The German Blogs: Um...Mt. Pilatus? --Ok, Zurich.

Waking up the morning, it was one of those instincts that just TOLD you your plans were not going to work out. I didn't even really have to open my eyes to know that the world outside was a sucky foggy day.

And it was. *sigh*

We went to breakfast in the restaurant, which again, didn't even come close to our expectations. I do believe that this was the first place I encountered the 5 minute egg. Now, I like a nice soft boiled egg here and again. Usually they are 7 or 9 minute eggs. But sometimes, they do not advertise how long said egg has been cooked, as here. So I cracked my egg open to enjoy my soft-boiled good new and almost puked on the table. It was the consistency of half cooled jell. I calmly put it to one side and ate my roll. T said that had I attempted to eat it, he would have had to leave the table.

We took our showers, loaded up the car again, and looked up to where Mt. Pilatus should have been.


Hmph. No mountain. For the heck of it, we drove to the cable car base again. And looked up. And saw nothing but clouds. It was raining quite badly, in fact. I was disappointed. My father has spoke so highly of the Mountain, and the information I had found on it had me interested. But it was E80 to go to the top, and that just wasn't going to happen if we couldn't see anything.

So, sadly, we piled back into the car, and headed for Zurich.

The ride to Zurich was uneventful. But again, with the clouds, I do believe that were gypped out of a beautiful, beautiful view. I would say, by comparison that this town was the least stressful of the towns because we quickly gave up and parked and walked into the hotel.

This was another positively WONDERFUL hotel, The Alder. It was an old hotel, and they were updating while we were there. I loved how clean and neat it was and we had a wonderful room on the top floor in the corner so we could see what was going on outside in the little platz we were on. They were helpful and nice.

The ONLY problem was the bathroom door. When you walk in, the bathroom is right there, and then you walk into the rest of the room, so you can't see the door from the rest of the room. However that does not change the fact that the door was glass.

Yes. Glass.

Did you think that I would not have photographic proof of that?

Anyway, the biggest problem was not so much that the toilet was RIGHT THERE, but that when frosted glass gets fogged, it becomes not frosted. IE, you could see right in to whomever was standing there in their naked glory.

Aside from this strange door situation, the room was very nice. There was mural on the one wall and 23" LCD tv in the corner which a certain someone couldn't stop pointing to and smiling. So, I used the free internet (heh) to email a teacher some homework and quick chat with a few people, while T looked at a few maps of the city and figured out where we were headed next.

The City of Zurich was a specific request from him. His favorite author, James Joyce, is buried there and he, much like me, seems to like to visit very famous people's graves. We got on the tram not all that far from our hotel, and headed up to the fluntern.

And walked right by it. We didn't even realize that it was a cemetary. It was so... entrance to a mansion-esque. We tried asking one woman at the zoo where James Joyce was buried, but got only a "who?" out of her. Her boss seemed to know who we were talking about and pointed us back the way we came. We realized then that we had walked right by it.

Into the cemetery we went. There was, for you perusing of the dead, a map on which to find the... um, residents. Mr. Joyce was buried in the back, and it was quite a nice little plot.

I have often wondered what other people think whilst standing and looking at the grave of someone who had such influence on them as I know Joyce had on T. I know that when I stood at Shakespeare's birthplace, I cursed him for creating the English language as we know it today, and for that leading to my great weakness in life-- writing. I'll never know though, because I believe that what you think at the grave of another is between you and them. And maybe God if s/he's interested.

So, since we found the zoo while trying to locate the Late Mr. Joyce, and having not much else to do, we went in.

I told you. We have an obsession with zoos.

I was delighted to find that this particular zoo had penguins. Oh, I've seen penguins before, don't get me wrong. But always the smaller ones that actually live on the coast of Chile and Argentina. Damned if I can remember what they are called.

These were the Emperor Penguins. I had, until that very day, never seen an Emperor penguin up close. They are tall suckers. About 3 feet tall, and just beautiful. I wanted to stay and watch them for a while, but T was all into everything else there. We walked up stairs to a hot room habitat that had frogs and lizards and snakes. Then into the bird habitat, and then to the primates.

I love the little monkeys. They are the best. The ultra tiny ones like the tamarins and such. They are so cool to watch, because they are just mini monkeys.

