After a lot of wine and a late night for some (everyone but me), we all had a quiet morning before Danny took us on a very scenic drive around the Ard peninsula.
But first, Luke and I took Freddie for a walk to the supermarket. He was extremely well behaved and didn’t do any of the annoying things our own dog does.
Luke cosplaying as a local
Danny, with a medium amount of interference and obstruction from Peter, cooked up an absolutely perfect breakfast.
Danny does the mushrooms with a melty cheese and marmite and they were indeed magical! I shall be giving this a try at home.
Eventually we got ourselves into the car with Danny at the helm and Peter assisting with directions. Luke and I were left to admire the rolling green landscape and blue skies.
The houses along the coast are lovely colours.
We spotted an icecream van and got out for a stretch and some photos. Lucky we captured the sky at this point because the predicted storms that Danny had pooh-poohed earlier were lurking over the horizon.
The weather was just lovely and, most importantly, not too hot.
Tasted even better than it lookedAll smiles… for now!Normally photos taken by strangers are terrible but this lady did a great job!I thought the clouds behind the van looked a bit like icecream.
We drove along the coast for a while and Danny pointed out landmarks. We lined up for the ferry across the narrow strait.
The weather didn’t look so bad…until you looked behind us.Dark skies do make for great photos thoughCatching the ferry was fun and the flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder added a little spice to the scene
Not long after we drove off the ferry the rain started absolutely smashing down and then the hail started.
Apparently you can be fined in Ireland for driving through a puddle and drenching a pedestrian, which doesn’t seem like a policy in line with the famed Irish love of craic but there you go.
We saw a lot of tractors and I forgot I was collecting photos of them (and I’ve forgotten why) but here’s a terrible photo for the fans out there.
We stopped at the door of the Mourne Mountains in a little town called Newcastle. The mountain behind the town made it look a little like the Lake District but it was on the Irish Sea. It has a very shallow bay, apparently when the tide is low you can walk a very long way out.
We took a walk along the very pretty seafront, which was marred by a high cement wall and worse around the town’s public swimming pool.
We stopped in a pub for a drink. The whole place was very quiet for a not-totally-freezing Sunday afternoon.
On the way home the sun came out.
Irish rainbows have to be extra special, surely?
We finished the evening with a picky tea of fancy cheese and Peter’s delicious soy and chilli cucumbers – yet another dish I’ll have to try out at home.
When Danny and I were doing the Camino he would have a quick chat to his mum every day and I would be sure to yell hello from the background as I’d met Danny’s mother, Kathryn, years ago… decades ago, actually! So we all met up for brunch at an art gallery in the middle of the city. Somewhat embarrassingly for the rest of us, Kathy was much more fashionably dressed and had also been out filming interviews for a community project while we’d been dragging ourselves out of bed.
Brunch was lovely and the cafe was quiet despite the city being very busy when we got outside.
While in the gallery we went to look at an exhibition of teapots, which I thought I’d send photos of to Charmaine since we’d been to a tea cosy festival last year.
We did not manage to find the teapots but did spend a surprising amount of time in the lift going up and down looking for them. Oh well!
The exhibitions we did find were a bit sparse.
Much better to be out on the streets where Belfast really shines.
Excellent!
Such fantastic diversity in themes and styles and so huge! Many were commissioned as part of a festival.
Being a Saturday afternoon, all of Belfast’s demographics were out in the cathedral quarter.
We walked through a covered market and I bought some hand-painted cards.
I’m very curious about this cheese.
This one reminded me of Lea, who loved sticky toffee pudding but maybe not enough to try it as a cheese flavour.
Peter always describes people who behave wildly as ‘wee hallions’.
More art.
It’s almost everywhere you look and really contributes to the vibrant character of the city.
We popped into The Sunflower for a drink. It has one of the last remaining entry cages from The Troubles.
Nowadays they do pizzas and music and it’s very relaxed.
Yet more art, this one is one of my favourites.
Before going back home, a visit to a fancy cheese shop.
I didn’t mention Freddie yesterday, he is Peter and Danny’s dog and a cockapoo. He is very cuddly and spends almost all his time doing this.
It makes me miss Bonnie even more!
We had a very fancy dinner booked at restaurant called The Muddler’s Club so we got changed then headed back into the city. I had been feeling the hay fever again so I took some tablets, not thinking that one of them acted like a sedative and I was drowsy all evening.
On the way in.
Despite my sleepiness the food was amazing; two entrees, two mains and two desserts with bread and a plate of tiny appetisers.
We had matched wines and they were really well matched, especially the entree that was a scallop with iberico ham in a butter and pea sauce. I think of all the courses, that’s the one I won’t forget.
