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.