To add to my delight in this particular enclosure, not only was I treated to those penguins, but I was also treated to a silverback gorillas. HUGE was not the word for him. He just sat there peeling a stick, or something, not at all interested in all the activity by the other silverback around him. I loved it-- I could have there all day.

I have to say that the Zurich Zoo has one of the most natural habitats I have ever seen. Standing by the red pandas, I couldn't figure out how they kept them in their area. I mean, there must have been something, but I couldn't figure it out. I was pleased with that, because I had the feeling that the animals were happy about it too. The only thing we couldn’t find were the kangaroos. That was sad to me, but considering that I had my penguins and my silverback by then, I was otherwise pleased.

We go back on to the tram. And go on the wrong tram. And didn't get off in time. So we wound up by the Bahnhofstrasse. Um. Yeah.

The Bahnhofstrasse is one of the most expensive places in Europe to shop. Yes, just as hoity toity as Paris and Milan. But lower key, and certainly no concession to the people who just want to buy something there to say they bought something there. Prada, Louis Vuitton, names you couldn't even thing of buying from. As we walked down the street, I mumbled to T, "We can't even afforded to walk here, never mind shop here."

So we walked along for a little while, me knowing that the Bahnhofstrasse would lead to the Bahnhof, which would take us to the bridge back to our hotel. Apparently, T did not know this, and decided to take a right toward the river. And we were lost on the back streets of Zurich in moments.

We did encounter a wonderful black lab that decided to eat a florist's wares whilst her owner kept walking. All of sudden the owner realized what was going on, and yelled at her, "HELEN! Come! Wretched Hund!!!" At which T and I stifled the gales of laughter that threatened to boil up.

We reached the river bank, only to find that we were nearly 100 feet above the river in a park that I had no idea how we had gotten there. We did discover that there was a foot bridge not that far away over the river. We headed that way, and wandered along the other side of the river to the Bahnhof (which to say I was miffed about going there after getting lost was a touch of an understatement.)

We picked up a water bus that took us out to the Chinese Garden, which was closed for the day. And a pile of Junk. Or Art. Or whatever. It was awful and rusted. We were getting hungry by this time, it was starting to rain and my feet were still hurting. So we found the trams and took one of those back to our closest stop on the line and headed back to the hotel.

Dinner that night was what I had been looking forward to for a while. Swiss Fondue. With real Swiss Cheese. T opted for something called Rosti-- for which he was brought a little grill and toasted his meat on the top and melted the cheese underneath and ate everything together. I opted for the fondue itself, a bourguignon based boiling pot with meat and veggies. Heavenly! I love nothing so much as a good fondue, and this was really good fondue.

We walked around for a little while after the meal (because it was a MEAL) and found that we were in the bar district. Sadly all the bars were filled with University students and we're too old do be doing that stuff at this point or they were gay bars. So after paying an exorbitant price for a soda, we headed back to room, and hit the bed for the night.

The German Blogs: The Funkiest Thing in Feldkirche

Sadly, today, we had to leave Innsbruck (aww) and move on to other places in Europe.

However, before we got our autobahn on, we decided that it was worth it to stop at the Swarovski Kristallwelten. Hmm. Have you ever seen this on the discovery channel or the like? It's built in the ground and a museum.

Of sorts.

If I thought that I had previously experienced bizarre, that paled in comparison to this. Now, the entrance was fine. They were showing off with several reproductions of famous painting and original pieces reproduced in crystal, as well having both the largest crystal and the small crystal in the world in the room. And that was the last normal thing in there.

The next room was some sort of holographic bizarre display that you had to stand through and probably would have been more fascinating had I been dead stoned. (And I don't smoke.) Then we passed into the crystal dome which had perfect, and I mean PERFECT acoustics. It would make even Ashley Simpson sound like she could sing. It was actually the most interesting of the rooms. We left and passed a room that had an all crystal tree in an alcove and into some sort of floor projected kaleidoscope.

Next was the Theater of the Bizarre, I mean the Crystal Theater. In here, were supposedly reproduction of scenes from famous operas. Or that's the interpretation I took away from it. We ran out of this room because there was this weird mind control music playing. We were led into the ice passage which pales in comparison to being in a real ice cavern* and kept moving. About this time, we realized that this was getting more and more strange as we went along...

