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Do you know where Santa’s workshop is? Since we were tiny tots we were told that it’s up at the frozen North Pole. No, as I discovered earlier this year, everyone was wrong. Its’ location is quite a bit further south in eastern Germany, very close to the Czech Republic. Seiffen, a village of around 3000 people is situated in a remote, sparsely settled area, in the heart of the melancholy forests of Erzgebirge (literally translated “ore mountains”). It is here where lights glow in the windows of the traditional half-timbered houses where modern day Santa’s elves work at creating their wooden masterpieces.
A nutcracker soldier, the size of a fairy tale giant stands guard at one of the entrances to the town. Metal lanterns with Christmas designs light up the streets and alleys. Everywhere you look there are larger than life displays of wooden nativity scenes, Christmas pyramids, nutcrackers, and shaved pinecones and stars, a trademark of Seiffen’s artisans.
When you mention Salzburg, Austria, it’s natural to think of the 1965 Oscar winning film “The Sound of Music” with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plumber and the Von Trapp children dancing in the Mirabellgardens to Do-re-me. And, yes, you can take a guided tour to all the sites in Salzburg and surrounding area used in making the musical. But there is so much more to see here.
On a beautiful Spring day in late May, our rented diesel Opel Vectra station wagon took us to “The Mozart City”, situated on both banks of the Salzach River, in the foothills of the Austrian Alps. We arrived here from Graz, in the southeast of Austria, traveling on the twisty, two-lane E-57 highway, crossing the breathtaking mountainous countryside. We passed farmers busy cutting hay in their fields, sheep, horses and cows grazing contentedly, and drove through numerous clean and tidy small towns.
Following the M-1 freeway in our rented Opel Vectra station wagon, the four of us breezed in to Budapest, a busy city of 2 million people. Travel brochures refer to this city as the Paris of the East.
Executing the “Latino style driving technique”, as outlined in the Budapest Visitor’s Guide “Need to Know” section, “driving in Budapest should never be tackled lightly and certainly not by the fainthearted. There is a Highway Code, though few seem to give it much regard. Armed with that information we looked for the small blue signs with a white “i”(symbol for tourist information center). We wound our way over the Danube River that divides the flat “Pest” (pronounced pesht) side from the hilly “Buda” area of the city. Buda and Pest were officially amalgamated to form Budapest in 1872.
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