Amanda

On saturday May 25 the Life Ball (an Aids charity event) takes place in Vienna. Several stars are invited to the ball like Sharon Stone, Bill Clinton, the porn actress Jennna Jameson and transsexual Amanda Lepore from NYC. Newspapers have reports on the stars as well as pictures.

I discover a photograph of Amanda Lepore in the papers and recognize her from that Dj Hell inner sleeve i have written about in my weblog (At the MoMa). I guess I was totally wrong charging that woman 60 years old. There was something very odd about her looks what made me guess her age that wrong. She is a transsexual instead.

On a mountain

We go to the Ötscher, a mountain in the province of Lower Austria, where i wanted to go for years but never made it there. Approaching the mountain area in a bus we pass beautiful, partly wooden houses, from the beginning of the 20th century. Charging from those houses I think that the area must have been very rich in the past and maybe still is...
The Ötscher itself stands alone and is situated in an extremely beautiful area of limestone mountains and rivers. It offers a spectacular view of the Alps in the West which seem to be endless.

On the second day of our stay we go down through the Ötschergräben, a steep river valley close to the Ötscher. The hike through the valley takes several hours, it almost seems endless.

We arrive at a cottage which serves as a restaurant. It is situated right over the river valley.
From there we leave the valley and walk to the Erlauf reservoir. The Erlauf is a river in that area. Even that reservoir is beautiful.

After that we get to a train station of the Mariazeller Bahn, which is a narrow gauge railway running from the famous place of pilgrimage called Mariazell. Even the pope comes there sometimes. The train ride is superscenic but takes 2,5 hrs for 85 km. The first 1,5 hrs the trip is beautiful. The train goes down from around 900 m altitude to around 250m.