It might take a good rub of the eyes to dispel any fears that the blob before you in the crepuscular light is not a T-1000 shape-shifting android. You can bet Arnold Schwarzenegger[Ah-nuld] will be back one day, but for now the only thing terminating around here is the Watch video[funicular car] in which you've just ridden. You have arrived at the top stop, and belvedere, of a new eighty-million-dollar Nordpark Innsbruck[narrow-gauge railway] whose station motifs View site[echo glacial moraines and luminescent ice formations]. The project has drawn, well,
View site[glowing tributes].

The railway track slopes at times a vertiginous forty-six degrees over a nine-hundred-foot ascent, but no matter the angle, you're sitting pretty in small cabins that pivot. Dreamed up by a
Zaha Hadid[Koolhaas acolyte], this designer transport system opened last December. The eight-minute, mile-long trek begins at a Congress Station[metro station] just outside the Old Town, then proceeds to the
Löwenhaus Station[Lion House] and the Alpenzoo Station[zoo] before depositing riders next to Hungerburg Station[gondolas] that head up the View [pistes] in the distance. Along the way, the funicular exits a tunnel to cross a curvy cable-stayed suspension bridge (whose minaret-like towers suggest that the architect was returning to her roots).

Speaking of spans, the name of the Innsbruck[provincial capital] you are in refers to an ancient bridge over a Inn[strategic river]. As you stroll the cobblestoned streets, you will no doubt gaze many times at the city's erstwhile icon, an imperial Golden Roof[town house] whose Gothic oriel has a gold-plated roof. You'll wonder if that gilt hue is what inspired a visiting nineteenth-century George Meredith, Letter 1861[English novelist] to envision "mountains holding up cups of snow to the fiery sun, who glares on them in vain." Perhaps his celestial prose in turn inspired the Victor Hess[physicist] who set up an observatory on a peak here in the 1930s to study cosmic rays (and later basked in his Nobel Prize).

Last winter a local paper reported that, due to higher-speed skiing, injuries are up twenty percent on local slopes. Not to worry: Now is the season to enjoy vigorous walks in the woods, and this month, the nation and a neighbor will co-host a Euro 2008[quadrennial athletic tournament] and welcome visitors with parties all over town. Your reception at this ice station promises to be anything but frosty.

Where are you, anyhow?