Innsbruck, Austria

Our only stop in Austria was in Innsbruck.  After a good night's sleep, we hit the town in the morning for some sight seeing.

 We had a local guide who showed us around the city.  Innsbruck is mostly a tourist and university city, and it has also hosted the winter Olympics twice--the old Olympic village is now student housing!

 We started off at the top of the hill at the ski jump.  Apparently the only thing the jumpers can see is a larger cemetery as they jump.  That's reassuring!  There were also two Olympic arches on the hill, one for each year they hosted.  Innsbruck will be hosting the 2012 Winter Olympics in January--must be quite the winter wonderland to host so many prestigious sporting events!

 We then headed to a beautiful basilica with ornate decorations.  Very beautiful.  I thought the yellow was also a nice contrast against the morning's blue sky.

 We then headed to another church (sorry, can't remember the names of these places) where there were these huge bronze statues.  Many were European royalty and they were larger than life and apparently extremely heavy.

 After our formal tour, we had free time to explore the city.  The weather was gorgeous and so was the city. I loved how the city was settled in a valley and surrounded by mountains.  If you look closely at the building at the center of the picture below, you can see the house with the golden roof.  If only the cloud would have blown away so we could see the mountains.

 Then there was shopping.  There was a large Swarovski store in Innsbruck (and, actually, many after this stop as well), and although Rick said I could get something shiny I didn't see anything I could live without.  The picture above is some sort of chandelier that reached the ground in the store.  Pretty impressive.  We wandered into a Christmas store that wasn't as impressive as the one in Rothenburg, but they were pretty excited about their egg ornaments which was pretty neat.  They had eggs for every holiday and tons of them!  There were several rooms of stacked eggs.

 Starting in Innsbruck, we followed the Inn River to its source for a few days.  Though the scenery along the way was beautiful, I couldn't get over the color of the river.  Apparently it's a very fast-moving river and the color is partially from the turbulence of the fast water, but also partially the minerals in the water.  It just seems out of place in the beauty around it.

The Inn River took us to Switzerland next.  We spent the most time in Switzerland and it was so beautiful--more to come soon!