The Sound of Music

After our out-of-this-world morning at Swarovski, we headed up the road to Salzburg through more beautiful Austrian Alps. We arrived just before dark, so we didn't have too much time for exploration after we settled in, but made a plan for the next three days so we could squeeze all the many activities in.

Part of the plan was buying the 24 hour Salzburg tourist card, which helped make the next day one of the best of the trip. We coffeed up the next morning and set out on our adventure. Our first stop was Mozart's house/museum - a shockingly large apartment right in the middle of the city (free admission with the card). We learned a lot about him and his family and their world travels. We then walked over the bridge to try the famous local sausage at Balkan Grill, and check out the other Mozart museum/his birthplace (also free with the card). There we got a sense of his later life, and got to read a collection of letters he wrote his family. 

Almost Mozarted out, we hopped a bus (free with card...) out to the Steigl brewery for a tour and a tasting (free with card...). The tour was self-guided, expansive, and incredibly informative. Michael was in heaven, and I was amazed. We finished off with a nice chat with a German man and 3 good size beer samples each. Then came Hellbrunn Palace - a journey to reach, but well worth it. We arrived just in time to catch the next tour of the gardens and the trick fountain show (free with card... are you seeing a pattern?) and did not know what a treat we were in for. Hellbrunn was built in 1613 by Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, for the sole purpose of partying. As we learned, he was apparently out of his mind, and quite the bully. What we didn't realize was that "trick" fountains meant the mean kind of trick, not the pretty fancy kind of trick. We spent the next half hour in awe of the hydrotechnics (I'm making that a word if it isn't one already), and getting the full splashy treatment. It can't be described, just don't miss it when you visit. 

Exhausted after our long day, we turned in for the night and got up early the next day to be sure we could use the last few hours of our card to head up to Festung Hohensalzburg, the huge and famous fortress sitting atop a hill overlooking all of the city and beyond. The view was incredible and the history equally so. We spent a good long time wandering the grounds after our audio tour, and then descended to spent the rest of the day just enjoying the city, complete with gelato, a show from a gold-painted jazz band, and a picnic in the gardens of Mirabell Palace (musical accompaniment provided by a chorus of schoolchildren). That night was our last, and we spent it prepping for the uncertain drive to Prague, and so we said goodbye to Salzburg and Austria. The most beautiful city in the most beautiful country I'd ever seen. 

Worked Up So Sexual

Departing from chilly, misty Innsbruck, we took a daytrip to one of the area's more curious attractions. Roughly twenty minutes outside of Innsbruck in Wattens, Austria, is the founding home, factory and headquarters of Swarovski Crystal and their "amusement" park (if you will). It was here that we were given our first in a series of lessons about Austrian strangeness.

The beauty of the lands surrounding the head of the great giant, like the crystals inside the mound he protects, cannot be overstated. Inside were many rooms featuring a collection of art pieces commissioned by various artists, using crystal in new and inventive ways. The first room of the exhibit featured crystallized copies of famous art pieces, original sculptures, the world's largest and smallest cut crystal, and a living, breathing chandelier that moved above the room like a crystal jellyfish. It wasn't until the second room, and the unsettling 'Mechanical Theater' by Jim Whiting, that things took a quick turn toward the bizarre.

Portions of body parts -- lower halves and upper halves -- "perform" different movements as crystallized shirts go whirring by on a snaking, overhead track. Tables spin and shadows dance, an iRobot looking stripper performs a catwalk to bad, 80's synthesizer music (think, Kraftwork) that's meant to be seductive, and a male mannequin body -- an Adonis -- is raised above the room and then dissected into many sections, revealing the black crystal inside his skin. As odd as I could try to make it sound, even with a thousand pages, I could never fully capture it. It was like an 80's robot, Red Light District, snuff show.

Another room of strange note were the crystal recreations of landmark structures, each with a video of people in white on a black screen on the ground floor of each statue. Two dancing girls and a creepy jack-in-the-box in the base of the Taj Mahal, a half-naked blonde girl screaming mercilessly at the sudden appearance of a man in a monkey mask within the Empire State Building, an angry, Freudian figure berating you from the bottom of Swarovski's own headquarters, and man eating another man's heart, while the latter shakes violently in the depths of the Giza Pyramid.

I could go on and on, and on and on and on, as there were about fifteen rooms within the place; each one providing a new capture of surrealism to mock the eyes and torment the soul. The whole adventure was like some acid trip gone horribly, horribly wrong and we both walked out of there with the same flabbergasted look of 'what the ****?' that was plastered to us from 'Mechanical Theater' onward. It was awesome, in a way I never knew awesome existed, but we had more pressing matters to attend to. Chiefly, the quaintest little city either of us have ever seen, and a continued journey into strange Austrian humor and the obsessive iconization of one man, worthy as he is for it.

Come In Please

Into the North we set, having ultimately decided that the nearer we were to Salzburg, the more sensible the destination. This brought us to Innsbruck, Austria -- we were happy it had.

The drive between Lucca and Innsbruck was magical. We hit the river winding into the Southern Alps and watched as the villages slowly transformed from stone, Romanesque houses into wooden, Bavarian chalets. Most notable was the castle, carved out of the rock face of some jutting mountain high above an Alpine valley. We're still searching our heads for how anyone accessed it. It seemed untouchable.

Into Innsbruck we rode, to a little B&B Ali's mother found us while in transit. She did very well. At the end of a stone street, situated perfectly between the stone culdesac and the river Sill, there we found our little pensión. Our well-kept room overlooked the tiny river, and beyond were the sweeping faces of the Alps! The loveliest view we have had all trip.

We spent the next three nights in Innsbruck and happily took in Austrian culture. We learned so much while there, including that Innsbruck was the home of the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman Empire's most notable and lengthy ruling dynasty; has twice hosted the winter Olympics; that Austrians are about as hospitable and polite a people as can exist, and that they quite literally eat dessert three times a day! Breakfast, dessert, Lunch, dessert, Dinner, dessert. Apfelstrudel, topfenstrudel, sachetorte, ice cream, sugar, SUGAR, SUGAR!

The cable car going up the mountain broke down on the day of our arrival and was yet repaired on the day we left, so we spent much of our time in the old town, tracking through the city's colorful, alpine streets and moseying along the Sill's larger brother -- the Inn River.

On the second night there, our luck with weather changed in an awing way. Two thunderstorms collided over the sleepy, mountain town and lit up the sky with startling strikes of lightning and deafening thunder that echoed through the low valley like some great giant's snare rolling eternally. crack, CLAP, BOOM! went the sky and we hung around long enough on the old bridge to capture it all on video until the first drops of rain hit our bare skin. Then we sprinted through the downpour, soaked and smiling as we slipped into some warmer clothes and had a few beers, watching the storm roll over the mountains just outside.

From that point on a low fog and light rain held over Innsbruck, but it didn't matter. The simple being there was enough for me, and I have crowned Innsbruck as the single most beautiful location of our entire journey. While other cities proved more gorgeous, nowhere we have encountered can top the sheer awesomeness of the Alpine peaks from the floor of that Tyrollean valley.