Why I love Tirol so much

Last night was one of the best nights both of our lives. Definitely in my top ten, Rachel said it is in her top five. This is why:
Last night we were invited by our Austrian friend Johannah to go on a lantern hike up the mountains in the south. It was Rachel, Me, Johannah, our friend Hannah, and a few American students not with our program, but with St. Mary's business school. There was probably about ten of us total. We took a bus to Igls (a small village on the southern mountain range of Innsbruck) and started hiking from there. The hike was a little over 30 minutes, not too bad, and it was on a paved road, so it really wasn't a hike at all. We were hiking to a restaurant called Heiligwasser (Holy Water). When we got there we sat down and had a beer and then these two old men who worked there gave us a private concert, singing us traditional Tirolean folk music, with a lot of yodeling and all that. Then they made us yodel with them. They told me that I was the best yodeler and they took Hannah and I into the back with them and told us that we were going to perform a little skit and the skit was this: they would ask us if we knew the traditional song of Innsbruck and we would say yes. Then they would sing the verses and we would mouth them and make fools of ourselves since we obviously didn't know the words, but it was all for fun. And then, when we got to the yodeling I would yodel the part of the old guy with the accordion, I don't remember his name, and Hannah would yodel the part of Arther, the man playing guitar. It was pretty fantastic. Then before going back out, we all took a shot of what they jokingly called yodeling water (some sort of schnapps). Hannah didnt really know how to yodel, or sing for that matter, and she was drunk anyway so she was literally howling like a wolf and kind of ruining the show but it was ok. After Rachel and I split some Sachertorte (a traditional dessert from Austria, its like chocolate and Apricot cake with Apricot jam in it and a hard layer of chocolate frosting on top) we were informed by Johannah, who was sitting outside this whole time, that some hunters just came up and they had a deer that they had shot with them. We all ran out to see it. The deer was in a canvas sack and it had a branch from a Christmas tree in its mouth. Hannah, who was intoxicated, started freaking out that the deer was eating when they killed it. She didn't understand, even after being told, that it was tradition to take a branch off of a tree and put part of it in the deer's mouth and the other part in the hunters hat. We took pictures with the hunters and with the deer, which was still warm, I felt it. The hunters were so friendly, as are all the people here. It was a great, trational Tirolean night, a fantastic taste of the culture.
-T