Easter Friends

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Cheri and I have employed an advanced form of mathematics to calculate the best possible usage of our holiday time. We both get 20 days from our jobs, and an extra 8 on top of that for public holidays. Combined with judicious usage of long weekends, and you can turn 1 day of holiday from work into 10 actual elapsed days. Some creative accounting goes into it.

For Easter, Cheri and I decided to spend time in two cities: Munich and Innsbruck. Munich being one of the cities that we had enjoyed the most, the last time that we were here and Innsbruck being the home town of one of my friends (a mad scientist who deals closely with turning Star Trek into reality). It might seem unfair to call him a mad scientist, however he is a scientist and I've seen pictures of him wearing Lederhosen. You do the math.

The danger with returning to the scene of the crime, is that you might not like what you find when you've had a chance to reflect. Thankfully Munich was just as good the second time as it was the first. Cheri and I (no Amber this time) have already done just about everything you could want to do in Munich. Consequently the list of activities that we wanted to do was quite short:
1. Buy some Birkenstocks
The rest of the time would be taken up with re-aquainting ourselves with the beer gardens and beer halls which are dotted all over Munich.

Surprisingly, our list was fairly hard to accomplish and exposed the fatal flaw in our mathematics. You see, when you travel on a holiday, especially a religious holiday, there is a very good chance that this will also be a holiday in the country that you are visiting. There is also a very good chance that if it is a religious holiday, all of the shops will be closed. This was the case with Munich. We found plenty of shops that would sell us Birkenstocks, if only they were open.

Foiled, we had to revert to Plan B. We went for a walk in the English garden with the aim of ending up in the Chinese garden beer garden. The Chinese garden has seating for over 7000. Probably 3/4 were there on the same day as us. The Chinese garden is self service. You walk through a turnstyle into a food stall area. At the bar area, there are two guys who pick up empty steins, fill them and then throw them along the bar. Customer's (like us) walk up the bar and intercept the stein's and then walk off. You can also pick up some food if you want, finally heading back out of the food area via a cash point where you pay. You also get a token for you stein.

The idea of the token is simple. When you've finished your beer, you can return the glass for a refund on your purchase price. By giving the guy your token as well, he knows that you must have gotten the glass from him (and not picked it up elsewhere). He then pays out the refund. Which turns out to be one euro. One stinkin Euro! You can't buy these glasses for less than seven euro. So incensed was I at this rip off, that I vowed the next time we got a beer from the Chinese gardens, I would walk off with it. We had already bought Cheri a nice clay Stein from the Hofbrau House, so this would take our haul of steins from this trip up to 3 (1 paid for). However, I figured that even if we couldn't afford the room and I had to just leave one or both of the "souvenired" steins behind, I would rather do that than give them up for a measly one euro. It makes sense if you're annoyed enough.

Meanwhile, a day or two passed and the shops opened. We bought our Birkenstocks which meant our list was complete. With nothing else to do, we tried out German cuisine, especially with respect to sausages. There are a few things that Germany does very, very well:
• Beer
• Bread (especially Bretzels)
• Sausages
Naturally, we had to try them in a variety of differnt settings. Eventually this lead us back to the Chinese gardens. Having bought our meal and beer, we were seated at a table with a nice German family. Germans drink more beer per capita than any other country in the world. Munich drinks more beer per capita than any city in Germany. In the Hofbrau house over 10,000 litres of beer are drunk EVERY DAY. Not too shabby when you consider that it has seating for only (only - hah!) 1,000. Which means that every seat averages 10 steins of beer. Lets say that the same seat is occupied for lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and evening by 4 different people, they still need to be drinking 2.5 steins each - just to bring it to average.

Getting back to the Chinese garden though, you look around and see groups of grannies (with steins), groups of grandfathers (several steins each) and family groups (fathers and mothers with steins, children with steins of coke). It isn't hard to see how Munich gets it's title.

We finished lunch (but not the beer) and I wanted to walk off (nonchalantly, while drinking stein). Cheri wanted to find some grass to sit on. We headed off. Trying not to look sneaky, we passed beyond the borders of the Chinese garden and into the fields of the English garden, found a nice bit of grass and sat down - we had got away with it, them infact. Two glass steins stamped with the emblem of the Hofbrau House. Trying not to look out of place, we finished our beer and stowed the glasses inside my backpack. Upon leaving the English garden, I looked around and noticed a group of Germans with full glasses from the Chinese gardens also taking it easy on the grass. Well that explains why no-one challenged us - frankly we were just doing the same as the Germans do. Still this did leave us with 3 steins to lug about for the rest of our trip. But lets face it, that's the "stein half empty" way of looking at it.

