Mozart's Doorstep, a Glass Hangar, and a Late Train to Budapest

The last morning in Salzburg started the way the other two had: awake, into the shared bathroom before the queue built up, breakfast at the hostel eaten faster than it deserved, backpack handed back to a locker so I could spend one more day moving through the city with nothing on my shoulders.

Mirabell Palace sits a short walk from the station, its gardens laid out in the kind of symmetry that only makes sense from above, though it reads fine enough from the ground too. Everything was bare and a little frostbitten in late November, the rosebeds down to their stems, the fountains not running, but the view still worked: straight down the central path, across the river, up to the fortress sitting over the old town exactly the way it does on every postcard sold within five blocks of where I was standing. Off to one side, a small stone crowd of dwarves stood around a garden of their own, worn smooth in places by however many hands had touched them before mine, a seventeenth century archbishop's idea of a joke that had outlived every joke told about him since. The "Do-Re-Mi" sequence from The Sound of Music was filmed on a set of stone steps in this same garden, and I stood on them anyway, the way everyone who visits apparently does, whether they meant to or not.

From there to Getreidegasse, which I had technically already walked past twice without knowing its name. The street is narrow enough that you notice the signage before anything else, wrought iron hanging out over the cobblestones for every shop, a guild tradition older than any of the businesses currently using it, so that even the fast food places had commissioned something ornate to hang above their door. Number nine is a plain yellow building with nothing about its facade insisting on its own importance, which is a strange thing to say about the house where Mozart was born in 1756. I went in, walked the rooms slower than I usually walk a museum, and came back out onto a street that had not changed at all in the time I was inside it.

A hangar full of something else entirely

Everything up to that point had been a version of Salzburg I expected: old stone, church spires, a composer's ghost in every gift shop window. Hangar-7 is not that. It sits out by the airport, a curved glass shell that looks like it landed rather than got built, one man's private collection of vintage aircraft and Formula 1 cars grown large enough to need its own building shaped like an aircraft hangar because, eventually, it was one. A butter yellow taxicab with a black and white checkerboard stripe, styled like something pulled straight off a 1970s New York street, sat parked a few feet from a black and red Formula 1 car roped off under the glass, two objects that had no business sharing a room doing exactly that anyway. Sunlight came through the curved glass roof at an angle that lit up chrome and old propellers at the same time, and a workshop next door kept the older planes flying rather than just sitting there for people to photograph. I walked it slowly too, mostly because I could not immediately reconcile it with the palace gardens I had been standing in two hours earlier.