Then came the Eno Room. As in Brian Eno, founder of Roxy Music. Now this sounded like it might, might be interesting. Wrong. It was, following the theme, bizarre. It was a completely dark room with three shapes projected on a wall and provided you uncomfortable chairs in which to ponder these shapes. Eyeah. Moving on.

... to the strangest, to my way of thinking, room of all. The Giant's Belongings. Now, this would have been ok, if they had kept everything in scale. But the scale used for each piece was different and, AND, they chose to have a Very Large Accordion in the corner that was supposedly supply the music. Run. Just run.

The next room was cool. It was called The Floating Poem and it projected a poem in down each crystal of what looked like spiral chandelier. It was an awful poem, but I liked the idea of it. Next was the Crystal Forest. I didn't get it. At all. There were tubes hanging from the ceiling projecting squares of blue on the floor... I'm shaking my head remembering it. Then there was world networking was a really neat spinning globe that might have been quite profound if I had been able to understand German.

Somewhere a lot the way we passed a huge fiber optic octopus, too. Just kind of laying in the hallway.

You are, naturally, let out into one of their stores, and you can browse for all things Swarovski. And while I liked the crystal, it was time for us to move on. Though not before we went through one of the most disappointing mazes ever. Perhaps if there had been leaves on the bushes it would have been more of challenge, but we were in and out in less than five minutes.

And then-- ON TO LUZERN!

Ok, so we're supposed to drive from Innsbruck, Austria to Luzern Switzerland via Lichtenstein and stop for lunch in said country. Well, the best way to go is to take this tunnel. I like tunnels.

I didn't like this tunnel. It was 22 Km long and full of the worst diesel smoke ever. It cost us E20 to go through it too. I would rather have tried my hand at the pass to get over the mountains than this thing, though T swears that I wouldn't have been able to handle it. Like the tunnel was fun?

A word about the Swiss: they love tunnels, and in some places I can see the reason for them. People have been living on these mountains and plains for thousands of years so why displace them for a road. But in the middle of nowhere, tunnel after tunnel. To the point where tunnels now make me cringe.

Soon after the tunnel is the exit that we have to take to get to Lichtenstein. We get off and my darling my love my husband the weirdo decides that he's going to play the Funkiest thing that Feldkirche has ever heard on the iPod.

He puts on the Bertha Butt Boogie, quickly followed by The Troglodyte. Thereby planting the Bertha Butt Boogie firmly in our heads for the rest of this trip.

FanTASTic!

So, after torturing ourselves with pinnacle of horrible 70s funk, we are now approaching the Lichtenstein border, and T is hoping for a really cool check point into the country, as it's not part of the European Union.

"Guttentag."
"Good day."
"Englisch? Ja. Where are you headed?"
"Switzerland."
"Don't forget to buy your road tax sticker. Have a nice day."
A moment later, T: "That's it? That's the world most disappointing checkpoint!"

So we pull into this little store and buy a road tax sticker (which cost E40 and she wasn't very happy about selling it to us!) and we were off again, into quaint wonderful little Lichtenstein.

Here's another Swiss quirk. They LOVE the freakin' circles. LOVE them. Circles, roundabouts, rotaries, what you want to call them. And since the Lichtenstienians are a breed of Swiss, they too have them. Now, rotaries in the US are a free for all. In Europe, they are NOT. NOT. NOT. You yield to the left, and only go after that person has decided what they are doing.

I did not know this yet, as I had only encountered once circle and there was no one there to share it with. Well, I got the European equivalent of the Jersey (New Jersey) Salute by a Lichtensteinian who didn't appreciate my lack of knowledge on how to negotiate one of these things.

We decided to hightail it out of there. And anyway, there wasn't even a donner kebab place to be seen anywhere in Vaduz.

So, may I present:
The Only Picture You Will Ever Need to See of Lichtenstein:


You may now proceed to Switzerland. Thank you.

After leaving Lichtenstein, you immediately find yourself in the Appenzel region of Switzerland. And since we were deprived of food and rest in Lichtenstien, we had to pee, something bad. We find the first rest stop, about 30 minutes later and pull in. It's actually quite a beautiful view, with a huge mountain and glacial lake below.

