Our road trip was supposed to end in Munich, as the first stop from Munich to our first stop in Austria, Salzburg, is less than 150 km away and can be reached by train. But the traffic from Hallstatt to Vienna was too inconvenient, so we had to continue our car to Austria. To our surprise, this inadvertent change gave us a taste of the purer lakes and mountains in Austria than in Switzerland.
Salzburg
There is no border between Germany and Austria, and if it weren't for the change in speed limits on motorways, if it weren't for the picturesque, crystal clear lakes that we would have always felt like on German soil. Austrian highways have a speed limit of 130 km/h, but it is rare to see people driving fast in a desperate way, which is very different from the experience on German highways. Foreigners need an international driver's license to drive in Austria, so we spent $20 in the United States before we left. It is strange that the countries to which the international driver's license applies does not include China.
We arrived in Salzburg at 9am. Because of our experience finding a parking space in the city of Munich, we found a place to park in Salzburg in Munich, so we went straight to the parking lot and started our first tour in Austria.
Mirabell Gardens
Salzburg rose to fame with a movie known as The Sound of Music. The film's interludes "Do-Re-Mi" and "Edelweiss" were sung around the world and covered into Chinese versions. The film won five Academy Awards and five nominations in 1965, and The Sound of Music was filmed in Salzburg.
Salzburg, which means "Salt Castle" in German, is the fourth largest city in Austria and the oldest in Austria, and has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age. The city's architectural style is dominated by Baroque, which is a melting pot of Nordic and Southern European culture and art, and is known as the "Rome of the North". It is the gateway of the Alps and is a veritable mountain town with the highest green coverage in Europe. Our journey in Salzburg started at Mirabell Gardens near the old town.
Fountain in Mirabell Gardens
The Mirabell Gardens is a garden built in 1606 by The Prince of the Habsburg dynasty and the supreme governor of Salzburg, Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, for his lover. Mirabell Gardens is a synthesis of two people each taking their own name, which means "amazingly beautiful" in Italian. So carefully built a garden for his lover and named it, this lover must have been extraordinary in the heart of this archbishop. Indeed, the archbishop's lover not only came from a prestigious origin, but also bore the archbishop 15 children. If it were not for the fact that the archbishop could not marry, his lover would have been the wife of the ming media.
This Baroque garden is indeed as its name suggests, beautiful and extraordinary, with green grass and flowers. In the distance, there is a sea of colorful flowers. Flowers and plants are trimmed into different shapes, embellished with cleverly designed fountains that spray water from the mouths of the birds parked on the maidens. Surrounded by four groups of large stone sculptures based on Greek mythology, representing wind, earth, water, and fire. The back garden of the Colonel's house in The Sound of Music, where the male and female protagonists danced, is here; and Maria and her seven children sang and danced around the fountain in the center of the garden, and the children used the stairs leading to Rose Hill as a scale and sang the popular "Do-Re-Mi" from this garden.