Arriving in Salzburg

Flying to Europe always knocks me out. This was a particularly long flight. First, it took three hours to get to the airport, then there was security and a couple of hours waiting around. The Lufthansa flight was eleven hours to Frankfurt. I had to go for the fast track lane to get around a huge line or I never would have made the Austrian airline flight. Lufthansa was ok, but the food was merely acceptable. The Austrian flight was delightfully informal and they played Viennese waltzes on the system. Just a one hour flight. I had never been to the Salzburg airport before and was delighted to see that it is possibly the only airport in the world named after a composer:

I was totally zonked by the time I got here, and starving! So I popped into this hotel sky restaurant (meaning it is on the sixth floor with a view) and had a terrific salad with caramelised sheep cheese and a weissbier, both excellent. Looking forward to a hearty wienerschnitzel for lunch. My hotel is a fairly small, old-fashioned one in the historic part of town, so I think it won't be far to the Grosse Festspielhaus for tonight. Looking at a map, looks like it will be a cab ride.

Tonight at 8:30 will be the Grigory Sokolov recital in the Grosses Festspielhaus and the program is Beethoven and Brahms. Tomorrow at 8pm is the Bavarian Radio Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and they will be doing the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich. Here is the calendar for the whole festival and as you can see, there are several concerts every day. Today, for example, the Ébène Quartet play and there are two plays as well as the Sokolov recital. There is a puppet theatre here, but I'm not sure which are those and which are normal stage plays. Tomorrow is an opera camp performance of Medea and Idomeneo by Mozart,  a Gorky play as well as the Bavarians.

I will try to take a few more photos than usual. Salzburg has the charm of a small city in a small country--Austria is only eight million people. For example, in my hotel, there is a lounge, open all hours, where you can go and read magazines and consume various beverages from orange juice to champagne. And it is on the honour system! You just go, take what you want and write it down on a little list along with your name and room number. Never seen that before! They never give you a wash cloth in the bathroom, so I brought my own. I expected a bathrobe, but no luck there.

Well, it is almost breakfast time here and I am starving, so more later. For our envoi, let's have a very suitable Viennese waltz by Johann Strauss II:

UPDATE: Nothing like a good German Frühstück to set you up for the day. The breakfast room here is surprisingly large and well-lit as it overlooks the garden. The lobby, in comparison, is very unprepossessing. I was going to say something about the ticket to the concert tonight. As I said, the artists and concerts are announced in December and I ordered tickets in January. What I find so interesting about the ticket to the Sokolov concert tonight is that it doesn't actually mention who is playing (I penciled in the artist just to remind myself):

Isn't that weird? And the ticket for tomorrow's concert only says "Orchester des BR." One starts to get the idea that this is really all that's required and a lot of the stuff we see every day is purely for marketing. What would the world look like without marketing?

Looking at that ticket now, could I really be in the third row? Cool!

UPPERDATE: My hotel room is so small I don't think I can get a shot of it, but there is a nice view out the window:

Across the street

Looking to the southwest. In the distance you can see an alp

Looking the other way. Nice 18th century architecture.

Another UPDATE: Salzburg feels a bit like an overgrown music department. Instead of barking dogs, what I hear floating over the rooftops is someone doing vocal exercises. And I just noticed that the prints in the hallway in the hotel are scenes from operas.