Arnold Schwarzenegger may not live here any more, but his Austrian birthplace is presenting him like a young boy stepping out to spend a warm summer afternoon with his bodybuilder friends at a nearby lake.
Amid the recent private troubles besetting the former action star and US politician, his hometown of Thal is presenting him with a special kind of present on his 64th birthday, by opening a museum in his former home that exudes nothing but wholesomeness and idyllic charm.
Schwarzenegger will not be present but has said that he plans to visit later in the year for a second opening of what he has decided should be the world's only Schwarzenegger museum. He lived in this sturdy yellow house overlooking a quiet and lush forest valley until he was 19.
On the day before the opening, the museum's initiator Peter Urdl and helpers were putting the last touches to displays that include Schwarzenegger's hand-made weights, a motorcycle used in a Terminator film and a copy of his California governor's desk. There are also several life-sized figures that make clear just how outsized the star's body is. Urdl is not only a former mayor of Thal, but also Arnold's elementary school classmate.
"He was really a totally inconspicuous child, and we wouldn't have thought that he would have this world career," he said. But in his teenage years Schwarzenegger changed when he started spending time with bodybuilders from the nearby city of Graz who came to swim in a lake in Thal. "We were very impressed by their red swimming trunks and bronzed bodies," Urdl said.
Schwarzenegger soon started to train and to plan a career as a professional bodybuilder in the United States. In a mountain hut Urdl found the action star's iron boyhood bed that the family had later given to a hunter and has displayed it in the museum.
When Schwarzenegger visited the museum in June, he especially liked the bed and said: "That's where my dreams started," Urdl recalled. Schwarzenegger not only became a bodybuilding champion, filmstar, and governor, but also married into the influential Kennedy family by wedding Maria Shriver.
The museum shows several photos of his wife, but it does not touch on her recent filing for divorce, after her husband revealed that he had had an affair and child with their housekeeper. In addition to the divorce, Schwarzenegger has had to deal with a severe accident involving his teenage son, who was released from hospital Monday.
Urdl said he did not touch upon these topics in recent contact with his boyhood friend, as Schwarzenegger was more eager to fine-tune those displays that symbolise his childhood. Urdl built the kitchen as true to the original as he could, guided by instructions from California about the exact location of the bread drawer and other items.
The metal oven is where Arnold's mother Aurelia baked his beloved apfelstrudel, Austria's apple pastry of choice. "We will serve apfelstrudel at the opening tomorrow. And there will always be some apfelstrudel for visitors after that," Urdl said.