Highest point in the Wienerwald: Schoepfl Hike

Here's a short account of my (hopefully temporary) farewell hike in the Wienerwald, source of so many blog entries and pleasant hikes over the lifetime of this blog! It had been years since I last climbed to the highest peak in the Wienerwald, the Schoepfl. It isn't too hard to reach with public transport but you do need to go rather early and on a Saturday via bus. Saturday is often ignored for hiking due to the fact that it's the only day off where the shops are open!

Nonetheless I managed to collect together a couple of companions and we set off on a perfect hiking day, warm and intermittently sunny but with plenty of clouds, breezes and fresh dew on the ground to ensure we weren't going to overheat. The hike heads pretty much immediately upward, past some very rural scenery. There are lots of farms in this area and something about it reminds me of Buckinghamshire, perhaps just that there is a lot of grass compared to other parts of the Wienerwald.

The Schoepfl itself however is steep and wooded, projecting up several hundred meters above the surrounding hills. As part of a large single ridge (of hard sandstone, geo-fans!) it really seems to catch the wind very well and it got a lot cooler and windier on the way up. For a few magical seconds we were in a thin misty cloud and the sun and shadows created a crazy barred effect just like on Stuhleck that one time. But this was a lot more short lived and reaching the top of the stepp part we were greeted by a sunny overgrown meadow. We trekked up to the lookout tower for great views and really fierce winds, then dropped down to the shelter of the (closed for the holidays) gasthaus garden for lunch, accompanied by the loud baa-ing of a sheep herd who apparently had learned to beg for attention as if they were dogs...

The weather held as we completed the rest of the walk, crossing broad fields, teeming meadows, and shady woods, everywhere summer in obvious full swing. Towards the end we were greeted with the spectacle of a faraway rain shower, colouring the sky dark and moody. Dry ourselves, we dallied briefly picking raspberries before heading to the true and much longed-for destination of our hike: the village ice cream parlour! Nothing like tea and a massive ice cream bowl to round off a summer hike :-)

Foe-toes can be accessed by clicking on the green link!!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Quick rainy trip up the Schneealpe in July

It has been a relatively cool summer in Austria, something for which I am of course extremely thankful. It has actually rained a fair amount, and in combination with my own obsession for swing dancing and general social demands, I really haven't managed to do much hiking this year. Still, after it became clear (spoiler alert!) that I would be moving to Duesseldorf in August (where I am writing this), I did want to go check out some Alps before I moved. Luck would have it that one friend was in possession of that most rare of commodities, a car. Even more luck would have it that he really wanted to go hiking! I chose the Schneealpe as our destination, a beautiful limestone plateau right next to the Rax but considerably more difficult to access via public transport.

We picked the day for the hike many weeks in advance so we weren't able to be picky about the weather... The forecast was for rain early on, clearing up throughout the day. We shrugged our shoulders and decided to make the best of it. The ascent starts in a well-sheltered valley and zigzags sharply up the steep side of the plateau. For most of the way we were sheltered from the wind and comparatively warm even though we were getting drenched by the constant rain. As we climbed higher the dramatic rise of the Rax was visible in the distance, completely capped by streaming white clouds.

Just a little bit higher and the protection of the mountainside started to become less. The addition of the wind made everything a lot colder and we fled towards a nearby limestone outcrop. Esconcing ourselves in a deep and narrow crack in the rock we had an early lunch, hoping that the rain might pass. Indeed it did, though the wind remained, and we headed up to the plateau. All thoughts of travelling to the 1800m peak were gone, but we did enjoy the view from a small rise on the rim of the massif. The entire forest below us began steaming with woodsmoke as water evaporated after the rain, sending cloud columns rising into the air to be caught by the fierce wind across the plateau and curled into dramtic fingers.

After half an hour of buffeting by the winds, and seeing fog-like clouds closing on us fast, we decided to head down the quick way, back the way we had come. A very shortened hike but one with some incredible cloud forms over the nearby peaks and from the woodsmoke, and truly exhilarating with all the high winds. As usual, please click on the link to see a small collection of pictures from our small adventure!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

A Long Weekend in Brno

My parents have now visited Vienna quite a lot of times, and I have obviously lived here for over 5 years (non-consecutively). While none of us has exhausted the huge amount of things to do in Vienna, the last couple of years we have spent a long weekend checking out a nearby city, making the most of the rich choice of other destinations in the area and making sure nobody gets over-Vienna'd. This year's destination choice was Brno, a place I had been through many times on the train and repeatedly heard was a good tourist destination, but a place I knew nothing about.

