Day 33 Innsbruck

A 4 1/2 hour train ride can make a world of difference. We left Sunny, short sleeved Florence and arrived at snowy, bundled up Innsbruck. The gradual approach of the Alps was fantastic. First a few isolated mountains with an occasional snow capped peak, eventually giving way to the steep sided valley of the Brenner Pass. At the end, we climbed out of the train station ringed by magnificent blue-grey behemoths with glistening, snowy tops. We are staying in a great, old pension just across the river Inn from the Old Town. Though fairly exhausted we ventured out in the evening for a bite to eat at the Christkindlmarkt. We found some special Tyrolean foods and some familiar foods which the Tyroleans cooked up with a unique style that mirrors their unique spelling and pronunciation of the German language.

A top winner for food is the Potato Spit. It is made by slicing the top and bottom off of a potato, skewering it, and placing it in a spiral slicer. The result is a continuous potato spiral on an 18 inch spit. It is then dipped in batter and deep fried. But they don't stop there. When it is fresh from the oil, it is sprinkled with your choice of flavored salts. The result is a little bite of heaven. We also sampled a version of raclette, featuring melted cheese and speck (a Tyrolean meat partway between bacon and prosciutto), aboard a hash brown looking potato pancake. The Innsbruck version of the Swabian spaetzle was also very good. The boys were surprised that the Innsbrucker bratwurst was a set of two smaller sausages, rather than the one large sausage they had received up north when they ordered the Frankfurter or the Thuringer. This Christmas market, like the one in Zurich, sported a Swarovski crystal Christmas tree (although it was a bit more modest here).

We topped off the evening in the bar on the first floor as the internet is better there. Before heading up to put the final touches on our blog, we had a family game of 8-ball in the pool room. The boys had never actually played before and we had a great time commiserating over our failures and celebrating triumphs - Barb had a particularly nice combo where she sank two balls!

It is great to be back in Innsbruck, a place where we spent such an intense year in what seems like a lifetime ago. In our early twenties we taught for a year at a ski school in the Stubai Valley. We are eager to retrace the steps of our youth - though at the time we surely considered ourselves to be old at 20 and 22. The boys are especially excited to visit one of the storied places of our early life together.