Friends from afar; Salzburg

When people suggest that real friendships might not be possible in online space, I tell them about Harry Potter for Grown-ups (HPfGU). I joined that Yahoo group in late 2000, and during the three years that I was active, made several friends there with whom I’ve remained connected and even close. Most notably, I met and befriended the woman I married. Eighteen  years in, I can confirm that it’s as solid a relationship as any that has begun with a face-to-face meet, although we did make sure to meet in person before deciding to spend our lives together.

Over the years, we have met in person, visited, and hosted numerous other friends from HPfGU, and tonight we will meet for the first time the one, the only, the famous, Mike “Aberforths’s Goat” Gray and his celebrated wife, Susan. They live in Zurich, and will be our hosts for the next six days, unless they decide that we were a lot more pleasant online and pointedly book us a hotel room. I am so excited–more excited to meet them than to see Zurich, if truth be told, since they were the reason we put Zurich on the itinerary to begin with. But Zurich does look like a pleasant and interesting city and on our long train trip from Salzburg, which begins any minute now, we’ll make some plans s about things to see and do there.

Salzburg is beautiful. It too was put on the itinerary for largely extrinsic reasons, being midway between Ljubljana and Zurich, so I knew very little about it. I did not know, for example, that it is set in a valley that was once a large lake, and that one side is built right up against (and, to some extent, atop) sheer stone cliffs.

I also didn’t know about Salzburg’s role in western music. I knew that this guy Mozart was born there, but I didn’t know the much more important fact that it was the setting for The Sound of Music. My wife’s reputation as a curmudgeon is unsullied by her complete and utter love of this movie. She proved her mushiness by buying three tickets to a four-hour bus tour of the places featured in the fictionalized lives of the von Trapps, and her curmudgeonliness by compelling the grumpy teenager to come along. I was completely aboard with both parts of this plan.

The grumpy teenager redeemed the time by making and studying German flashcards on her phone.* We enjoyed singing along with the soundtrack, which played between parts of the tour guide’s spiel. And it was a great way to get an overview of Salzburg and get to places we probably would never have gone to any other way, although the guide (who was knowledgeable and funny) was kind enough to tell us all the exact city buses that would take us there.

One such location was the new home of the gazebo in which the external shots of two key love scenes were filmed. It wasn’t big enough for the cameras and actors to get inside for the interior shots, so they built a second one for those. (I don’t know how anyone who really sees movies with an insider’s view can stand to watch them. Aren’t they constantly noticing that the interior of a room has six windows and the exterior eight, etc.? Whatever–I am not blessed or cursed with that eye for cinematic detail.) Joy wanted to take a photo of it. Munchkin wanted to climb a lovely spreading tree near it. Uninterested in doing either of these things, I wandered off a ways and noticed that someone had adorned the scar left by a sawed-off branch.

Another stop was Mondsee, home of the church where (movie) Captain von Trapp and Maria got married. Needing a break from finely shaded pencil drawings, I followed Munchkin’s lead and did a quick black-ink drawing of the church’s towers from the restaurant where we had lunch. The one I did the next day, back in Salzburg, between ordering and receiving dinner (I’m noticing a pattern . . .) was more satisfactory:

I’ll be back to shading soon enough, though, because I loved this detail near the front door of the church and am itching to draw it:

Incidentally, there are over 100 Roman Catholic churches in Salzburg, population 160,000. There’s a story there. Why so many? Did every archbishop-prince (I recoil at the term, but that’s what they were) feel obligated to build one as a monument to his reign? I might be curious enough to do a little research, because I have time for that kind of thing. Gosh do I love sabbatical.

I always kind of figured that “Do-Re-Mi,” a.k.a. “How three generations of US Americans learned solfege,” was a montage of, I don’t know, the von Trapp estate. Or just various pretty places. Now I understand that it is very much a tour of famous places in and around Salzburg, the way a song set in San Francisco might show the kids waving from a cable car, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, sliding in the playground in Dolores Park, etc. Most of the shots in “Do-Re-Mi” are in the Mirabell Gardens: including the Pegasus fountain, the ivy-covered arbor, the dwarf statue they all tap (disturbing sign in the garden: “the most famous of Europe’s dwarf gardens”), and the steps that stand in for the scale at the end. (Well, the kids’ scale. Julie would have to climb a scaffold to get to her final high note.)

After we were deposited in the Mirabell gardens, Munchkin went off on her own adventures, while Joy and I got some snacks and parked ourselves in Salzburg Old Town to await the start of a concert of Mozart violin sonatas.

This building in Old Town illustrates the stages of clothing production, from shearing the sheep to buying the clothes.

Naturally I had to take this photo in honor of my dear friend Dan Schatz.

If I took a picture of everywhere “Zucker” shows up, it would overrun my photo files; it means “sugar.”

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Reading: Oil and Marble, Stephanie Storey

Still learning a little music theory with the Great Courses series by Robert Greenberg.

*I stand corrected. The teenager says she wasn’t grumpy about coming along. She just thought her ticket was a waste of our money.