The Other Side

Day 106,  Tuesday 2nd December 2008 (Cath)

This song seems much less cutesy in my mind than it looks when represented by a montage of photos taken during our time in Salzburg. I do warn you that even I have started to feel there may be such a thing as too much of The Sound of Music. Still, we had fun trying to find all of these Favourite Things, or things that sounded a lot like them, around town. Enjoy – keep a bucket handy if you feel you might need it (it gets better once you get past the roses and kittens, trust me).

Raindrops on roses,

whiskers on kittens,

green copper rooftops

and warm woollen mittens,

red paper packages tied on a string,

these are a few of my favourite things.

Cream coloured ponies

and crisp apple strudels,

doorbells

and sleigh-bells

and schnitzel (no noodles)*,

wild geese that fall and get ice on their wings,

these are a few of my favourite things.

Girls in white dresses with no satin sashes,

snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,

silver white Winters** that melt into Springs,

these are a few of my favourite things.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favourite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.

Awww.

*Schnitzel actually from London, not Salzburg, and not actually meat.

**Silver white Winter actually in Milan, and technically still Autumn.

Day 106, Tuesday 2nd December 2008 (Al)

As you will recall from the previous entry, the Sound of Music (SoM) tour left a few gaps. “We” decided to use our last day here in Salzburg to cover as many as possible. I’ll try to be brief as SoM has already taken up enough of my time and, more importantly, your time dear reader.

***WARNING: If you are a huge SoM fan, you may want to just look at the pictures. If you don’t really like the film that much, then you may enjoy the commentary. But don’t think I am a novice – I have seen it several times***

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MARIA?

I would say a Hannibal Lecter-style straightjacket and muzzle would do the trick. But in the sugar-land this film was made, troublemakers get sent to a rich person’s house, to be waited on hand and foot, where your only task is to keep the kids busy.

Let’s face it, the kids are pretty tame. The frog and pine cone incidents - gosh, how naughty are they? They wouldn’t even get a gig on Home & Away where REALLY troubled kids  go. I do concede it was a different time, but a time where a belting with a strap would have been common place…

Nonnberg Abbey entrance and a pious resident

The street next to the Abbey

The great view to the hills

DO RE MI

I really hate this song – mainly because it continues drilling into your head long after hearing it like a sugar-coated Ryobi cordless. In the movie though I like that it’s a montage covering a couple of weeks where the kids learn to sing half decently – even Rocky had a montage after all.

The fountain that they walk around

The steps where they do a lame dance routine – but some of the kids are quite young and fat in cases so the choreographer did what he/she could

The garden arch that they run through

The statues they mimic as they march past – I felt silly being made to do this

The terrace where more singing happens – Maria must be getting sick of the song by now, like the majority of the audience that have a Y chromosome

The foot bridge over the river, they walk here on their way to the hills (and into our hearts) for a picnic whilst wearing dreadfully patterned haberdashery

THE SALZBURG FESTIVAL PERFORMANCE

This is one part of the movie I don’t actually mind, save for the plot holes (with all of the Nazi guards around the theatre, how could they forget to station even a single guard near the stage exit?).

Edelweiss is actually a beautiful song and it is touching when, in the face of Nazi occupation, Georg & Maria rally the mainly Austrian audience to join in – take that, Hitler!

Felsenreitschule Theatre – only used for 5 weeks of the year during the  Salzburg Festival in summer. The stage is covered in wet weather gear but still pretty cool to see.

The guard-less exit – “dumkopff!”

Movie trivia:

• Christopher Plummer did not actually sing this bit
• The audience, made up of locals, had to be taught the English lyrics, but lots of them ended up just opening and shutting their mouths

THE GREAT ESCAPE

After escaping the theatre, the family hide in a cemetary that looks to be within the abbey grounds of Nonnberg – about 15 minutes jog away. The actual location is a sound stage in Hollywood, but based on the cemetary of St Stephen’s nearby the theatre:

Hmmm – there’s not much room behind those headstones for 9 people to hide

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

Being a movie fan, I did get into this more than I am letting on. It’s probably the musical (Broadway style) aspect that I don’t like. I enjoyed finding familiar places and photographing them – particularly in a place as scenic as Salzburg. Any fans of the movie have to come here, and any non-fans dragged with them should still enjoy it.  However, everyone reaches their limit…

Stay tuned for some of Cath’s favourite things!

Day 105, Monday 1st December 2008 (Cath)

NOTE: No animals were harmed in the making of this blog entry

It’s not often that I wake up, look out the window and feel disappointed to see clear blue skies above and dry ground beneath me. When I’m at home in Australia, I do of course always hope for rain for the good of the world, but on the rare days that I actually spend time outside I can’t help selfishly enjoying the sunshine. After catching glimpses of a white Alpine world through the train window yesterday, however, I had been holding on to the faint hope that we would be able to wander around in glistening snow today.

An hour or so later, standing on top of Capuchin Hill overlooking Salzburg, with dry feet, fingers that could still move and grip things, and having not even come close to slipping over on the footpath, I was over the disappointment.

View across the Salzach river, with the green dome of the main cathedral (Dom) and the hilltop Salzburg fortress in the background

As Al may have alluded to in his most recent entry, I have been known to watch The Sound of Music from time to time and enjoy it. That is to say, I clearly remember the first time I saw it (at The Chalet in Lorne on a family holiday, in between swims in the pool), and can also recite several of the ads from the version we had on video at home when I was younger, taped from TV in the late 80s or early 90s (‘Dip, dip, Philadelphia dip, let your taste buds flip, Philadelphia dip’).

