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.