This is where I learned that the French language really does include the word "Pissoir". There it was, emblazoned on the men's room of the rest stop. We use the bathrooms (quickly) and decide to check out the little shop there that was nothing but a greasy spoon and one or two cheesy souvenirs.

However, across the road from us was a palatial rest stop that looked ever so inviting and clean and filled with food. We saw no way across. After a moment of staring, we sighed, got back into the car, and drove off. Not that much later we did come across another rest stop and had one of the most disappointing meals of the trip. I think I had lettuce.

So, we're on to Luzern! We were planning to get there and find a little hotel to stay in. Perhaps in town? Perhaps out by the Famous Mt. Pilatus. A bit to eat is on the agenda as well.

Here's another free tip: never go into a town without a goddamned map and some kind of destination in mind. Driving aimlessly around a medieval town that became a famous resort in the 1800s will get you nothing.but.frustrated. And Lost. We mustn't forget lost.

Somehow, in the wandering through what I'm sure was a lovely town, really!, we managed to get all the way to the other side of the lake on about 1/4 tank of gas. I found out here that my French wasn't so hot anymore, but didn't reveal with to T, and that I still had no command of German. Thankfully, holding up three fingers to indicate 'pump 3' will still allow the clerks to know what pump you were at and how much you owe.

We turn around, and head right back into town. Now it's getting late, I'm getting really aggravated, tired and hungry, and we're about to snap each other's heads off. We drive straight through the center of what I'm sure was a really lovely town, and out the other side, hunting for the Famed Mt. Pilatus.

On the way, we pass a sign for an Ibis hotel. Another chain that we are aware of. We find the cable car departure for the mountain and nod. We're happy we've found it.

We head directly back to this Ibis in the middle of nowhere, with no one in the parking lot. We walk through what looks for all the world like a porn outlet into the lobby of this hotel, and up to the desk.
"Guttentag."
"Guttentag," I respond. "We'd like a room for the night."
"Ah, I am sorry, but we are booked."

T and I look at each other. There was no one around this hotel, there was no one in the parking lot, there was no one anywhere, and they were booked? Also, please realize-- it's just about 8 o'clock, and we're getting desperate for a place to sleep that night. I was ready to cry, and T started to walk away, but a desperate idea formed.

"Do you know of any other hotels that might have rooms available?"
"Ah, yes... Pilatusblick should have a few room still."
"Thank you."

Imagine. I actually thought to ask before we left if there was another hotel we could try.

Pilatusblick, down the road, through about 1000 more traffic circles, did indeed have room and also had a restaurant. We had a plain, clean room, and plain, filling dinner and hit the bed like there was nothing else to do. Which there wasn't.

---------------
*story to come in a few blogs.

The German Blogs: Alpenzoo and Scheisser!

Our agenda here was supposed to include a trip to the top of a local mountain, but as we quickly found out, we hand landed at the seasonal shut down time where it's not warm enough to hike nor cold enough to ski. So the mountains are shut down.

Instead, we opted for the Alpenzoo. The Alpine Zoo is the highest altitude zoo in Europe. It houses all the native Alpine species, and is also working on expanding some of it's areas. PS, it's on the side of the mountain. There is a LOT of climbing involved. A LOT.

We caught our little Sightseer shuttle to the zoo and retrieved our tickets. The first environment there was a beaver, and there was no beaver. There were tons of bird displays of very cool birds. There were quails in all colors, and even an ibis display. Ibis are nasty looking birds with these wicked hooked beaks that remind me of something in a bad sci-fi film.

There were baby boars, which I had never seen before. There were the requisite wolves that don't howl or even get up much like the might be interested. I must note here, even laying down, they were bigger than the North American grey wolf. They had deer (but I've seen those before) and there was a brown bear. The brown bear was depressing to me, because he was pacing, and pacing badly. This is a bad sign in zoo animals, as it means they are discontent. I couldn't stay there very long. Just after, we found out where the beaver was hiding. Oh, and we saw a few snakes copulating. Very nice.

