with a common background. It is very special that on nearly every guided tour, in every popular travel destination worldwide, you'll find a member of our small, formidable clan.

Coolest bit of trivia we learned: the exterior of the house, backyard of the house, and every interior shot were all in different locations (nearly every interior was on a sound stage in Hollywood). So, if there are transitions between inside and outside, or people speaking with different backgrounds of the house i.e maria and the captain outside by the lake, it's just the magic of movie editing that makes it all seem put together. Makes you appreciate the movie that much more, if that's even possible.

On our last stop at the mariabelle gardens, I said goodbye to the Israelis and spoke with them a bit about Israel and my experience with the Chabadnik the night before. It was nice to be back around sane people. They got my number, invited me to stay by them at their kibbutz, and referred to themselves as my adoptive parents. I then walked around the gardens and waited 20 minutes for my next tour, the salt mines.

Unfortunately, I was pretty underwhelmed. It was an hour tour. One of those Audio guide ones - for us English speakers. We wore jumpsuits took a little open-air trolley into the mines and walked from stop to explanatory stop. There was a slide, a ride across a salt lake with a light show, and I met another family speaking Hebrew.

After that, we had a quick, 40 minute stop in the small town of Berchtesgadener before the bus dropped us back off at the starting point.

Our first tour guide told us about a brewery thats been in operation since the 1600s, originally founded by the monks of Salzburg. I decided to check it out, grabbed a half-liter of some of the best beer I've had, and walked to the train station to catch a 7 PM, half hour train back to Munich.

The beer was so good, in fact, that I grabbed a bottle of it at a supermarket back in Munich. I made an instant soup from the kosher market for dinner and decided to relax after two nights of hardly enough sleep. Now, for the end to day 3, I'm sipping on a great Salzburg beer and smiling ear to ear watching the Sound of Music.