April 7, 2017 (continued)
(Just catching up on some posts I’ve been meaning to publish. I appreciate your patience.)
When I learned that a friend was coming to visit, Grant and I listed all the things we wanted to see in town and saved them up for when she would come. That way, we’d have the excuse to be tourists and it would prevent us from seeing all the cool things first only to leave the secondary things for when my friend arrives.
If you read my post on purchasing an Innsbruck card, you will know that the card is very convenient for seeing a lot of things within a short amount of time, in our case 24 hours.
We wanted to get a sense of the Innsbruck skyline. To do this, we climbed to the top of Stadtturm (City Tower), located right in the old town section. With more than 133 steps, this provided good exercise, although I definitely felt I’ve eaten too many cups of gelato since arriving in Austria as I was slightly out of breadth before reaching the top. Something to keep in mind as summer approaches (or so I keep telling myself).
Stadtturm is a mediaeval tower that was used as a lookout to protect the city walls from invaders. For about 400 years, guards kept watch from this tower warning the townspeople of dangers such as fire, hordes of thieves, etc. It is located across the street from the Hapsburg’s Palace, no doubt alerting and protecting the royal family. It was the tallest building in Innsbruck back in the day of its usefulness.
The view from the top was worth the climb:
Next we toured the Palace of the Hapsburgs (Hofburg in German). This is a pretty nice palace, as far as palaces go, constructed around the year 1460. It even includes some of the furniture belonging to the Hapsburg family. I recommend a visit here if you are interested in learning about royalty or the history of the Hapsburgs.
Fun fact: Marie Antoinette, the wife of French King Louis XVI, and the last Queen of France prior to the French Revolution, was the 15th child of Empress Maria Theresa, the only female ruler of the Hapsburg empire.
We got lucky, just as they were closing the palace for the day, and we got shoo’ed out, an Easter market was underway in the town square. It was a small but rustic market with handcrafted cheese, olive tapenades, Easter crafts, and a power stone jewelry kiosk.
And we got to hear some traditional Tirolean music:
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I bet Grant loved seeing the architect drawings. Beautiful palace!
I sure did! Those drawings were really well done and makes me a little sad that we spend so much time on the technical stuff (that the Contractor should be able to do without a drawing) that we don’t have as much time to make great looking drawings. Competition drawings are just done differently these days, but there is a certain life and quality in drawings done by hand which computer generated images cannot reproduce.