Swarovski=a not so cheap high

Sunday we visited the highly hyped Swarovski Museum. All you have to do is Google search for Innsbruck and the iconic Swarovski fountain face is likely one of the first things you will encounter. It’s one of the 11 museums that our freizeitticket ski pass gets us into an otherwise very expensive museum so we made our way 20 minutes outside of the city to see what all the fuss was about.

I was expecting something that showcased what Swarovski does, how they do it and what makes them so special. Instead, we got a mixture of things that both over delivered and under delivered.

The museum itself is located under the grassy mound of the famous fountain and is actually a modern art museum. The art exhibits employ the use of light, sound and on occasion, crystals to give the viewer a sort of “experiential” exposure to art. On the face of it, it was a bunch of really dark rooms linked with heavy black curtains and a variety of strange noises and psychedelic lights that left the viewer a bit disoriented and queasy. (Can you get motion sickness without actually moving? Experience tells me yes.) We felt like we had been tripping and someone slipped us something in our OJ at breakfast.

I’ve put together a quick video that will give you an idea of what it was like because it’s hard to describe without seeing it for yourself. The end of the tour snaked you through a Swarovski showroom that was so white, pristine and organized, it reminded me of some scene from the Matrix. Not so impressed with the museum.

The grounds were pretty although after visiting the Palaces of Vienna, London and Paris, it’s tough to compete. There was a hedged hand shaped maze that you could walk through. The gardeners were especially good as there were no holes to cheat through to get the the middle. You had to figure it out the good old fashioned way by making lots of wrong turns along the way.

Perhaps the best part of the entire visit was the playground. It wasn’t just any playground. It was a 4 story indoor climbing gym. In it’s modern construction, there were really only half a dozen activities inside but they were so brilliant that they entertained all of us.There was a giant rope spider maze that spanned all 4 floors, slippery sloped polished wooden floors that required sticky socks to get any traction, and an entire floor that was literally aircraft netting.  The favorite of everyone was the trampolines. After an hour, we had to tear the boys away so we could make the shuttle back to Innsbruck.

At one point we were admiring the view of the mountains and came across some of those viewing binoculars that you typically pay a quarter to look through. Scanning the mountainside for the huts we visited the day before, I said to Justin, “Man these are probably the best cheesy tourist binoculars I’ve ever looked through.”

Justin rolled his eyes and said, “We are at Swarovski! What did you expect?!”

Oh yeah.

#curiosities #fun #roadtrip