Footprints on Cobblestone: Mama Manya and Mozart, Papa Joe and Parsch

I'll start with the weather. The forecast for today was rain all day, so when we left our room in the morning, we bundled up in our raincoats and brought umbrellas. There's a saying about the weather in Salzburg (or so our guidebook claims): "If you can see the castle, it's about to rain. If you can't see it, it's already raining." The good news is...it never rained today! The bad news is...we had to carry around raincoats and umbrellas all day. But that's definitely better than walking in the rain.

Today was the "following in their footsteps" day in Salzburg, so our first goal was to see the areas of the 4 DP camps where Papa Joe and Mama Manya lived: Riedenburg, Hallein, Beth-Bialik, and New Palestine. We're pretty sure that Papa Joe started off in Riedenburg and Mama Manya in Hallein, and after they were married, moved to New Palestine. At some point, they were in Beth-Bialik, but that may have just been from where they left to America in 1950. Today, Riedenburg is a neighborhood with a military base in its center, Beth-Bialik is a brewery, Hallein is a small industrial town, and New Palestine is a residential neighborhood called Parsch. We had an address for Mama Manya and Papa Joe's home in Parsch/New Palestine, but unfortunately the building where they lived no longer exists. We did, however, find a small park right around the corner from where their home used to be...which brings me to what was our next goal! That was reenacting all of the pictures we have of Mama Manya and Papa Joe from Salzburg. Many of these pictures were of Mama Manya and Papa Joe in front of recognizable landscapes and famous buildings, and it was easy to find the approximate locations to reenact those. Other (many) pictures were of both of them on park benches, so when we saw the park right around the corner from their address in Parsch, we knew that this was a likely location of all those bench pictures! Our results are below--we think we did a pretty good job!

We next walked around the old town of Salzburg and got to see some of the famous Mozart-related sites--because even though Vienna also claims Mozart as their own, he was born and grew up in Salzburg. We then continued walking in the footsteps of Mama Manya and Papa Joe by sitting in a cafe near Mozart square, looking up towards the Salzburg fortress--something that our good family friend, born in Salzburg after the war, told us that Mama Manya, Papa Joe, and friends used to enjoy doing. We then did probably the most important thing to follow in Mama Manya's footsteps, at least, and that was shop! Mama Manya bought a lot of nice things in Salzburg, and we thought we would do the same. We ended the day with a horse-drawn carriage ride through the town and a walk through the Mirabell gardens, the filming site for the "Do-Re-Mi" scene in The Sound of Music. Overall, though our visit to Salzburg was short, it made us realize why Mama Manya and Papa Joe had such happy memories from here. It's not only a beautiful place, it's also small and quiet, and also with art and culture (Uncle N.--you can be proud to be a Salzburger!). We decided that Salzburg is definitely a "come-back" place, a place we'd enjoy visiting again and again. Who wants to plan our next trip?