After dinner we went for a drink in this fancy building.
The drinks were absolutely delicious but they were at the top of the scale, price-wise too. Worth it for the very luxurious atmosphere and they did come with some snacks.
Slightly worried about the end of public transport time, we caught the glider (a bus/tram hybrid) back to Ballyhackamore and had a last couple of drinks at a very buzzing brewery (Bullhouse East) that we had visited the night before.
On returning home we watched a few episodes of a very Trailer Park Boys style show called Hardy Bucks, a show about some complete drop kicks, set in small town Ireland. As you could probably predict, Luke and I understood about one word in ten and none of the Irish in-jokes but found it amusing anyhow.
I was in bed by midnight, Luke, Danny and Peter stayed up chatting about music for several hours.
Tomorrow: wild weather, icecream and magic mushrooms!
I honestly think Belfast is one of Europe’s most underrated cities. I know I wouldn’t ever have come here without the lure of a friend, but every time I come there’s new things to do, amazing places to eat, new art to see and more.
This is Luke’s first visit and I’m keen to show him why I like it so much.
Belfast is a much smaller city than Melbourne but has an amazing art and music scene that, in some areas, makes it feel a lot like home.
We’re here for a week and a half and plan to visit Derry, go to the Game of Thrones studio tour and eat a lot of good local food. So goodbye Salzburg, maybe one day we’ll come back when it’s cooler and see more of the city.
Aerial view of Salzburg.Coming into Frankfurt
We had to catch two flights to get from Salzburg to Belfast and flew with Lufthansa. The first flight was delayed but we had a big gap between the two. We had our break at Frankfurt airport, which is huge. So big the staff ride around on bicycles, which I’ve never seen at an airport before.
Fortunately we went to look for our gate with plenty of time to spare as we had to get between terminals and it was nearly a kilometre of moving walkways through a tunnel.
But it wasn’t long before we got to Belfast.
Danny picked us up, he lives less than 10 minutes from the city airport and we were very pleased the weather was cooler.
After going back to the house to pick up Ash and dropping off our bags it was out for dinner at a local place called Duad that had about five tables and a dj playing – so very Belfast.
A delicious Korean chicken burger
Then Danny took us on a short walking tour of the local area. Here’s the local library masquerading as a storage facility.
Danny took us to to C.S. Lewis Square, which had this statue below and others of creatures from his books.
I kind of imagined Aslan a bit more imposing than this.
We finished off the night with visits to a couple of bars.
I stopped taking photos and have no idea what time we got home or went to sleep, but it wasn’t too late. We did watch the clip to Kylie Minogue’s new song, ‘Padam Padam’, as Peter is a huge fan and I’d seen people talking about it on TikTok.
Somehow the woman does seem to have aged since 1990!
Well, I won’t lie, we didn’t do a whole heap in Salzburg. It was hot, especially after about 11am, all the way to the middle of the night.
I combated the heat somewhat by soaking my T-shirt then rolling it in a towel so it was lightly damp. This technique keeps you cool for at least an hour outdoors. If it gets really hot I add a wet thin cotton scarf for my head and neck. By then I look like Lawrence of Arabia but with more dripping.
Every morning we started our day with breakfast in the apartment followed by a trip to Kaffee Alchemie.
Luke probably looks sad because I’ve won more wordle games than him.
We tried their cappuccinos, iced cappuccinos and affogatos. Their coffee was extremely flavourful and not bitter or burned, it had a light sweetness and their milk foam was thick, not like the styrofoam- consistency milk froth you get in the UK. If I had two I never felt jittery either, just perfectly awake. Basically I’m crying on the inside leaving it behind ;-).
We did do a few activities in Salzburg after the first day.
On the recommendation of our lovely friends from the Mozart concert, we went to the midday organ recital at Salzburg cathedral. It was worth the €6 just to spend an hour sitting out of the heat, the architecture was very imposing and elaborate and the organ music was… fine. Not my thing but kind of interesting to see live. They had two organists who moved around and played each of the six organs in the building.
At the end we saw our friends (if you’re reading this, ladies please leave a comment, I wasn’t sure how to spell your names!) and they took another photo and I wish I had too. It’s always nice to run into familiar faces in a new city.
Glare cityLooking up kind of gives you vertigo
We spent some time walking around the narrow alleys of the old town. Most of the shops were luxury brands and had tourist prices but we did go into one cheese store that sold cheddar style cheese but with lots of different flavours.
The most unusual was lavender, which had the colour of blu tac. I ended up tasting some the second time we went in and it barely had any taste beyond cheese, the colour was a bit off-putting though. We did buy some aged sheep’s cheese and used it for our dinner.