There were several different kinds of cats, but were most delighted at the Wildekatze cages when a kitten came out of their little box to stare at us. Mother cat was going in and she stop in the door way to sniff at something and out tumbled the kitten. It stared at us for a moment with pretty blue eyes, then got scared when it looked in the water pan. Also, the difference between a wildekatze and hauskatze isn't much-- there were a tuffs on dad's ears that were not on any house cat I had ever seen, and he was bigger than your average (or even overweight) cat, but that was it. For all the world, I could imagine him sitting on my couch when I got home.

It was a great little zoo, with a little tribute to their heritage in the middle half way up with a farm style set up. Having not been on a farm in a very long time, I had forgotten something key about them.

Pigs. Smell.

Now, you're sitting there thinking, well duh. Of course. But I must tell you that unless you have been next to a pig sty with the stench of pig shit wafting through the enclosure, I'm not sure you know what I mean by Pigs. Smell. Thankfully, I knew to get away from there as quick as I could before I had an asthma attack from the stink.

So we're done with the zoo and there's no way to get back into the town without the shuttle. Which the schedule says is next due at 13:17. T looks at his watch. It's 12:35. We have nearly an hour. So, basically we just putz around the area waiting for this bus. Had I realize that it was going to take so long, we would have eaten at the little restaurant that was in the Emperor's Hunting Lodge.

The Shuttle shows up and we decide that we are going to take that thing over to Schloss Ambras. This was built by Arch-Duke Ferdinand in 16th century. He built two halves of the castle. One was for living in, naturally, and the other was for showing off his arms and armor collection as well some oddities that he had collected over the years.

Lets address the Arms and Armor first, shall we?

There are two major US museums that I have visited several times that feature their arms and armor exhibits immediately upon entry. The Metropolitan Museum in NYC and Philadelphia Art Museum. Every time I have gone to these museums, I have been sucked into the arms and armors exhibits for more time than is necessary to study swords and steel codpieces. Far more time than anyone would need to study such things. It's a metal codpiece. It goes over their dingaling to protect them from being Bobbitized. Enough? Enough. Let's go. And yet, if we have 5 hours, 2 of it is spent staring at medieval packages.

Needless to say that when we walked into this armory hall, I groaned. Loudly. More codpieces and swords. Fantastic!. I walked through slowly to be polite, but I truly didn't want to be there. I wanted to move on. We did because I think that even T was getting tired of the stuff.

The second half of this museum was dedicated to oddities. Things that the Duke had picked up along the way. Now, for those of us in the modern world, coral really isn't that spectacular. We've all seen in and some people may even have coral jewelry. Apparently in the 1600's, this shit was the bomb. There was an entire room of it. Again, one can only take in so much coral. So we moved on quickly to the next room where there were portraits, and other oddities. I thought to myself. Great. More pictures.

BUT WAIT! What is that I spy on the wall? It's a werewolf! A werewolf! insert me jumping up and down in excitement

Why am I excited about a werewolf. Well you see, it's not just any werewolf, it's Petrus Gonsalvus, only the most famous carrier of hypertrichosis in the world. He and his daughter and son all had this disease which caused them to covered from head to toe in hair.

Meet Petrus Gonsalvus:

Cool, hunh? He's in just about every biology book's genetics chapter. Say hi.

So, then I look up. And I start doing another jig. Who's this you're asking? Why the one and only Vlad the Impaler. The original portrait. I was and still am very big into vampire and werewolf legends and this was like ice cream on hot a summer day to me.

Meet Vlad Tepes the Impaler:

This is the historical Dracula. The one that Bram Stoker used in his book. Say hi.

So, here I am doing a little jig in front of these three portraits, and the French group coming through is peering around the corner wondering "Qu'est-ca c'est? Ell'est une fou." But I didn't care. I was happy. The steel codpiece exposure was worth this.
T was fascinated by another portrait of a duke with a lance through his head. He wanted to know if they had waited until the painter was done with the portrait to pull it out. (The dude lived too, after having this lance shoved in his eye and out the back of his head. Ewy.)

We're done with the lower buildings at this point and I'm feeling little snaky. I wanted like a croissant and a soda or something, and delightfully, there was little restaurant there. But not with little prices. We skipped it and headed for the castle proper.

