Kitzbuhel Tuesday

Move over Ireland. This place is so….. beautiful.  In a different way, however.  While the mountains here are huge and craggy and grand and awesome (literally), they are softened, at this time of year, by the gentle greens of the slopes below,  the confidence of the summer floral displays, and the complacency of the cattle.  There is not the atmosphere of wild, barely contained energy that pervades the west of Ireland. 

After classes the ‘Damen’ in the course took the cable car up to Hammerkahn, one of the peaks, 1779 metres above sea level.  Once up there, one can choose to take one of many walking tracks, or sit in one of several restaurants and just drink in the surroundings.  Fly became a shutterbug again, with a special propensity for the cattle (being a fly, to be expected).  They are fat and happy and beautiful.  They own the place, just as in Ireland.  But here they have bells.  Not all of them.  Why some do and others don’t was not apparent. (It was not by gender, fly checked).  The bells are all differently pitched, so there is a symphony of bells in the hills are they contentedly mooch around and do cow-things.  Literally, the hills are alive with the sound of music.  There is no cacophany – perhaps the bells are tuned to harmonise??? Here in the Gasthaus, the hall is decorated with a long row of large, decorative cow-bells, won by Sebastian in his years as a farmer.  He and Hanni are very proud of them.  Also, the large leather collars worn by their horses are feature pieces in the dining and living rooms.  Lots of people wear lederhosen, men and women, though they must be hot at this time of year.  And the shops are full of dirndl outfits for women – from basic every day wear (and most of those working in the town are wearing them) to elaborate and very expensive dirndls for dress occasions, encrusted with jewels etc.  Winter gear appearing in the shops is also very Tyrolean in style. They still wear what has always proven best for this place. What passes for fashion in the rest of the world has not convinced them at all apparently. But the town is geared for tourists.  I sought a simple notebook, but was told to go to the next town, half an hour away.  Tourists did not usually need notebooks, and tourism is what Kitzbuhel is about.

At the top of the mountain, while the fly and Serena, the Italian, enjoyed a cool ‘ice wine’, chatted in pigeon Italian-English-French-German (fly has no idea what the conversation was about) and absorbed the atmosphere, the English and the Irish set off on a three hour hike. The sixty-one year old Irish woman is a ski instructor (she has accompanied the Irish team to the Winter Olympics) and the fifty-seven year old English woman still runs marathons and does cross country skiing in Finland. She runs for an hour each morning before class, and swims for an hour each evening.  Fly is such a slug!