Salzburg, between rain and rehearsal

Some days the weather is the whole entry and there's no use pretending otherwise. Salzburg was rain, start to finish. We'd come in under the arched hall at the Hbf a little after ten, and by the time we'd walked the length of the Bahnhofshalle it had set in. Not through the roof (the ETFE cushions overhead held, taut and glowing), but outside, beyond the canopy, the air was already doing the thing the locals call Schnürlregen. String rain. Fine and steady and in no hurry, the kind that doesn't so much fall as hang there until you walk into it. Marc had read somewhere that October is one of Salzburg's drier months. We stood watching it come straight down and he didn't bring that up again.

Wet shoes by half ten. The walk in toward the Salzach is short, and the river met us properly, swollen and milky-jade, moving fast enough to hear under the rain. Salz, salt: for centuries that's what went down it on barges. It runs into the Inn an hour or so downstream, not the Danube directly the way people say, and the Inn does the rest.

The lane of iron signs

We crossed and went straight for the Getreidegasse, which in the wet is one long dripping corridor of wrought iron. The Zunftzeichen are the thing here: guild signs hung out over the shops back when half the street couldn't read, so a pretzel meant a baker and a key a locksmith. The rule still holds even for the chains, so the McDonald's a few doors down has to hang a thin gold scroll of an M to match its neighbours, which was the most Salzburg thing I saw all day. Number 9 is the yellow house where Mozart was born. We didn't go in. I'd had a Mozartkugel for breakfast and felt I'd paid my respects, the real kind from Fürst on the Alter Markt, where they started, which I honestly can't always tell from the souvenir ones on the tongue. I just like buying it where it began.

Tomaselli, the grand old coffee house on the square, and on a wet Saturday every marble table was taken by someone who'd clearly arrived at nine and meant to leave at four. I respect it enormously and we couldn't get a seat.

We ended up across the river at Café Bazar instead, well, just inside the doors, because the terrace had a lake on it. Two Melange, one Salzburger Nockerl between the both of us that came out like three snow-dusted hills and collapsed the second a spoon touched it, which is the whole point of the thing. Through the window the fortress sat up on its hill, grey on grey, the one the guidebooks never tire of saying was never once taken. We'd meant to ride the funicular up, but in that weather it would have been a minute's climb to a view of cloud, so we let it go.

The two o'clock west

Which left the train, and that I'd checked over the second Melange. The two o'clock back toward Munich, the Blauer Enzian, up from Klagenfurt and on to Frankfurt after we got off; we wanted only the first leg, the hour and three-quarters to München Hbf. The windows ran with rain the whole way and there was nothing to face but cloud, so it hardly mattered which side we sat.

Grüß Gott from the conductor, who came through to control the Billets before we'd even cleared the platform, the doors chimed, and we pulled out of that good restored hall a couple of minutes down. My socks were still wet and I did not mind one bit. Somewhere behind us the cathedral bells were doing their two o'clock business, muffled by the weather, and I ate the second Mozartkugel I'd been saving.

— Tobi