the sound of music... stay with me, it'll be worth it.

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ever since i was a little girl, i've loved the film 'the sound of music'. i used to watch it so often on vhs that the tape eventually stretched, and all the songs gradually became a leeeettle bit slower than they were intended to be. i knew every line, every lyric, and would quote pieces from it in everyday conversation kind of how we all do with 'mean girls' now. it was really the mean girls of the late sixties. i mean... it wasn't, but whatever.

until i was well into my teens and my love of musicals had graduated to 'grease' and 'bye bye birdie' and 'dirty dancing' (not really a musical, but dayyyuum johnny castle), i thought i knew how the sound of music ended; maria and captain von trapp got married, and everyone lived happily ever after. right? that's exactly how you solve a problem like maria - you marry her off to a naval captain. right? right? wrong! 

after i'd read 'the diary of anne frank' in high school and learned a little about a place in time we fondly refer to as 'world war two', it became wildly apparent that there was something awry in my video collection. one night, while flatting in new zealand with some random people, my favourite childhood film came on. wanting to revel in some nostalgia, and having not seen the film in probably an eternity, we decided to watch it. we sat and watched, quoted it line for line, sang 'i am sixteen' at the tops of our voices while flinging each other around the lounge room and loved every goddamn minute of it. ahh, everybody loves a sixties austrian wedding, right? what's not to love. 

tra la la, i get up to change the channel and am stopped by my flatmates asking politely what in the eff i think i'm doing, the best bit is coming up. the... best bit? i'm sorry what, did you not just see the frou frou lace perfection that was maria von trapp's wedding gown? hellooooo? and then, my attention is caught by the film that continues to play on. there's a (spoiler alert) honeymoon glow. there's uncle max trying to pimp the kids out into some dodgy 'austria's got talent' freak show. there's a shit ton of swastikas around the place. then, in the night, there's a dramatic 'can't get the car started in the dark' problem. which actually leads to a 'performing edelweiss' in front of a room full of nazis' problem. then - if you can imagine - a hiding from said nazis in a fricken cemetery problem! and then, if all that wasn't controversial enough, there was a climb every mountain fricken problem. like for serious! they climbed the flippen alps! kurt was in shorts!

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wowzers. this film just got wildly topical and about an hour longer than i ever remembered it! immediately after it finished there was a phone call made to my dear sleeping mother who sheepishly admitted to 'shielding me' from the truth as a child by switching the film off after the wedding, to make me think that maria got her happy ending after all. uhhhhm. censorship and propaganda never had a place in the home, mother dear! did the war teach you nothing!

with the revelation apparent that my whole childhood was a lie, i started to question everything, and, with the invention of the internet, i started to google everything too. was salzburg even a real place? yes. was liesl really sixteen going on seventeen? yes. are brown paper packages tied up with string, really one of maria's favourite things? inconclusive. what i did learn via the medium of the internet is this; there's a sound of music tour that departs daily from the centre of salzburg that takes you to all of the token backdrops as seen in the film. from the abbey to the cemetery, to the fountain in the city, to the glass gazebo, and to the mountains to flail...

why am i telling you all this? well, because if you remember my 30 before thirty list of earlier this year, you'll kindly remember that number one on that list - on the bucket list of my twenties, is to flail on a mountain top in salzburg singing "the hills are alive" at the top of my lungs. and guess who's going to be doing just that in just over two weeks? me. i fucking am. excuse the language, but i am too excited to censor my sound of music memories the way my mother did all those (aaaaall those) years ago. i'm going to austria, bitches.

bex and i have been in talks to do this trip for the last four years...what better time that the present eh? 

i am sixteen going on thirty, and travelling is one of my favourite things.

what are some of the sneaky lies your parents have fed you to save face?