A brief interlude in Austria

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Well, I'm officially one entire country behind on the blogging. So instead of starting from the beginning of Italy, I've decided to skip over it and write a couple of more current entries before going back and filling things in. So for now there will a be a significant hole, a "time hole" if you will. But the hostel in Berlin has free internet, so maybe it'll get filled in a bit. But I'll be trying to write them as if I actually wrote them on that day, so that's why verb tenses might be... wrong here and there.

Amy's time in Europe has come to a close and Amy and Neil have headed back to Paris so can catch her flight. So at 11pm last night I decided to book a place to sleep for tonight. Not that leaving it until the last minute was going to be a problem, since my only requirement is that it be somewhere between the Cinque Terre in Italy and Berlin, where I will be meeting back up with Neil on the evening of the 7th.

I thought I'd try to go to Liechtenstein, but there were no beds available at the hostel. So I pulled out a map. Feldkirch, Austria was right near the border. Oh, and they had beds for 12.50 euro a night! That's cheap. Very very very cheap. And it said that it had all the amenities that an ordinary more expensive hostel would have, the pictures looked good, and the reviews were very good. So how could I say no? I couldn't.

Step 2: Getting there.

Last night the hostel clerk showed me a website that will change the way I search train times forever. www.bahn.de is the German railway site, and if you tell it where you are in Europe and where you want to go in Europe, it will bombard you with options, show you all the times and connections, tell you whether or not a reservation is necessary, what type of train your on, and even sometimes which platform at the station the train will be at. Magic. The best route he could find for me involved taking 4 trains, and 11 hours. Fine. That's really the price I pay for trying to take trains out of Italy.

Everything was going fine until Bologna.

I was supposed to catch a train at 11:22 to Innsbruck, Austria. I arrived in Bologna at 10:15, so no problem yet. I checked the board for the train, and there was no train going to Innsbruck. Well, still not really a problem since the boards in train stations always list the last stop, which won't necessarily be the one you want to get off at. So I checked the train schedule that's posted in the station to see what the final stop was supposed to be for the 11:22 train. It was Munich, which was funny, because the electronic board said "Monaco". What?

Slight problem for James. This is the only train leaving at 11:22, and the Italian train station is telling me that it's heading straight west instead of straight north. Ok, still calm. There are rarely, if any, occasions when two trains leave at the same time, so it's probably the right one, but just a typo.

Check the schedule: Still says Munich
Check the board: Still says Monaco

I ask a Trenitalia guy in the waiting room, showing him my reservation which says Innsbruck, and ask him, "Is this for that train?" point at the board which still says Monaco. His reply, "Si, si! Uh Monaco!". Me, "Umm, thanks."

Is Monaco Italian for Munich? Are there hundreds of excessively wealthy Italians that holiday in the wrong place? Screw it. I'm getting on the train. It really has to be right, and the worst thing that happens is that I end up back in the French Riviera. That's really not a bad thing at all.

So I embark on my mystery journey, heading for the train. Ah! There are paper signs in the doors that list the major stops, and Innsbruck is one of them! Good news!

... and there's a paper sign that says "Monaco" in large, bolded, underlined, arial font....

...whatever.

So I guess that's the Italian train system in a nutshell. Oh, and the (Italian) train was 20 minutes late getting to Innsbruck, so I missed my next connection.

So I had an hour and a half to kill in Innsbruck before the next train. Innsbruck is kind of like the Austrian equivalent of Banff, if Banff had 100,000 people and actually functioned as a city independent of tourism. So I guess it's not like Banff. Never mind.

It is beautiful though. And it would have been even better if the rain clouds weren't obstructing a good chunk of the mountain scenery. But it was still beautiful.

So I went to see a few of the sights (from the outside) that were listed in my guidebook. Not bad. Cool town. Then dinner became a priority, so I found a grocery store. This is the incredible part: I got a baguette style bun, sliced cheese, sliced meat, and a beer for 4.74 euro! And the beer was only 0.47 euro! And it wasn't even the cheapest beer! And the bread was so dense (but still fluffy, fresh, and delicious) and the cheese and meat was so thick (about 1cm combined) that a barely finished the sandwich. Why am I telling you abut my sandwich? I don't really know. But it was a good, cheap sandwich. And beer. Beer good too.

And the hostel in Feldkirch actually was 12.50 a night, it actually was really cool, and the staff actually were really friendly and helpful. Something tells me I'll be back here some day.

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Photos

Innsbruck
I had an hour and a half here, and I walked as much as I could.

Too cloudy for mountains
Unfortunate. I'm sure the backdrop to this city is something else.