G & J away from home

Friday, 17 June 2016

Our day can be summarised in tickets:

Our day

The Innsbruck Card has given us free rides on the cable cars, the hop-on hop-off bus tour, to the Golden Roof Museum, the shuttle and entry to Swarovski's Kristallwelten, and the Hofburg.  We ran out of steam before the card ran out of options.

Today's particular events were the trip out to the Swarovski Kristallwelten.  As we've run into a couple of times in Innsbruck already (and were to do so again this afternoon) signage is fairly minimal - not just in German, more like not in evidence or unclear - and so we spent a while milling around before we got the right tickets and the right map (the display ones were exercises in confusion).  So to start with we have the green giant face:

The giant

We entered the underground complex behind the pool and this was the first photo I took - accidentally having the flash on:

The crystal wall

After that the exhibition was a collection of light or crystal themed art / sculpture / whatever which were not my cup of tea, though the morning was substantially redeemed by Marianne's cup pot of excellent tea:

Real tea!

After squeezing three cups from that teabag Marianne felt refreshed enough to wander off with Gary and look around the rest of the complex while Beth and I sauntered past the Roman coin display (a highlight) and then staked our places in the shuttle bus queue.

The Roman coins were part of a hoard of 702 found when the site as being redeveloped in 2014,  They are all silver double denarii, and were minted between 201 and 294 AD.

Roman coin

Marianne and Gary visited the mirror pool under the crystal cloud (pretty when the sun was on it):

Gary in the mirror pool (Photo: Marianne)

Given that I'm such a sucker for sparkly things I did feel quite disappointed that this visit failed to meet expectations.


Back at Innsbruck we split up with all of us eventually going through the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Innsbruck.  The rooms were full of paintings and portraits and only a few of them were very appealing, but the porcelain stoves (heaters?) in the corner of each room were interesting - and have a book reference connection I intend to research.  Sadly this was another of those places where they don't allow photography and I have to say that I'm almost to the stage of not bothering with them at all as I enjoy recording through photographs the things that interest me about the places I visit.  (I'm fine with the restrictions on flash photography.)


Marianne and Beth went their separate ways, with Marianne visiting the Court Church (Hofkirche) and getting this lovely shot of the cloisters there:

Cloisters at Hofkirche (Photo: Marianne)

For our last night in Innsbruck we returned to the Italian restaurant we ate at last night and this time Beth, Marianne, and I all decided we would like to try a pizza.  When they arrived we realised we had (literally) bitten off more than we could chew!

Pizza: Larger than expected

Tomorrow we're off to Pertisau (Chalet location = Briesau), the original home of the Chalet School and the main stop in our book pilgrimage.  Exciting times!


Reading: Jo of the Chalet School by Elinor Brent-Dyer

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