Autumn is on its way!

Herr, es ist Zeit, begins the Rilke poem. Well, I'm not quite sure it is officially autumn time for a while yet, but you can certainly feel that it is going to come creeping up soon enough! Perhaps because I spent the whole of August hiding from the heat of Austria in (actually pretty sunny) London and Glasgow, August for those who remained behind was wet and cool. If by cool you mean not over 28 degrees most of the time, of course. All that wetness seems to have given the mushroom life of the mountains a great kickstart though! On my most recent hike the fungi were already in full 'bloom'...

It was a misty day as we started off on the 18 km hike I had invented after an evening's pleasant route planning the week before. This was a huge photographic blessing, as the webs which carpeted the undergrowth everywhere were festooned with water droplets, lending everything an exciting silvery sheen and allowing for some great close ups. As we headed further up more and more of the low bushes were blueberries, and the higher we went the more heavily laden their stubby branches. We stopped frequently to rake the berries off the plants in handfuls, turning our tongues blue and our hands a garish purple from all the juice. Now and again we supplemented our blueberry diet with some raspberries which were also found hanging around in the less wooded spots.

Later into the hike the sun burned though the clouds and it ended up being a wonderful day, although the views down the valley were almost completely obscured in haze. The order of the day really was colour, to the intenese purple of blueberry juice and the mild pinkish-red of the raspberries should be added the deep green of the blueberry leaves, the fiery orange of the stags-horn-like fungi and the spotted red and white of quite a few fly agaric.

I wasn't really in shape after a month of sitting around, but a great hike nonetheless. Sometimes things just seem to work out and a whole bunch of cool photos appear by chance all at once. Check them out here!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Vienna is beautiful

It's not that you forget that the city is beautiful. You don't stop noticing it so much as you forget that not everywhere else looks like it. The picture that springs to mind when you think 'street' becomes something very different from what it used to be. The same with 'park', and many other things. The best thing to counteract this sort of effect is of course travel. You can go somewhere else, then come back and see your city anew. Or you can fly in people from elsewhere, and vicariously enjoy their reactions to things that have become familiar.

Sometimes, nobody even has to travel in real life at all. Seeing your city in a film is a little bit of both, looking at it through new eyes and watching the reactions of others, all wrapped up together. Recently, having known of it for a very long time, I finally got around to watching the film Before Sunrise, probably already on its way to getting called a 'classic'. A great film for many reasons that I won't go into here. One of the things it succeeded at, and the thing that drew me to the film in the first place, is its treatment of its setting, the city of Vienna. It really succeeds in showing off the best of many parts of the city, and it has helped jog me out of my complacency almost as well as a visit from a real person might.

So here are a very few photos from around Vienna in the last few months, to celebrate the fact that once the film had finished, the whole city of Vienna was still waiting for me outside the door!

Bis bald,

der Tom