I was momentarily quite angry when Mer’s alarm went off at 7:00 this morning — I could not remember why her alarm would be going off when I was so deep in sleep. I quickly remembered where I was and so that was fine, but it was an indication that my body was still not quite rested.

It was raining and was supposed to rain most of the time at least through early afternoon, but we ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, where they had an impressive spread for a buffet, including having small Milka chocolate bars. You have to love a country where chocolate bars are considered part of breakfast.

We finished getting ready and headed out into the light Innsbruck rain, looking for Freien Evangelikalen Gemeinde Innsbruck – an evangelical church that has live English translation (as well as Farsi, which is interesting). We did make one wrong turn under my skillful navigation, but while we were pondering our map, we were able to help out a German cyclist who was looking for the River Inn, and could not tell direction because of the lack of sun. Applaud the power of paper maps! At any rate, we did finally find the church, about five minutes after the start of service. I was fairly amused that the church met on the third floor of a building that housed a pool hall.

The service was excellent. They had maybe 75 people there, and we were later told that the church had attendees from 20-25 countries. The service was conducted in German for the most part, and the over-headsets English translation was used as the lingua franca for the rest of the congregation (except for the Farsi speakers, who had their own translation). Many of the songs sung had some English verses, and one was entirely in English. Of the ones that were in German, most were German translations of songs we sing back in New Baltimore, so we knew the tunes well, so we could concentrate on trying to sing the German words being projected in the front of the church. Meredith did better with that than I did, but that is okay.

We had to concentrate on the sermon, as it turns out to be difficult to hear someone speaking quiet English in your ear as someone else speaks full-volume German. Of course, having to concentrate is not a bad thing when you are trying to pay attention. The sermon text was based on the exchange in Mark 10 in which Peter points out that the disciples had left everything for Jesus. Jesus replies that any who leave mother and brothers and homes will gain a hundred mothers and brothers and homes in the life to come. So, the sermon was that even if it can be hard to give up things for Jesus (like jobs or friends), it is worth it in the end. The pastor told of his own experience of leaving a bank job right after getting married, in order to go to seminary. Some of his friends thought he was crazy, and they drifted away. He himself did not know how he was going to make ends meet, but he said that in retrospect it has been easy to see how it was worth it. It was a good mixture of scripture and personal testimony, and worth hearing.

We chatted with the pastor and then the assistant pastor and then the piano player, all of whom were very friendly and spoke good or even excellent English. We think one of the great ways to experience local culture in a foreign country is to go to church, and this was a great experience. It was also a good reminder that God does not just speak English and love America. He is a little bigger than that….

We walked the twenty minutes back to the hotel in the still-light rain. I did some quick research on some things to do that would be indoors, and I settled on the Museum of Tyrolean Regional Heritage and the connected Court Church where Emperor Maximilian’s impressive (but empty) tomb monument is located.

The museums are in the old town area, and we were getting quite good at navigating that part of Innsbruck. The museum is excellent — it is three floors of well-laid-out exhibits. The first floor featured Tyrolean hand-carved nativity scenes. There were about twenty of them in all, so it made comparison very easy. Some were just three figures (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph), while some were very elaborate, with Tyrolean landscapes and dozens of figures. Many of the nativity scenes dated back to the 1800s or earlier, but they also included several from 1950 and on. They also put the viewer in one room “inside” a nativity set by using a projected film of a standard set being assembled, and the film covered three walls. It was quite effective.

The second floor had two major exhibits. One was a series of complete “Stube” rooms, about a dozen in all. Stube rooms were wood-paneled rooms with a ceramic stove in the corner. These rooms were used for family life and social occasions, and the stove was fed from the other side of the wall from the kitchen to keep the stube clear of smoke. Seeing a dozen of the rooms in quick succession gave us a good chance to compare the simpler ones with the more elaborate ones, and we felt like we got a good look at a small part of the Tyrolean culture.

The other major exhibit on the second floor was a church calendar carved in stone tiles on the floor that went around three sides of the museum courtyard. For each church holiday, there was a folk exhibit; it could be art of a saint, or farm tools for harvest, or costumes for a parade, but each was tied to the time of year suggested by the church calendar. It was a fascinating way to lay out the exhibit.

The third floor had exhibits dedicated to the folk arts (wood carving, iron making, furniture making, etc.), as well as some folk costumes from Tyrol from the past. The major exhibit on the third floor was dedicated to the issue of life and death and folk responses to these. So, it started with birth and the charms and folk customs associated with a safe birth. It progressed throughout life and included death and the customs around that. As you came to the end of the exhibit (death) a door automatically opened and if you went through it it led to a high vantage point behind the crucifix in Court Church. That was very cool.

We left the museum itself and went over to the church. The exhibit there started with a fun introduction to Emperor Maximilian. You sat in a room full of portraits of Maximilian, and a recorded narrator told us of some facts of his life. Then a door opened up on its own and we moved to the next room, where the voice talked about the Renaissance and Austria’s place in world politics during the time of Maximilian. Another door then opened up on its own and we went into a room that talked about Maximilian’s death. The entire thing was a smaller-scale Disney-style exhibit, and we loved it.

We wandered into the church itself, where the tomb is located. It is indeed very impressive. It is massive, and surrounded by twenty or more statues of people Maximilian admired or was friends with. The entire tomb took over 100 years to build, long after Maximilian died. He has never been moved from his original burying place of Wiener Neustadt in lower Austria, so the elaborate tomb is empty. One of the statues around the tomb is of King Arthur, so I got a picture of him with Meredith; the story is that Mer’s parents were going to name her Arthur had she been a boy, without realizing his name would have been Arthur King. I am fond of that story.

Maximillan was an interesting man. When he died, on his own orders, his head was shaved, all his teeth were knocked out, his body was flogged, and then covered in lime. He wanted to show how he did not want to hang on to his body and he wanted to repent from the sins he committed in the body. At the same time, he ordered the construction of one of the most elaborate tombs I have ever seen.

After we finished with the museums around 3:00, the rain had finally stopped, so I wanted to get into the mountains, a least a little. We headed over to the Innsbruck funicular (steep mountain train), which we took up to Hungerburg at 2,800 feet. We could have paid to take a cable car up even higher, but the mountain was in clouds, so we were content to look out over Innsbruck.

Almost. I decided we should take a hike up there, and so we did, even though it was uphill for fifteen minutes. I had hoped it would lead to some great views, but the mountain forest closed in almost immediately, and so after fifteen minutes, we turned around and headed back to the funicular station. After some leisurely gazing over the town, we took it back to the terminal near the old town. Before heading into the old city for supper, we trekked across the street and around the Imperial Gardens. They were very pretty, and we got to see some older men playing life-sized chess. It was only a short walk around the gardens, but it certainly woke my appetite. We found an Italian restaurant in the old town, where we had supper.

It started to rain again lightly as we walked back to the hotel, and since we were both still a bit tired from the trip over to Austria, we called it a night even though it was only 7:00. I drew Meredith a bath and started blogging. I’m hoping to be less shocked when the alarm goes off tomorrow.