The cheese shop also let us try some of their white port, which we hadn’t had since Porto. We bought a small bottle of that too.
We had two meals that I cooked in the apartment – pasta with grated cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil and cherry tomatoes. I feel like it’s my travel go-to since it’s so easy and usually most of the ingredients are already in the cupboard if there’s a kitchen in the Airbnb.
The fresh fruit and vegetable stall around the city sell the most amazingly perfect produce. I bought a big tub of red currants – something you almost never see at home. Luke didn’t want any so I got to eat them all myself.
There were many stores around town selling traditional clothing. Much like in Munich, it’s not unusual to see people wearing outfits like this around town. At around €500 for a complete set, it was out of my budget. I would’ve loved a proper dirndl for multicultural days at school though, a connection to my German heritage.
Luke did a load of washing when we first arrived and repurposed the shoe rack into the worlds smallest drying rack.
We spent two nights eating at a beer garden just around the corner from our apartment. It was a huge setup with both indoor and outdoor spaces, but we preferred sitting beneath the chestnut trees.
The food was very Germanic – meat, gravy, potato-based sides or dumplings, beans or noodles.
We also ate (or rather I ate while Luke watched because he was feeling a bit hungover) at the Afro Cafe, which was also only a couple of hundred metres from our accommodation. It was recommended online as a good place to eat and something different from Australian cuisine. It was good for brunch – I had the shakshuka, admittedly something that’s pretty common at home.
We went back to the Mirabell Gardens and saw a bit more of them. We were interested in seeing more of the palace but only a small part was open… or we couldn’t find any other open sections. The roses smelled lovely.
Outside the university was a funny set of sculptures of giant gherkins. I had a student last year who was obsessed with gherkins so we took a few photos.
One of these cucumbers in not like the other ones.
One thing that should be mentioned if you’re thinking of going to Salzburg, is the fact that they sell Mozart chocolates everywhere. They look very fancy but be warned – they are primarily filled with marzipan so just don’t bother unless you’re one of the 1% of the population that actually likes it.
There really isn’t much else to report about Salzburg. It seemed like a really nice city and there are several hills I would’ve loved to climb if it hadn’t been uncomfortably hot. I know no European Airbnb owners are going to read this, but for god’s sake please put some fans in your apartments. Just a pedestal or desk fan would make life more bearable!
The heat has convinced me that April to mid-June are definitely my preferred months for European trips. Either that or autumn. Go when it’s quieter, cooler, cheaper and just generally more pleasant.
Salzburg from the airport
Right now we’re in Frankfurt airport, which surely has to be one of the biggest in the world. Terminal B was approximately a kilometre from Terminal A and staff ride bicycles around!
Next stop: Belfast! Don’t let us down, Lufthansa, we have a dinner booking somewhere fancy.
Last night we very much enjoyed an excellent night’s sleep in our lovely bed, but we have noticed that in the hotels we have stayed in, both in Switzerland and Austria, the double beds are always made up of two single beds. Even when the room/bed head would not accommodate two single beds with spaces between, they are two separate beds. Often they have completely separate fitted sheets, which must be a pain to change, and they always have two separate duvets/quilts/doonas. Weird!
See how the bedhead is in two sections? This one has a cover but you can see two separate duvets underneath.
It does make me wonder what things people find strange when they come to Australia.
Despite our room being quite hot last night there was still no cooler option sheet-wise than using either the divested duvet covers or the ornamental spread that covered the whole bed. There was a small Dyson fan but we couldn’t open the windows for a cool breeze as there were no fly screens and, being by a lake, there were plenty of bugs. It feels like a market someone could really capitalise on financially!
There’s two layers of doors and windows, one of which is double-glazed. Excellent for winter but not for summer.
Anyhow, our sleep would’ve been a bit longer but the sun was shining in through the thin white curtains by 5:30am. Fortunately we’re both pretty good at sleeping through daylight. Seeing as how many parts of Europe experience extremely short evenings for at least a quarter of the year, the ineffective curtain situation is also mind boggling. I think I’ve reached the point of the trip where all I’m noticing are problems… sorry! I am actually still really enjoying myself!
Fill your own tea bag!
Breakfast was a buffet that seemed to be manned by one extremely busy waitress. The selection of food was great and we ended up sitting next to an older American couple who had just finished their fourth biking holiday. They were both retired teachers and we had a good chat about work. One had been a reading teacher and told me how much she had loved the First Steps program, which was developed in Australia.
We left our bags at reception and went to hire a boat!
The small electric boats are hired for 30€ for an hour and it’s a great way to escape the hot streets and noise. Plus I love boats!
We both dressed to match the boat!
We hired one immediately at 11:30am but by the time we got back there was a queue.