Which as we were about to step foot into, was inundated with loud Italian school children. Dozens of them. As T and I are not thrilled with other people being around in general, never mind unruly children, we opted to stare at the peacock in the garden for a good 10 minutes before attempting to enter the building. Upon entering the building, we discovered it was entire portrait gallery and nothing else. Well, I won't say I didn't like it because I loved reading about the women in the different portraits (and thinking, hey, I could be related to these people!), but there were three floors of portraits and my feet were yelling at me.

Oh, have I mentioned? It is best to make sure that you have walked far in your shoes previous to going to Europe. Very far. Because by the time we arrived in Innsbruck, my blister had a blister and the skin had essentially peeled off my toe. Thankfully, in Europe, getting medication is MUCH easier than most other places in the world. So I was wearing a band aid with an antiseptic cream on the toe covered by a corn cover that keep it from rubbing on anything.

And we walked through 3 levels of very nice portraits, as well as a small cellar with some very interesting religious relics in it. And then I was ready to go. I was so ready to go that when we found we had 20 minutes to the next bus, I sat on sewer plate and refused to move. Well, not refused, but didn't want to.

Our bus took us back to our starting point and we hopped off. We walked back to our room and took a little while to decide where we wanted to eat. We found the only place that half appealed to us at that point and head over to it. Only to find it locked up tight as a drum. I didn't get it. It was like 6:15 and if a restaurant in Europe closes, it's usually from 2 to 4 or 3 to 6. So we went for the only other place that I thought would be open. It was called the Hofkellar, and it was, by far, the most unimpressive meal we had all through the trip.

It was still not yet time for us to go to bed, but nearly everything was closing, and add to that some rain. We decided to sit down at outside cafe that had some good rain umbrellas up and have a drink and maybe some dessert.

Meanwhile... the rain is getting fairly heavy and the center of the square is made of cobblestone. Cobblestones get very very slippery when they are wet. Some rather obnoxious teenagers decided to take advantage of this and were running and sliding from the square toward one of the street. Can you guess what's coming? That's right-- one of them slides so hard and so fast that his feet go out from under him.

"Scheisser!"

T about fell out of his chair laughing. You see, until that very point, he didn't know that the word ‘scheizer’ was a real swear word. He thought that it was something the movies had made up to sound German, and never expected that someone would really use it. Yet here is this rowdy teenager who just made a complete ass of himself screaming it in the middle of Innsbruck.

After the scheizer incident, it started getting too rainy and too cold, so we headed over to a bar that I had wanted to check out called The Dom. It's on St.JakobStrasse, and if you're ever in Innsbruck, this is a wonderful little bar, with a fantastic atmosphere and a great drink list. T and I chatted away until almost midnight and then teetered off to bed.

The German Blogs: Onward To Innsbruck!

I am sad to say that my notes of my second favorite town are lacking badly, so I may have to just do this on the fly.

The drive from Salzburg to Innsbruck was completely uneventful. We had to go back into Germany, and we were going to attempt to take a back road through the country to get to Innsbruck. Unfortunately, from what we could tell, we whizzed right by one of the exits at about 90 miles an hour and were back on the highway we came in on. So we just followed that back to where we knew there was a road that led to Innsbruck.

Again, this was uneventful, all the way to the outskirts of the city. When we realized-- we didn't have a hotel.

Now after the pain that was driving around Salzburg looking for a place to stay, we had kind of decided that we needed to find places ahead of time. Lo and behold, a Hotel and Information Stop!

We pull in and find that the information place is closed; they have been kind enough to leave us brochures. We randomly pick one, Gasthof Weißes Rössl- a 3 star- and head for the phone.

The pay phones in Europe are annoying. They take a whole euro and don't give you change. Then I had to figure out how the hell to dial the number. Is it the 15 digits? the 12 digits? the 6? So I start longest to shortest and succeed with the shortest. And they have a room for two nights! So we book it, and almost before I am off the phone, the woman behind me shoves out of the way because apparently this was HER phone and how dare a stupid American use it. I mumbled something about blowing it out her ass as we walked away.

Innsbruck was, by far, the easiest of all the towns to navigate. We got off the highway, and right onto the road we were looking for. Save for one confusion street sign, we sailed right up to the Aldstat (Old Town) and found a place to park. Not only did we find a place to a park, we managed to find a place to park just about 100 yards from the hotel. Naturally, we didn't know that and circled the Aldstat about 3 times looking for the place when it was just where we came in. We just didn't see it right away.