It was the movie I watched whenever I was sick and stayed home from school. The best remedy for me was lying on the couch in my dressing gown, with Mum bringing me a glass of flat lemonade and putting The Sound of Music in the VCR. It worked for everything from a broken wrist to the chicken pox – basically, anything 10mL of purple Dimetapp couldn’t fix.

What I’m trying to say is, that even though I know it’s pure Hollywood schmaltz, even though I know it is not accurate geographically or historically or biographically or even culturally, it would have been wrong for me to visit Austria for a second time and not do a Sound of Music tour.

For Al, I think coming along on the tour was more of a way to pass the time, be driven around in comfort, see the countryside, and not have to listen to me tell him all about the tour later. How sweet!

Schloss Leopoldskron – complete with a terrace for drinking pink lemonade, gardens (now without gazebo) for singing and dancing, and a boat landing onto which children wearing wet old drapes can scramble from the water. 

The man-made lake in front of the house was beginning to freeze over, and this goose decided to walk across the ice to where our group was standing. I’m sure most of us were wondering what would happen if it came across a thin patch. I suppose Al was just a little bit more open about it - ’I really, really want that goose to fall through the ice’.

Voila.

As stated earlier, the goose was not harmed. It just had to sort of push itself across the rest of the ice for a while, since it was too scared to stand up again. Eventually it found a bigger patch of water and started to swim, like an Antarctic ice breaking ship. Wow. Most Australian geese probably don’t even think about those sorts of winter survival skills.

Untersberg Mountain, where Maria is supposed to be when she twirls in a meadow and skips over a brook singing ‘The Hills are Alive’, then hears the bells of the Abbey and runs down the hill. This photo is taken from below the Abbey - that’s a big run.

The road (Hellbrunner Allee) where the children hang from the trees like street urchins.

As seen from the bus (tourists obviously not allowed to get any closer) – the side of the house (Schloss Frohnburg) where Maria arrives singing ‘I Have Confidence’ and from where they push the cars to try and make their escape, and are accosted by the Nazis waiting outside.

The ‘16 Going on 17′ gazebo, relocated to Schloss Helbrunn (already a tourist attraction) to keep embarrassing people who try and sing and dance like they’re in the movie away from the grounds of Schloss Leopoldskron. The gazebo is now kept locked, apparently because a lady tried to do an ‘80 going on 81′ dance on its benches and broke her hip.

It would have been rude if I didn’t sing even a little bit when the tour guide put the soundtrack on in the bus. The American girls behind us drowned me out, anyway.

Lake Fuschl – as close to a snow-covered village as we will probably see. The surrounding snow-capped mountains and lack of directly associated song made this Al’s favourite stop on the tour.

Another of Al’s favourite things was learning that, during the film family’s escape over the mountains (and yes, they were actually walking towards Germany and just near one of Hitler’s residences), Christopher Plummer refused to carry Gretl as she had enjoyed a few too many pastries during her time in Salzburg (and who could blame her?). Instead, a slimmer little girl was found to be her body double for the piggyback scene. The poor little chubby thing!

The Church at Mondsee, where the movie wedding was filmed. Sadly, nobody was playing the slow organ version of ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ while we were there.

The village of Mondsee – pretty as.

If you are not a fan of the movie, and/or are not likely to be dragged through Salzburg by someone who is, you can stop reading right here. If you are, I thought I should share a few tips about Sound of Music tours:

• The tours will take you near a lot of filming locations, but not inside them, and in some cases not even close enough to take a photo.
• Our tour took four hours and only let us out of the bus four times: at Schloss Leopoldskron, Schloss Hellbrunn (from where we could walk across the road to the start of the tree-lined street, Hellbrunner Allee), a lookout point over Lake Fuschl, and in Mondsee (where we had an hour to ourselves, to see the church and either buy tacky souvenirs - think yodelling beavers - or have some cake and hot chocolate in a nice cafe).
• While other tour guides might be different, ours preferred to talk a lot about the history of the real Von Trapp family and all the ins and outs of how the musical and film were made, rather than play all of the songs from the soundtrack during the trip, as advertised.
• The first song wasn’t played until we left Schloss Hellbrunn and headed out into the Salzkammergut countryside. One song at a time would be played, and even though a few of us asked for the music to be turned up (including Al!), it wasn’t really loud enough for anyone to feel comfortable singing (although the tour guide did sing each song to try and get everyone into it, it would perhaps have been nicer to hear Julie Andrews instead).
• The tour starts in Salzburg near the Mirabell Gardens, but didn’t visit them or any other locations in the city itself. We spent about twenty minutes sitting in the bus in the streets of Salzburg hearing about locations there, but didn’t see or visit them.
• Allow an extra day (or at least half a day) to see these locations in Salzburg, all of which are easy to walk to and free (except the Rock Riding School, which can only be seen on a paid guided tour – ask anyone working at the Salzburg Festival Hall for info):
  • Mirabell Gardens
  • Nonnberg Abbey
  • St Stephen’s abbey cemetery
  • Monchsberg Terrace
  • Residenzplatz (fountain, and arches beside the cathedral)
  • Old pedestrian bridge over the river, and the river bank
• See our next day’s post for photos of these locations – and please excuse Al’s commentary. He is not a fan.
• Doing a tour is still the easiest way to see all these out-of-Salzburg locations. And hopefully, if you know what to expect, you won’t be disappointed.
• Finally, do not expect Austrians to like or even to have heard of the movie or the Von Trapp family! And keep that in mind when you are being taken on a tour by an Austrian who is forced to sing songs they had probably never heard before they got this job!