When I got to Lienz, in the southwest of Austria, I had no real mental image of what it would look like.

Mountains, probably, sure. Maybe a wide valley. Maybe something more like a plain. Possibly denuded hills, from logging. Maybe a dump or a belching factory. But I got far better than that.

I was looking for a soccer team, not paradise. I found both.

My time here has involved a lot of writing about soccer, but this “stunning scenery” concept keeps edging into the picture.

Anytime I get into the rental car and drive 20 minutes, I find myself saying (and yes, I talk to myself, when alone in cars): “This is, like, ridiculously nice. … This is just crazy nice.”

It seems as if each time I decide that a certain part of the country absolutely could not be more visually perfect, and the weather more crisply-greenly-sunnily wondrous … and all things Austrian so completely tidy and clean and wholesome … and then I go to another little town, and it seems to beat everything I saw before.

Like, for example, Matrei-In-Osttirol, where I saw the UAE play Honduras in a soccer match tonight.

Like most of the towns in this part of the country, you find it in a wide spot between Alpine peaks, and this one is up the Isel River from Lienz. (The same river that runs next to the hotel here, the one I can hear rushing all night long, which provides apparently great rafting, between Lienz and Matrei.)

However, the hills in Matrie are greener. Down in Lienz, which is only 20 miles or so south, the Dolomites (a sub-region of the Alps) are taking over, and the those can be rocky. Very interesting, but ultimately … rocky. The big peak rearing out of the earth behind the practice field in Lienz (photo below), that’s one of the Dolomites; the trees can’t grow on those rocks.

In Matrei, the sun was going down as the game got going, and the photo (above, with UAE players in red and Hondurans in blue) does not adequately reflect the distance a person can see through crystal-clear air, nor how green the hills are off into the distance.

In the photo, the sun, which is just out of the picture, is distorting the image, or at least shortening it. As good as it might look, it’s twice as nice in real life.

When you see places like this, several thoughts rush through your head.

Could I afford to live here?

How come I never knew about this?

Do the people who live here ever get bored with this? Do they go entire years without once thinking, “I live in paradise.”

Is the winter so rough that it really is only a summer thing, and maybe only a few weeks each summer?

And could I afford to live here? (That tends to recur.)

One curious aspect of public facilities, like this marvelous little jewel of a stadium (which also sells beer) that they have built on the edge of the marvelous little town, is that they are west-facing. I imagine that is to catch every bit of light for afternoon events during the winter months.

In the summer, it can make it a little hard to look into; a hat with a brim and sunglasses help. But I understand why they built it this way. (In places like Spain and Mexico, it would be the other way around. With the stands facing east.)

Honduras beat the UAE, 2-1, which has to be a bit alarming for the Emiratis, ahead of the London Olympics, because nobody has confused Honduras with world-beaters — though they did keep the U.S. out of the tournament.

Maybe it was one of those things where the desert guys got caught looking at those mountains that are even greener than the ones they’ve been looking at … and Honduras scored twice.

It almost happened to me. I was lucky I actually saw all three goals, and didn’t get caught gawking at Eden.