Category Archives: Outdoor Activities

Stubai Glacier

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The main event today was skiing the Stubai Glacier.  This is one of nine ski resorts the City of Innsbruck offers free shuttles to for tourists.  Axamer Lizum, the resort we went to on Saturday is another.  This resort is actually on a glacier.  It peaks to 3.2 km (roughly 2 miles) above sea level.  The ski resort guarantees snow from October through June!  This seems impressive, especially since there are places in Colorado that boast peaks just as high, yet cannot boast snow for this large a part of the year.  In fact, I think most of the resorts there close by mid-April, if not earlier.

It took us a lot longer to get there from Innsbruck (about an hour), but I enjoyed the skiing here a lot more than Axamer Lizum.  First of all, Axamer Lizum is not for beginners.  Abby and I felt like the worst skiers there.  At Stubai Glacier I saw people of all ability levels.  Also, here I was able to do some trails at the intermediate level (Red).  In fact, that is what I mostly did.  So, I felt much more legit.  This was possibly related to the better snow conditions at higher altitudes.  The snow conditions did, however, deteriorate in mid-afternoon, as temperatures were well above freezing on most of the hill.  It got close to 70 in town, and I felt overheated on the ride home.

Overall, the whole experience was fun.  After skiing, we had 45 minutes to spare before the bus came to take us back to town.  We went to a bar to buy some soda, as we were thirsty.  As was the case at the other ski resort, there were people partying, having a good time, and listening to techno.  Then, they played a techno remix of Manfred Man’s hit song For You (from 1984).  It reminded me of Eric Pryd’s Call on Me, from several years back, which was a remix of the Steve Winwood song Valerie.  My trusted sources tell me that that song was quite huge in the London Club scene in the middle 2000s.

I thoroughly enjoyed this remix.  I think the Europeans do a good job of remixing old American music.  They periodically seem to do it with songs you would never think of making into a remix.  I mean, Steve Winwood, Manfred Mann.  Who thought of taking this song and turning it into a techno remix?  I mean, I could ponder a way to throw Metallica and Lady Gaga onto a Yanni track before I could ponder a remix of Steve Winwood or Manfred Mann.  But, they were good, real good, along with most of the other music I heard, both on this ski resort and the other one.

I could definitely see myself coming back here.  There really is no place in America like this.  It’s like the fictitious town in Hot Tub Time Machine.  We have ski resort towns in America, like Vail, Breckenridge, Steamboat, and Park City, but they are not nearly the size of Innsbruck, which has about 120,000 people.  Denver, Fort Collins, and Salt Lake City are bigger, but they are not nearly as close in proximity to the skiing, they are not ski towns.

Thinking of all of this European techno, specifically their producing quality remixed of American songs, naturally leads me to think of Flo-Rida.  A year and change ago (sometime in 2010), he released Sugar, which takes the tune from Eiffel 65’s 1999 hit song Blue (Ba ba di ba ba da).  Flo-Rida managed to spin this whole thing around.  Finally, an American creates a hit from a European track (Eiffel 65 is Italian), and Flo-Rida becomes a National Hero, well, at least to me.

We went out for Indian food tonight.  Abby found a place across the Inn River, meaning we got to see another part of town, kinda.  In the grand scheme of things, German food and Austrian food are similar.  So, it is probably a good idea to get something else as to not get burned out on this food before Munich.  I have no interest in trying Mexican food in Europe.  Maybe there are some places that are decent.  But, with Mexico borders the United States, and the US is currently experiencing a great migration of immigrants from Mexico.  So, I don’t see how the Mexican food here can be as good as it is in the US.  In fact, I imagine it to be a lot worse.  However, India is really nowhere near either county (USA or Austria), so it’s more worth a shot.  I did the Indian food here, but not as much as the Indian food in the U.S.  This could be due to the fact that the Indian food in the United States caters to our tastes.

As the day draws to a close, our last in Innsbruck, tow things are on my mind.

1.   What am I to expect from Munich, our next and final destination?  Tyroleans and Bavarians have to have some major cultural differences.  They fought each other repeatedly in the past, and have been declared part of two different countries fairly consistently throughout history.  What are these differences?  Will I end up experiencing them on this trip, or will I only be visiting places where these differences do not show up?

2.  Why the %&!# do I still have a lot of energy?  The story of my life.

Skiing Aximer Lizum

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Today we skied an Olympic ski run, at a resort called Axamer Lizum.  Both the 1964 and 1976 Olympics were held here.  Oddly enough, the 1976 Olympics were moved here from Denver because Colorado voted down a State bond issue referendum, making the financing of the games uncertain.

Skiing here is HARD!  The trails we did were all blue, which is the easiest here (red= medium and black= hard).  However, I was rust form having not skied much lately, and the conditions were kind of bad.  It’s almost April, what do you expect.  The snow is very wet, and got very clumpy, especially on the steeper parts of the hill.  Oh, and I had a screw up with the ski rentals.  They did not fit my boots to my bindings properly, and my right ski fell out every time I turned (left).  We had to trudge up a hill and take the ski lift down to the rental shop to get it fixed.  This wore me out, and wasted the good part of the ski day, morning, before the trails get clumpy from use.

It is hard to imagine, though, that skiing an Olympic course is 29,50 Euro, slightly less than the $45 it costs to ski Devil’s Head in Wisconsin.  They also gave us a free wiener schnitzel!  This was at a restaurant at the top of the mountain, with an amazing view of the town.  So, overall, the ski mountain was a great deal.  The rental company was not.  They did not even give us a discount for the mess up with the rentals.  But, I learned something.  This was the first time I ever saw a ski resort have multiple rental companies.  Usually, in the US, the ski resort just sells the rentals.  Here, there were multiple companies competing for our business.  In this case, we should not have gone to the first rental company we saw.  They have the least need to be good, as they can count on business from tourists that just go to the first place they see.  The others need to have a good reputation to get business, so they are a better bet.

For some reason I feel a bit closer to home here, which feels odd to me given that I am half Italian.  But, it’s just some little things.  Innsbruck has sushi, thai, and other food options that I don’t remember seeing in Italy.  The restaurants are open a bit earlier for dinner (around 6 PM), and it is less out of the ordinary to eat dinner at 7 or 7:30.  I also see pool, bowling, darts, and other activities I am used to seeing around.  I saw young people being rowdy both Friday night and Saturday night.

Tonight we stumbled upon a crazy acrobatics show outside the Golden Roof.  People were on stage in colored body suits, singing, banging on the drums, etc.  And then someone, head to toe in orange, tried to walk a tightrope across the street, from one building top to another.  I still have no idea why this show was happening, but it made the town feel a bit like the town in Hot Tub Time Machine, where people ski and party!

Also, everything is cheaper here.  We got gelato for 1,10 each.  It was never under 2 in Italy.  Beer is 2,10 and most other things are noticeably cheaper.  Most likely this is because Innsbruck is not much of a destination for people from other parts of the world.  But, sometimes I wonder if a cultural difference, or Italy’s current economic standing/ dire need for cash has anything to do with it.  Maybe this helps me explain the US a bit.  Could it be that Italians, in love with the extravagant, made New York expensive and extravagant as an image of their culture, while the Germans and Polish made Chicago and the Midwest cheaper and more practical in their image?