What’s cooking in Salzburg

Robin in the snow in Salzburg
Robin in the snow in Salzburg

There’s only one thing missing from our apartment in Salzburg.

We arrived in Salzburg this morning after a two-hour train trip from Munich. The people we had rented our Salzburg accommodation through had contacted us on the weekend to say our apartment had a plumbing problem so we could not have it, but they had another one available. We immediately thought suspicious thoughts and approached the new apartment prepared for the bait-and-switch worst.  So it we were very pleasantly surprised to find that the apartment is lovely, much better in every way than our Munich apartment. After checking it out (including a laugh over the picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and McMahons Point adorning a bedroom wall) we set out to explore Salzburg. As will become apparent, less laughing and more checking might have been an idea.

Salzburg turns out to be remarkably walkable. There is a compact centre of town which is riddled with pedestrian zones. So we strolled up to the base of the towering cliffs upon which the Fort sits. A funicular ride added another notch to our growing tally of transport types and saved us from having to walk up the slippery slopes. There’s unfortunately not all that much to see in the fort itself, but piles of snow and several slippery slopes kept the kids completely amused and the view is spectacular.

We eventually returned to ground level and spent the rest of the afternoon at the Haus der Natur: a lovely science museum which is covered in more detail over on our other blog. Then we walked back through the beautifully lit town to our flat via a stop at the supermarket.

Now one of the great things about staying in apartments is that we can cook our own food. Given how fussy the boys are about food, this was always going to be important as generally it allows us to force some vegetables into them. It’s also generally cheaper than eating out all the time and so an essential part of our budgetting process.

The downside of course is that we have to cook (well more precisely in our household division of labour I have to cook and Jennifer has to wash up). This being the essential difference between long-term travel and a holiday – chores. Cooking in a variety of apartments, with a variety of pots and utensils and limited ingredients is mostly fun although it would have its limitations if you were more of a particular cook than I am.

Anyway, so we stopped off at the local Spar supermarket to stock up on some gorceries. The supermarket turned out to be by far the worst we’d come across in our travels so far with a selection of about three things, none of which seemed to mix and match into a meal. To the boys’ delight we fell back on frozen pizzas, with the dire warning that we’d eat them in front of the TV watching something educational (and how’s that for an approach to road-schooling – cover your eyes any teachers reading this).

We get home to find that the one essential thing we’d over-looked in exploring the apartment that morning was to find the oven. So now we’re living in a bad joke that begins ‘what do you do with two frozen pizzas and no oven?’.

Luckily, we had also bought cornflakes and milk…

PS This flat has a flat screen TV.

7 thoughts on “What’s cooking in Salzburg

    1. I can’t remember exactly when I was faced with that issue… but that is what we did (no butter/oil required… more than enough in the pizza, and if you have a lid for the fry pan, so much the better)

  1. There is an association with that work of English history “No Bed For Bacon” in which one of Shakespeare’s clowns puts on a sublimely inspired face and announces that his inspiration comes from a custard pie. I think there is an episode of the Goodies where most of the gags are associated with people looking out from a face load of custard.

    You have obviously discovered what the Goons would see as a hard nosed Germanic variation on an English sight gag.

  2. If it’s any consolation, I once signed a lease and moved into a place before discovering the lack of oven. It had never occurred to me to specifically check for the presence of an oven!

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