Innsbruck, Austria

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

We now know that Bavaria is the southern part of Germany, something like a province. All the glasses here have lines on them that tell you how much the glass holds. Our lemonade came back filled exactly to the line.

We had a leisurely breakfast at the hotel, and slowly headed toward the train station. Grabbed some things to take along for lunch, including the yummy Movenpick. Handy too because it has a built-in spoon. At the train station, we had to validate our Eurail passes. We were in a bookshop looking around, when the police came to evacuate everyone from the area. Apparently there was a bomb scare (don't tell Frankie's mother). Cool! All our travels and this was our first bomb scare! It seemed to only be in a small shopping area; just past that area were the train platforms with hundreds of people, and they were not evacuating that part. We got through just in time, or we would have had to validate our tickets and then walk all the way around the station to a different entrance.

We had seat reservations on the first class car, but there was lots of confusion because they switched cars and none of the seats matched the reservations. Someone was in our seat, but we found 2 seats together so we were fine. Very full for first class.

It was a 2 hour train ride from Munich to Innsbruck. It went by very quickly because we ate our lunch and the mountains started. The scenery reminds us very much of Switzerland. But so far our trip has been much more affordable! There was no border crossing that we could tell, so we didn't know exactly when we entered Austria.

We sweet-talked a bus driver into letting us on his bus with the Railpass, and he told us exactly where to get off and where our hotel was. Our room was down a labyrinth of corridors, but nice and quiet.

We headed first thing to the Hungerburg Funicular. A funicular is a train attached to a cable that pulls it up a very steep incline. This one had 5 cars. Each car is pivoted so that even when you are climbing 45 degrees, the car stays flat. We were among the last to board, so we got on the last car, but this was the turnaround point, so we discovered to our delight that we were now in the front car.



The funicular took us up a few stops, then you had to get off to catch a large cable car to get to the higher stop. We went as high as you could go today which was Seegrube, which is 6250 ft high. The views over Innsbruck were fabulous. We took a 25 minute panoramic trail to get to the top of a peak for even better views. It was sweet to hear the cowbells again. Even the goats were wearing bells.


When we had our fill of the view, we went down the cable car and down the funicular, back to Innsbruck. We walked along the river, then cut into the old town and found Dom St Jakob, a church built in 1717. It had beautiful ceiling paintings.

Then we walked through the old town a bit. Innsbruck is an 800 year old town, with narrow alleys and high houses. It has also hosted the Olympic Winter Games twice. We found an outdoor restaurant and ordered rosti, a potato dish with bacon and cheese. Yummy, even if the bacon was more like a slab of ham. We were entertained by the oom-pa-pa of a family wearing Bavarian outfits and playing local music. They seemed to have a limited repertoire, either that or it was one long song, because it became very familiar.

Well, hitting the tourist information building somehow resulted in us having tickets to see the evening show called Tyrolean Evening, put on by the Gundolf family. Tyrolean refers to this region of the eastern Alps in western Austria and northern Italy. We were picked up by one of the cast members for the show. It was an hour and a half folk show including singing (yodeling), folk dancing, and music. They used very unusual things for instruments: a saw, a whole song done with cowbells, music created with mining instruments, and music created by chopping wood (with wood chips flying everywhere).

The whole show was fun and upbeat. At the end, they did a musical tribute to every single country that was there (we counted almost 20). For Canada, they sang "This Land is Your Land" and "Alouette". The only country they didn't know a song for was Bolivia, so the group from Bolivia had to sing their own song.