Salzburg
One Day

The RE Train, Eastbound

The regional express from Munich to Salzburg takes about ninety minutes, and for the last thirty of them the Alps are simply there — filling the window, unhurried and enormous. I had seen mountains before. I had not seen the Alps in winter morning light: a kind of white that isn't white, more silver, more impossible. The train ran along the valley floor and the peaks sat above the cloud line and I stopped reading whatever I was reading and just watched.

I had one day. Salzburg operates entirely on the logic of a place that knows it is extraordinary and has arranged itself accordingly. The old town fits inside an afternoon if you walk quickly. I did not walk quickly.

Mirabell Gardens: The Do-Re-Mi Steps

Mirabell Palace sits on the right bank of the Salzach and its gardens are, in February, still beautiful — bare hedges and stone fountains and wide gravel paths that the locals use for morning runs with the fortress visible on the hill above. The Pegasus fountain is there, the same one Julie Andrews danced around in The Sound of Music. So are the steps where she led the von Trapp children through Do-Re-Mi.

I sat on those steps for a while. Two American women of roughly my mother's age arrived and one of them — without embarrassment, which I admired — sang the opening bars of Do-Re-Mi while her friend filmed her. The garden staff walking past had the expression of people who have seen this approximately ten thousand times and have made a private peace with it. I found this scene entirely wonderful.

Mozart's Birthplace

Getreidegasse is the old town's main shopping street, narrow and medieval, its wrought iron guild signs hanging above every door. Number 9 is where Mozart was born in 1756 and lived until he was seventeen. The building is now a museum. I paid the entry fee and climbed the narrow stairs to the apartment his family shared.

The rooms are small. You forget, looking at the scale of the music, that the man who wrote it lived in ordinary human rooms. His childhood violin is in a glass case — a small instrument, sized for a child's hands. He was playing it publicly at four years old and composing at five. The violin is about the length of my forearm. I stood in front of it for a long time and thought about what it means to be five years old with a gift that size.

The Stiftsbäckerei & St Peter's Cemetery

Behind the Franciscan Church, down a narrow alley called Fellingergasse, is the Stiftsbäckerei St Peter — a bakery that has been operating since 1160. It is believed to be one of the oldest bakeries in the world still functioning. I bought a loaf of bread there and ate most of it standing up outside, which felt like the right way to honour eight hundred and sixty years of baking.

Next door is St Peter's Cemetery — the one in The Sound of Music, where the von Trapps hid from the Nazis. In reality it is a remarkable place regardless of its film history: small, walled, with individual graves each tended as its own garden. Iron lanterns hang over each plot. In the afternoon light they cast long shadows on the stone paths. The whole place smells of candle wax and old flowers and I walked through it very slowly, reading names, doing the arithmetic of how long people lived.

Currywurst & Schaumrollen

Lunch was a currywurst from a stand near the Salzach — Berlin's great contribution to German street food, available apparently everywhere — followed by a Schaumrollen from a pastry shop on Getreidegasse. A Schaumrollen is a cylinder of flaky pastry filled with meringue cream, dusted with icing sugar, and should probably be declared a controlled substance. I ate one standing on the bridge over the Salzach with the fortress above me and the river green below and thought: yes, this is why people travel.

Hohensalzburg: The Fortress Above the City

Hohensalzburg Fortress has stood on its hill above the city since 1077. The funicular takes you up in about a minute; the walk takes twenty. I walked up, because you should always walk up when you can — the city comes into view gradually, roof by roof, spire by spire, the Salzach a silver line through the middle of it.

From the fortress walls the view is 360 degrees: the old town to the north, the Alps to the south, the plain to the west where the light was already beginning to change. The fortress itself is massive and well-preserved — state rooms, a medieval organ, a torture chamber that the guide described with the cheerful detachment of someone who has explained medieval legal procedure many times. I walked every rampart and stood at every viewpoint. The cold was sharp and clean. I didn't want to go down.

Mozartkugeln

Before leaving the old town I bought Mozartkugeln — the chocolate-and-marzipan balls that Salzburg has been selling to tourists since Paul Fürst invented them in 1890. The original Fürst Mozartkugeln are wrapped in silver-blue foil and sold only at the Fürst confectionery shops; the mass-produced Reber version is wrapped in red-gold foil and available at every tourist shop and airport in the German-speaking world. I bought the original. The difference is real and worth noting.

How I Accidentally Broke a Law in Germany

Here is what happened on the return journey, told as accurately and without embellishment as I can manage.

At Salzburg Hauptbahnhof I boarded what I believed to be my train. It was not my train. My train, the one I had booked, had already left. The train I was on was a different service and my ticket, it emerged, was valid for a specific time and a specific train and this was not it.

The conductor appeared. I showed my ticket. The conductor looked at the ticket, looked at me, looked at the ticket again, and said something in German. I said, in English, that I did not speak German. The conductor said, in English, that my ticket was for the wrong train. I said I was aware of that now. The conductor said I would need to pay a surcharge to validate the ticket for this train. I said of course. The conductor produced a form.

The form required a pen.

I did not have a pen. I have never, in the years I have been travelling, needed a pen and not had one. This was the day. The conductor did not have a pen either, or claimed not to, and looked at me with the expression of a person who has encountered every variety of human failure and has arrived at a state of profound equanimity about all of it.

I turned to the carriage. Two women were seated across the aisle — one, perhaps sixty, reading a novel; the other, perhaps thirty, looking at her phone. I asked, in what I hoped was an appropriately apologetic tone, if either of them had a pen. The older woman reached into her bag without looking up from her novel and produced one. I took it, signed the form, paid the surcharge, returned the pen with thanks. The older woman nodded once, still not looking up. The younger woman watched all of this with the mild interest of someone observing a minor wildlife event.

The conductor left. I sat down. The Alps moved past the window in the gold of late afternoon.

I broke a law unknowingly in Germany. The punishment? A silent stare and a borrowed pen.

Alpenglühen

There is a word in German — Alpenglühen — for the phenomenon where the Alps turn pink and then deep rose at sunset, the snow holding the last light long after the valleys have gone dark. I watched it from the train window on the way back to Munich, the peaks catching fire one by one above the darkening plain, and I thought about the conductor, the pen, the two women, the Californian at Neuschwanstein, the American woman singing Do-Re-Mi on the Mirabell steps, the young Japanese couple on their honeymoon.

Nobody tells you that solo travel in a non-English speaking country will test every nerve you have — the wrong trams, the unreadable tickets, the announcements you can't understand. What they also don't tell you is that a stranger will always appear exactly when you need one. Sometimes with directions. Sometimes with advice. And once, memorably, with a pen.

The Alps went dark. Munich appeared on the plain ahead. I still had half a bag of Mozartkugeln. It had been, by any measure, a very good day.