The boats have two speeds: slow and stopped. Fine by us, and the electric motor means the lake is very quiet. The town has signs up asking people to keep the noise down and not play music on the street. Also there were signs about not flying drones but we saw one in the air just before we left.
As we had some time before the ferry back to the train, we went back to the hotel and had a drink on the deck.
Several staff members remembered us from the night before and I got to ask one of them about living and working in such a tourist town.
He said they often work 12+ hour shifts and the hotel they work for provides accommodation if they want it nearby, but it does cost them money to stay there. He rents a place in a nearby town and travels to Hallstatt.
He said people in the village had mixed opinions on the value of the tourism and the vast number of visiting cultures had changed the nature of the place, with some people taking photos through peoples’ windows and being more invasive and pushy. Right after he said this a family came in and immediately demanded a particular table, an umbrella (in a huge concrete stand) be moved and then they plonked themselves down despite the manager of the restaurant saying she couldn’t accommodate them.
It’s almost incomprehensible to me, with my reticent Anglo cultural heritage, to argue and demand something in a business then sit down and be perfectly comfortable with people I’ve just upset serving me food and drink. I’d just leave, but according to my Watching the English book, that’s not a trait everyone shares and I guess maybe there’s something to be said for being so much more bold…?
Watching the manager deal with the situation was quite something. She was a very dynamic and direct person, and she came to our table soon after. We told her we admired how well she did her job.
It must be quite the challenge to deal with people from all over the world, all with their own ideas of what is appropriate, what is polite and how to behave. Businesses in such places seem to do all they can to manage people effectively, but when people don’t speak the language (ourselves included, obviously!) it’s not hard for things to go wrong or get very confused. The restaurant had a sign in German and English asking people to wait to be seated but a lot of people just walked right in and sat at a table.
After our drinks we headed to the ferry landing next to the hotel. This might be the smallest non-chihuahua breed I’ve ever seen.
We caught the ferry back across the lake.
It was quite hot inside but better than being on the back of the ferry in the direct sun.
We’d booked dinner and a show in the evening, not thinking about the train cancellations and travel time but it worked out fine.
We sat on the scenic side of the train this time. Apparently the water in this lake is drinking quality!
We took a taxi from the station in Salzburg to our Airbnb place in the old town.
This is the building entrance, not our front door. Pretty imposing though! The kitchen, note the fold out table and folding chairs and the complete lack of room if you chose to use them.
The kitchen is so tiny it reminds me of our Camden flat but the lounge and bedroom are quite spacious. We would’ve really appreciated all this room when there were four of us!
The flat has windows on two opposite sides so the evening breeze is nice but the amount of noise from people walking past is quite high. The stone walls of the buildings means that it echoes a lot. Also there are no fly screens and the owner had left the windows open so there were heaps of flies zooming around.
Still, the mattress is decent and it’s nice to have cooking facilities and a washing machine.
We had a lie down for an hour then changed for our dinner and classical music evening at the St Peter Stifskulinarium, the oldest restaurant in the world.
How old??
It’s been in operation since at least 803 AD. 1220 years!
It’s huge too, over 600 seats in 11 rooms. All the rooms are different colours and themes. The main restaurant looks like this:
We had a drink here before the show, which was in a large room upstairs. Parts of the restaurant are carved straight into the cliff face.
One the way to our concert we saw some pretty amazing wallpaper.
Also some fancy lighting fixtures.
Our concert room was more traditional.
We were sat at a table with two lovely ladies, one from Delhi, one from New York, who had become friends because their husbands were childhood friends and now they go on trips without the husbands! I love that! These lovely ladies told us about an organ performance that happens at the cathedral each day at midday so we said we might see them there.
The concert was all Mozart, mostly songs from operas but some instrumental pieces. There were only two singers, one man and one woman, and they were quite incredible! The volume and notes they could reach were something I don’t think I’ve heard in person before.
I do wish there’s been more instrumental pieces though, they were Luke’s and my favourite.
A very interesting way of laying the table!The only food I photographed was the dessert, nockerl, a local dish that I think is supposed to represent three mountains. It is served with raspberry sauce underneath and basically tastes like undercooked meringue, very sweet and soft.
A short walk home afterwards and straight to bed, although it was still warm inside. We opened up the windows for some airflow but noisy passers-by meant closing them, then putting in my noise-cancelling earplugs and playing rain sounds.
In the morning (6:30ish) a sewerage truck parked almost under our window and ran some kind of pipe down every sewerage line in the area for about two hours with a loud motor running. Not our best night’s sleep!
Fortunately there was no smell.
Tomorrow: the cathedral concert and back to our new favourite coffee shop. Also, lavender flavoured cheese!
Here Comes The Planet 