When we arrived at Innsbruck station, my friend Andy (mad scientist) was waiting for us. A short walk and bus ride later we were ensconced in his living room, which was to be our hotel for the next few nights. Wanting to make the most of our time, we headed out for a guided tour, courtesy of Andy's Innsbruck Tours.

First stop, lunch. We were going to go somewhere authentic and Austrian. However we couldn't as there was an authentic Austrian Easter Market outside the golden roof which was attracting a sizable crowd with it's authentic Austrian Easter Market Food... Yes, we stopped for food. This also gave us the perfect opportunity to pause and look at the Golden Roof. Royalty being in the habit of appearing on the verranda to talk to the crowd, naturally, the backdrop had to look... regal. Apparantly not satisfied with the backdrop to his house (an impressive mountain range) an Austrian king decided to tile the roof of his balcony with Gold. Well, copper. Tourists have been taking photos ever since. We ate sausie and gawped. Possibly I said "crikey". Possibly, I didn't.

Innsbruck, situated upon the river Inn, lies in a valley between two mountain ranges near the Brenner pass. It's hard to take this kind of thing at ground level, but much better from a ski jump (today) or a rather high mountain (tomorrow). Innsbruck has hosted the winter olympics twice. Both times, they used a rather impressive ski jump located at the edge of town, right above the cemetary. Bad planning or good? What is apparant though, when you're standing at the top of the ski jump, it looks just like you're about to launch yourself into town, or possibly your final resting place.

Dinner that night was at a quaint ol' Austrian place. I had the meat special. It had meat. Austrians are almost as big on their meat as Germans are. Cheri took the vegetarian option and had schnitzel.

Day two saw us hiking to the top of Seegrube (mountain overlooking Innsbruck - which actually doesn't clarify that much, there's heaps of them - mountains overlooking Innsbruck that is). Hike is actually a strong word considering that we took a cable car. We watched people hike though. Crazy. Not for the faint of heart the cable car quickly ascends to more than 6,000 ft above the city. I could convert that to metric, but it doesn’t look as cool, well ok then, 1,800 m or 1.8 km. The sky tower seems quite shallow by comparison. When you’re that high, usually you can count on the prices being similarly elevated, however the restaurant at Seegrube was quite reasonable. We each got a meal, and the best view that money didn’t have to buy.

Seegrube is very steeply inclined, and when we were there, had not much snow. This didn’t stop the brave from strapping on tiny skis and giving it a good go. To their credit we didn’t see anyone fall over. Then again, at that angle there’s not much difference to skiing and falling. Perhaps we just weren’t discerning enough to spot the difference. Either way, the cable car was definately the slow way down - till you get to the gravel, then it becomes the transport medium of choice. Well, when it comes to choosing between a cable car and skiing on gravel, I know what I'd choose.

That afternoon we had another stroll around Innsbruck and a mop up exercise of visiting the places that we still needed to check off our list. We actually didn't have much of a list when we came to Innsbruck, so this wasn't too hard. The list consisted of the Hofburg (the imperial palace) and the Hofkirche (the imperial church). Hof means imperial.

Germans love David Hasselhoff, however that's nothing compared to the Austrian who presumably some time in the future will develop time-travel, go into the past and name royalty after him. Kind of a "we did Hoff-Mail first" claim to fame.

The Hofburg's major draw is the Giant's room. A large room with floor to ceiling full body portraits of Maria Theresa's children. Included is the ill-fated Mary Antoinette of "let them eat cake" fame.

The Hofkirche has a collection of statues of the Habsburg family. As is the custom with bronze statues, various parts get rubbed for good luck. Over time, the statue becomes black with the exception of the rubbed area which retains the original colouring. One of the statues must have been used as ancient Viagra because he was quite well rubbed in a particular area.

All too soon it was time to take a train to a plane to a tube to our home. It takes no time to write, but much longer to actually do, according to the time, it only took a few hours - but then again there was a time difference.

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