This hotel was one of the old, classic guesthouses that you expect to see in the old town of an old city. The reception was on the second floor, and there was a small restaurant there. We were on the third floor (by the American way of thinking) and what a most excellent room. It had no carpet, but it was large and comfortable and had the toilet seperate from the shower, meaning in another room. A true water closet. Turns out that this place was built in 1410 as a hotel and has been one ever since. I cannot even tell you how nice this place was save that, should you ever find yourself looking for a hotel in Innsbruck, Gasthof Weißes Rössl is the place to stay. (bookable through www.venere.com plug plug plug)

Ok, Quick German lesson: "ß" - the "b" looking thing- in the German language is a double "ss" so if like me you don't have the ß on your keyboard and you can't find it to copy and paste, just use "ss". When you get to an umlat- ö - it depends on the letter it's modifying. The umlat o is said as more of "ewr", so Rössl (don't ask my why they didn't use the ß in that!) would be said more like "rewrssel" than the murdered American Rowssl. You will also see Zurich with the umlat over the u. Fortunately, we tend to say the "oo" sound for u's in English, which is the way you're are supposed to say the umlat u. Occasionally you will see Zurich written out as "Zuerich" to indicate the pronouncination. /end German Lesson.

We check into our hotel, and realizing that the aldstat in Innsbruck is not that big, we decide to walk around. We walk out into the plaza and around the same area that we had wandered around looking for our hotel. About this time I look down the Hofstrasse, and realize that I'm staring at the Imperial Palace.

Bwah?



Yes, indeed, right at the end of this steet was the Imperial Palace, known as the Hofburg (which I can never remember. I called it the Hofhaus the whole time we were there). Butted right up against the common homes.

After wandering around we found the tourist office and got The Innsbruck Card. Again, a note here. If you find yourself in a city that offers The (Blank City) Card, buy it. With this card we had free transport around the city, free entrance to most monuments, and it was good for 48 hours.

We take our cards back to the Hofburg and proceed inside to retrieve our tickets. We are the only people in the whole building, so it seems. We walk up the stairs to the first level and encounter one of the most bizarre displays I had thus far seen. It was a 3D presentation of tapestries you read that right of the triumph of Maximillian the First. Seriously. It was bizzare. We watched until we were ready to puke from the 3D.

We went into the main ball room of the palace and I think that T was finally astonished by the size of this room. It was huge. It was painted very similarly to Versailles, and I was happy to see it. We walked on through the rooms and I could tell that aside from that very amazing first room, T wasn't thrilled. Neither was I, really. I had been in Buckingham Palace and Versailles and let me tell you-- the Hofburg had nothing on them.

We did however run into the royal "thrones" which I had never seen before. They usually don't display or preserve where the Emperor took his morning piss.

About then, we had managed to take up about 3 hours wandering through the palace, so it was time for dinner. We wandering back to the hotel for dinner, which was in the very neat little restaurant on the second (american way of thinking) floor. We sat down and I looked over and there were two dogs sitting at the table next to us.

In the US, this would never happen. But there's something different around European dogs. They aren't wild, their owners walk them off the leash everywhere, and they listen to them. These two pooches just laid there, happily waiting for their masters to finish dinner. I petted them before they left, of course.

The food was, as usual, amazing. We had Cordon Blue, made with pork.

T:"Are you sure that was pork?"

Yes, that's what the menu said. Schweinfleich= pig meat. Though I did agree with his assessment of this: by far the best piece of pork I have ever had. After dinner we headed out to the center of the town for some dessert. We started noticing, right about now, that nearly everything closed at about 8 p.m. no matter what day it was. So your only choice was a bar or a restaurant or a bar restaurant.

We found a lovely little place and sat under the umbrellas in the dark (because it drizzling on and off) and had dessert. We spent about 2 hours just sitting and talking when I noticed something at the end of the street.

J:"Hey. That's a gold a roof down there."
T:"You just noticed?"
J:"Yes, I just noticed. Isn't there something about a famous gold roof?"
T:"Um, yeah. The Golden Roof."
J:"I think that's it."
T:"I think you're right."
J:Looking and pondering for a moment. "That's most unimpressive landmark I've ever seen."

We went to bed soon after.