Anyway, back to tales of cultural oddities.

I spent a few days wandering around Munich with my cousin. She was my tour guide and showed me the town halls, and the main town squares, which were covered in school children enjoying their holidays which had only just begun a few days earlier. Too many children running about, I say. I prefer cities filled with backpackers, waiting to be met and asked many random questions.


Munich isn't the most beautiful city. But it is quaint and European in terms of all the buildings everywhere with their palace-esque styles. Compared with Australia and the states, it looks old and dignified.



As far as I can tell, it's quite typically German in terms of being run to the second in terms of promptness and exactness. The metro system has trains coming pretty much every 20 minutes on the dot on our line, not like Sydney at all, where trains being 20 minutes late is not uncommon. I also love the buy-one-ticket-get-travel-on-all-forms-of-transport-all-day-long philosophy. It's great for tourists such as myself.
Even my cousin is so cute and German. She tells me about her usual day right down to the exact minute. She's meant to leave the house at 7:20am, she says, but she's often running late and instead of having 5 minutes to walk to the bus which comes at 7:25, she runs the distance in 2 minutes. Don't these people have traffic jams? How can it all be so predictable? When I leave the house aiming for a 7:25 bus, i leave at 7:15, in case it comes early, and don't leave in disgust until 7:50 because some buses are genuinely 15 or 20 minutes late in Sydney. In my area, at least.

After a couple days of such general wandering around Munich (such as seeing their Olympic Games village from the 70s - which reminds me, they wanted the 2012 games, but would have built an all new village, wouldn't they? Why don't they just reuse the facilities they have, dammit! It seems like such wasted investments. Sorry, mini-rant.), my cousin and I have headed over to Austria.

We spent a day and a half in Salzburg, going around the fortress and basking in the beauty that is the town in which the Sound of Music was filmed. It's old and makes a big fuss about Mozart coming from there. All of Austria seems to, actually. Vienna included, even though it's several hours away from his birthplace and he may have only lived here for a few months.





We also managed to go to a free presentation of one of Mozart's operas. It was probably free because it was presented in the strangest way ever. We missed the first 10 minutes, but I don't think that would have made it any less odd. It was in Italian, and all the performers were dressed in very contemporary clothes, but that wasn't the odd bit. As far as we could tell, two girls and two guys were singing about who-knows-what and obsessing about this tall guy in an orange shirt. They ended up wrapped up in a 5 way hug, where Orange-Shirt-Guy had someone clinging to each leg.

Does this not look odd to everyone else, too? Remember that there's another person attached to his right leg, too, but it's behind the head in the audience.



Another thing that struck me as odd is the sheer number of Australians I've encountered in my travels. We were getting into the Festungbahn (Fortress train that takes you up the hill)



to go into the Fortress, and within our carriage (which takes no more than 10 people) there were 4 Australian guys. At our current youth hostel in Vienna, every evening I've encountered someone else with a familiar accent.
Of course, at the same time I keep hearing such a mix of different languages here that it's been quite impressive. Everything from French to Korean has been audible, and even a few languages I haven't been able to quite place. Extremely common are Italians, not surprisingly. A few I met the other night biked their way up from Italy, which I thought was a decent effort.

At the same time, when you go out into the city, it's hard to find someone who doesn't speak English. I got asked for directions in English several times. This is just another one of those cities filled with tourists.

And again, where there are hoardes of tourists, there are people who try to take advantage of them. Along one of the main streets in Vienna, Mariahilfer Strasse, we have been repeatedly approached by beggars. They try to come up with interesting reasons to give them money, too. Yesterday, one wanted money to buy food for his dog. Another woman asked my cousin gently for money for her child, and when my cousin said she didn't have any money, the woman got furious, called her a liar, and said she shouldn't be a liar at such a young age. When, I wonder, is an appropriate age to become a liar?

Some of the buskers have been interesting, also. There was a violin player who would only play when someone put money into his hat. Like a wind-up toy, he'd play a few bars then slow down and rock back and forth on the last note, freezing until the next coin was placed in his hat. He would play for various amounts of time, depending on how good the coin was. I suspect the only reason it worked for him was because he seemed to be a pretty decent violinist.

One odd thing I've noticed about the Austrians is that sometimes when you ask them for something, they won't respond. They'll just continue whatever it is that they were doing and if you repeat yourself, then they'll get annoyed because they heard you the first time. This is an unusual thing to work with, but I guess I've learnt to speak loudly and clearly the first time and assume I've been heard unless they don't do what I want for ages afterwards.

Other random photos of Salzburg:







And now some of Vienna:

The town hall:


The royal apartments' decorations:


The art gallery which is a stunning building itself:


And an Egyptian display within:


Finally, some pretty bridge photos over the Danube: