December in CA!!

In December me and Ani visited California over Christmas. Boy is the winter weather great in Calif! From the dreary gray of wintery Vienna, we came into the sun again! The sun blazed, the sky was blue. It is so nice to feel the sun warm your skin. This may be a little thing, but when you miss it, it's unbelievable how good it feels.

We visited Mom/Grandma, dearest Tessa, and old friends. We kept busy, went ice skating in SF, visited the beach in SF, in halfmoon bay, Pacifica, took a hike through the redwood forest in the Oakland hills. Nature is good! We painted plates in Berkeley. Tessa made a super portrait of a ice bear, I did a plate with an alpine scene, and Ani painted xxx. We played mini-golf in a super cool course in Alameda, where the holes were places around the Bay: lombard street, the golden gate bridge, the High street bridge, and even more mundane sites like the oakland harbor. We ate Japanese food, high chic mexican food, and good old italian. We also spent quite a bit of time in bookstores, and brought a stack of 'em home.

I didn't take so many pictures, because I wanted to focus more on being there and taking in that feeling. Here are a few photographic memories.

Gym Pictures!

My friend Werner collects here and there videos and pictures from our weekly gym sessions. Every 1/4 year of so he gives me 4Gb worth of videos. Mostly they are useful for looking at my form, so there are a lot of pictures/videos of the same trick done over and over again. I haven't posted anything though for a very long time, so here are some highlights from 2012! The videos include Werner's skeptical coaching voice, often in a funny Viennese accent :)

The belt halves your weight!

Some simple stuff, apparently still not correct enough for my coach!

A real handstand on the real rings!

Backflips!!

Normal Giants.

Backward Giants.

It isn't always easy!

Simple half twist.

P-bars. Handstands.

Last Day Before the Winter (on the Rax)

On top of the Rax

The last week of September we drove an hour outside of Wien to the Rax. In Wien everything was foggy and chilly. When we got to the Rax the sun was shining! On top of the mountain the weather was perfect, a slow warm breeze, under a perfect a blue sky.

Given everyone in Austria is talking about Austia's latest greatest international hero, Baumgartner who base jumped from space, we decided to recreate the stunning feat with Monstro, Pascal's latest favorite stuffed animal. Monstro didn't break the sound barrier, but he tumbled through the air like crazy and he landed (unhurt) with NO parachute!

Landing

Take OFF!!!

Next time Monstro will base jumped from here

Meeting Erin Hunter

Anika's self-made book cover

This year I started reading a series called Warrior Cats. I am already done with the third season (one season has 6 books) and am reading the second book of fourth season. I'm really proud that I'm so far. I was talking with one of my friends and he brought up that Erin Hunter, the author of Warrior Cats, was coming to Vienna!!! I knew that I would want to go there right away. So finally the day of the reading came and I went there with my mom. And what do you know the place was crammed with chairs and all the seats were reserved. But we went on the side and I was sitting on the ground right next to the platform!!! Good thing we came early. After what felt like 1 hour everyone was there and the whole room packed with kids from 8-16 years old and a few parents. I was sitting next to 2 teenagers on the floor. I saw that one of them was reading the books in English.  I wanted to know how far she was. But because I am always shy at first it took me 10 minutes to even ask her. She spoke German and was born in Vienna but she read the books in English. It looked like the second one liked America: Scarf and shoes with the American flag!!! Then at last Erin Hunter came. I was really excited and because I was never in a reading I wondered what she would start with. Of course everyone was there because they wanted to listen to the first chapter in german (boring). I had already read it in English. So I was sitting there rotting and sweating in the room cause there was so many people. After they were done with that it was time for questions. Already way more interesting. After 30 minutes she gave out autographs. I think I was the only one that really talked with her!!! It was pretty cool to do that. It sounds like Erin Hunter comes every year so let's see if it will be the same next year!!!

Here are some of the questions Erin Hunter answered:

Question 1: Why did you start writing Warrior Cats?

Answer: Harper Collins is my publisher and I had already wrote horse novels. They asked me to write a book about cats. I don't really like cats and I am allergic to them so I wrote about some things that interested me like war, death, politics and religion. So I wrote the book and gave it to Harper Collins but they said the dense content was not one book but enough for six.

Question 2: Which is your favorite cat?

Answer: I really like Cinderpelt she is so energetic and wise. She is the only dead cat that I feel sorry for.

Question 3: What will happen in the 5th season?

Answer: In the 5th season it will be about the clans (a group of cats) before there was Bluestar and Firestar and all the other cats. So basically about when the Clans were first made and what happened.

Of course these are not all the questions but I don't remember all of them. I didn't tell you that Erin Hunter is actually a team of 5 women and that Vicky Holmes (her real name) is the boss. She basically makes a balloon (the story frame, scenes etc.) and the other 4 writers blow the balloon up for her with details.

-Written by Anika

Into the Green

The fresh mountain air and green all around makes people happy. See proof below:

Hiking and Carving

So Tirol is mountains, and mountains want to be climbed, or hiked at least. We did actually a lot of hiking (every other day was the deal we made with the kids). Ani and Pascal, although they wined at the start of every hike, did well and after a while they got into the swing of things. Or longest hike was almost 5 hours, and the hikes were always up the mountain.

On thing I found relaxing to do during the hike was to carve a walking stick. No elaborate carving here, just what they call whittling. I would carve off all the bark down to the fresh wood. It smelled nice the newly uncovered wood. After a while I would try and "fix" gashes in the stick, and the most ambitious I got was to carve the top of the stick all round so as to fit the hand better. Sounds dumb and boring, but I kind of liked it. Anika carved a stick of her own too (although not while hiking). Pascal got in a couple of whittles, but as he's only seven he still needs a little more supervision so as not to get hurt.

The other thing about hiking I noticed was why do people climb mountains. Out our hotel window we had a nice view of a mountain peak. In bed I could watch the clouds disappear and the mountain peak appear, or the clouds slowly wrap around the peak like pulling a blanket around your chin as you settle in to sleep. Watching this was fascinating, and these mountain peaks take on a certain life and personality. So if you lived here the thought of wanting, no needing, to climb to the top of these mountains would be as natural as wanting to swim in a lake on a hot day. It just seemed so obvious to me that I wanted to climb the mountain, that it seems unexplainable to think one would not. Any ways all this to explain why (Sir Hillary who climbed Mt. Everest?) who said the reason why we climb mountains is because they are there. What seems like a curious thought is really the most obvious thought that anyone would have. Cool.

Ani whittling.

Pascal with his stick.

Ani with her stick.

Papa with his stick.

At the beginning (thanks to a Seilbahn).

A mini glacier! Really slippery!

The mini glacier.

Everyone had his/her own backpack and proper hiking shoes.

Beautiful.

Ani carving, Mama resting.

Pascal at a high mountain lake.

The Highest Mountain (depending where you stand)

So we took the Seilbahn up to the top of Zugspitze (the highest mountain in Germany). There are two Seilbahns to the top, one starts in Germany, the other in Austria. Go figure.... do you really need two Seilbahn maybe 20 minutes away from each other? It's like a mini space race between Germany and Austria.

Check out those ski trails on the green mountain below. Nice......

Above the clouds! At the bottom right you can see part of the last Seilbahn tower.

A chilly 7 celcius at the top,  a warm 28 Celcius at the bottom.

The Zugspitze is high (2900m), and in the summer does look like the moon. Nothing but rock at the top, not a single plant. Not a living thing except tons of tourists and these little black birds soaring about picking crumbs from "the highest Biergarten in Germany".

A blackbird waiting for crumbs from those who always need to eat in really high places.

Biergarten at a very high altitude.

It's cold up here!

There's the deadly Gipfelkreuz behind Ani.

It was bracing standing there on top of all that rock, above the clouds, in the cold high altitude air. Unfortunately there were so many tourists it was comical. And you couldn't actually walk around the mountain (without risking a deady fall) but had to stay in the building where the Seilbahn unloads its passengers. There are numerous viewing platforms, and slowly one could make your way from one to the other. It was so crowded in the passages, I thought I was on an U-bahn.

O.k. so you spent 40 euros to go to the "top of Germany" so you have to really go to the top, all the way, to the Gipfelkreuz. The Kreuz is just 30 meters away from the viewing platforms, but it's on some seriously steep rock, with deadly drops left and right. To get there you should have climbing gear, i.e. harness, etc. so you could rope yourself to the steel guide cable. The problem is you and another million Germans want to do this, climb the puny section of deadly steep rock so you too can say you have touched the "top of Germany". Sorry I just don't get this! It's like climbing to the top of mount Everest and finding a film crew and models making an automobile commercial. It just ruins the whole adventure of climbing to the highest point if everyone else is already there. And in addition I would not risk my life on such a section of deadly rock with such a crowd of people pushing and shoving their way up and down the rock. 

But don't get me wrong, it is splendidly beautiful up there above the clouds teatering on the rocky knife edge of this ridiculously gigantic piece of rock.

Tirol/Zugspitze Witz!

We just got back from a 2 week Urlaub in Tirol, and here is the first Witz: Warum gehen die Osterreicher und Bayern auf die Zugspitze (2962m)? Um hoch, Deutsch zu reden! Ha, ha, ha.

Panorama with Zugspitze rechts.

Paris ist Schön

S. had a conference in Paris, and I got to go with. Paris is - I know you've heard this before - a beautiful city. But it is, really! We were staying in a much too expensive hotel next to the Tuilerie gardens. We were on one end of the gardens and the Louvre on the other. Along one side of the garden they had a amusement park set up. It was fun to sit in the Tuileries and watch the "hammer of doom" whip people 30 meters into the air, then down again. The ferries wheel was also a great place to get a view of Paris, from Monte Marte to the Arch de Triumph.

We walked all over Paris! Once to the eiffel tower, the other time all the way down the Seine to Notre Dame. There were beautiful gardens all along the way:

The French sure do know how to take in the simple pleasures of life: food, clothes, gardens, loving (more on that later). An example of the French attitude might be seen in these chairs which were strewn all through the Tuilerie gardens:

Perfect for just lying back and enjoying the sun. They even had these chairs at the airport near the gate (actually there they were more a perverse joke on waiting forever!).

As you can see in the tree above, Paris is the city of love. And public displays of affection (PDA) are quite the norm. In the Tuilerie gardens some couples acted as if no one else was around. It's kind of sweet really to see the importance the French place on L'Amour, the world could certainly use more of it.