It's a freaking CASTLE

We went to a CASTLE!! Like, an actual castle with ramparts and arrow slits and holes for pouring boiling oil on people and a dungeon and bastions and crenellations. As a person who grew up reading about places like that—places I thought I’d never get to see—this was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it was at the top of a killer hill. This made for an awesome defensive position, but it basically murdered my legs and lungs (which I guess it the point but you know, I didn’t appreciate it at the time). It was 1000% worth it though. We took a tour and talked about Prince-Archbishops and sieges, and how the rings in the ceiling were for hanging bags of sand and water, ready to put out fires when the rope was cut with a sword. We learned why the people of Salzburg are called “bull washers” (but in German obviously)—because during a siege the people in the castle were running out of food and only had one cow left, but they wanted it to seem like they had more, so they painted the cow a different color each day so it looked like there were multiple cows. Of course, to change the paint, they had to wash the cow off at night, hence the name. One of my favorite moments though was walking through this narrow passageway and imagining that I was a guard patrolling the castle… and then barely five minutes later I learned that that’s exactly what the passageway was for: guard patrols! This was yet another case of “this is just like being in a book.” Oh man, it was so cool. I’ll never forget that.

Castle

Austrian Alps from the Castle

City from the Castle

Part of the Castle as seen from one of its bastions

The next day we went to the Mozart Museum (in the house where he was born) and ate bread from the oldest bakery in Salzburg, which grinds its own flour using electricity generated by an actual water wheel. I also had Mozart chocolate (chocolate and marzipan) for the first time. It has to be some of the sweetest candy I’ve ever tasted (because of the marzipan—which I’ve never actually had before so I had no idea what it tasted like or whether I’d like it), but it was really good! If you don’t like really sweet things, you probably wouldn’t like Mozart chocolate, but to me it was awesome (I’m even eating one as I write this!)

And then we saw The Abduction from the Saraglio. This was a… really interesting performance. They used period instruments, but the actual opera/onstage part was really modern and had an interesting interpretation (the Pasha was basically like a director, and there were cameras shooting the action at times). Overall, it was pretty hilarious. I actually laughed out loud more than once, which I rarely do at live performances. My favorite part was when one of the characters (Pedrillo I think) actually said “Stay cool. Relax” like actual English words in the middle of an opera sung in German. I really loved Osmin because he was super angry and violent (and his man bun was hilarious), Pedrillo was also great, Blonde was so sassy I loved her, Belmonte was okay as a character but a good singer, and Constanza was a great singer, but I didn’t like the character or some of the acting she did. Pasha Salim was so weird (he like actually took his shirt off, tied himself up and then laid on the floor for a bit during a duet between Belmonte and Constanza and I was just like… Why?) I think overall it was enjoyable because of the comedy, but it was also really weird.