Last day in Innsbruck

To follow the last post, Tuesday afternoon after we had our adventure in Hungerburg we went to the Tyrolean folk art museum in Innsbruck. I wasn't sure what to expect but it was an impressive museum! We had a cool reading guide machine thingy which we pointed at the barcode tag in front of each exhibit and the laser scanned it and pulled up information. It was a pretty neat way to see the museum and to learn a lot about the cultural history of the area. I honestly didn't know that much about Tyrolean culture so I was grateful we had the chance to learn about it a bit.
We also visited the church that is right beside the museum and we were lucky enough to visit it right in the middle of an organ concert. Every church,every single church, that we've seen in Europe has a fancy organ. Churches differ in their fanciness and ornateness, but the organ is always impressive. So we admired the decorations and listened to the organ music. Not a bad way to see a church.

We wrapped that night up with dinner at the Ottoburg, one of the oldest buildings in the city, which has now been turned into a local cuisine restaurant. It was originally built sometime around the 1300s. It's a beautiful building and our cute little table was next to a window that looked out to the mountains. We ate our Austrian-style ravioli (with spinach and multiple types of delicious cheese) and Wiener schnitzel, which was a little too heavily fried but not bad otherwise.
Gotta try the local specialties ;)


Our last day in Innsbruck was a little chilly but we got up early to walk around Hofgarten, a gorgeous garden in the middle of the city. It basically means the garden for royalty. The Hofburg, right beside the garden, is the royal palace. And the hofkirke was the royal church that we had visited the day before. We walked through it as the sun came up and as business people in suits passed by on their morning commute. We also were passed by a group of school children on what appeared to be their morning laps around the garden. Almost all of the were jogging, even though they were in normal school clothes.  They were working up a sweat and...get this...they even seemed to be enjoying it. Think we could talk American children, and their teachers, in to spending a half an hour running a mile around a city garden before school?

We spent the rest of the day visiting the Swarovski crystal shop/exhibition area (because we decided not to go to the gigantic crystal museum, which I'm a little sad about, but it was too far away to really be worth it), climbing up the Stadturn, a tower that gave us a great view of the city, and visiting other churches. Our other big adventure of that day was renting bikes and exploring the city on wheels. On our way to get the bikes, it started to rain so we went to this museum I had noticed earlier. It was called Audioversum and it was developed and run by a prominent cochlear-implant company (that we, as silly Americans, had never heard of). It was awesome! We got to play sound localizing and 'guess that sound' games. We had a super cool guide who took us through the entire museum and we were the only people in there. We got to watch 3d videos of how sound is transducer which was super fun because we are both huge nerds. I had learned recently n my med neuro class about sound transduction and the cochlea, auditory cranial nerve and other brain areas responsible for sensing sound so it was fun to see how they had put that into interactive exhibits.

We finally got our bikes and it turned out to be a pretty nice day for riding. We rode up to the bergiesel, the famous ski jump of Innsbruck. I have some incredible pictures from the top of that, as it is a fairly high point in the city. In front of the ski jump is the city of Innsbruck and behind it is rugged terrain and mountains. If Innsbruck ever gets to be the site for the Winter Olympics again, I'll be able to say that I've been there :)

We rode to 3 more churches and then spent 10 minutes at a modern art museum right before it closed. Michael is a fan of churches and I'm a huge fan of modern art. So it was a win-win.

That pretty much sums it up for Innsbruck. The pictures will speak to how beautiful the area is. Ill be sure to post some