In case you, too, do not know anything about Brno, I will provide a few helpful hints. Brno is the second most populated city of the Czech Republic with a population of over 400,000 people. This makes it a tiny bit bigger than Austria's second city Graz, but while Graz is 2 and a half hours away by train (stupid mountains), it takes only a breezy 1 hour and 27 minute train journey almost due North of 
Vienna to reach Brno. Actually, I was really surprised by Brno's size. The train line doesn't run through the dead centre of the city and so I had never really grasped its size... Now I know why it has such a thriving swing dance scene!

The old town was where we spent more or less our entire time, and it is packed with enough things to see that we could pick and choose what we wanted and still not go to everything that might have tickled our collective fancies. The architecture is somewhat similar to Vienna's but with slightly less architectural monoculture than the first district of the austrian capital. There were a lot of ridiculously over the top decorated buildings, usually with very different motifs and architectural styles crammed right up against each other, and we had a lot of fun collecting all the different species of animal that adorned the various facades. Of special mention are four men holding up the frontage of a large building on the main square, obviously a famous tourist sight. In contrast to many of their kind, they appear extremely unimpressed with their lot, exhibiting a wide variety of annoyed expressions...

In our 3 day stay we managed to check out 3 or 4 art galleries, I climbed to the top of two different towers, we got lost for hours in the huge castle complex and (in)famous casemate dungeons, stopped by Gregor Mendel's actual monastery where he did the pea experiments, and had a semi personalised guided tour through a former nuclear shelter in the centre of town... Not to mention that we sampled the various beers and meaty, tasty dishes that the Czech republic has to offer. We also managed to stumble upon a small performance of swing and jazz music by musicians of the Brno philharmonic and a celebration of the end of world war two featuring cossack dancing and long speeches in Czech.

All in all an excellent holiday in a cool destination I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone sitting around in Vienna and wondering what to do this weekend. Or anyone sitting around anywhere else, for that matter! Hopefully you will check out my favourite 10 photos I took on my trip at the magic green hyperlink!

Bis bald,

Der Tom.

Brief stop in Dresden

And so we come to Dresden. My stay here came at the end of at least three weeks of travelling, failed experiments and post Lindy-hop exhaustion, so I wasn't exactly feeling all that adventurous. Furthermore, this was also a business trip, as I was attending a conference for both of the two full days I spent in the city. I spent the first evening I arrived and the evening of the first day of the conference eating in my hotel's restaurant and polishing my presentation for the final day.

Presentation given and conference completed, I walked back to my hotel for a brief lie down before I took advantage of the lengthening spring days and the gorgeous sunny weather to get in some late afternoon/ early evening touristic rambling in. Having asked my colleagues in Potsdam what to do, I also had a final (brewery-based) goal, all that is required of course to turn a simple stroll into a quest!

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history will understand why a British person might feel particularly awkward in the city. This has nothing to do with the behaviour of the current inhabitants, and probably lies squarely in the head of said visitor, but, there it is, nonetheless. I will say that the past in Dresden is something that is very much remembered and in evidence, be it through the photos in my hotel detailing the area before its destruction in the war, or through various other plaques and memeorials throughout the city, or through the imposing and beautiful bulk of the reconstructed monumental buildings along the banks of the Elbe. This feeling that the events of 70 years ago are still held very much in mind may stem from their magnitude but also perhaps the fact that as late as 1993, the majestic Frauenkirche lay simply (and symbolically) as ruins in the centre of the city.

My stroll took me through the centre of town as the sun was approaching the horizon, painting the incredible monuments in warm yellows and later oranges and purples. The Frauenkirche is huge, its bulk and impact impossible to capture easily in a photograph. Nearby lie several other impressive buildings and the broad sweep of the Elbe as it curves through the city. The green meadows across the river sloping gently down to the water looked incredibly enticing in the slanting evening light, and I was drawn across the river and to its shore, where I spent an enjoyable half hour skimming stones and taking pictures of the many locals enjoying the atmosphere.

Just as the sun dipped below the horizon I made it to the brewery (or brewery-owned restaurant) recommended to me by my colleagues, Watzke's. I was not at all disappointed and enjoyed an excellent meal with brilliant beer, a very satisfying end to my month abroad in Germany.

Check the green link to see my full gallery of Dresden photos!

bis bald,

der Tom

Easter in Berlin

In between wandering around Germany for research purposes I dodged off to Berlin to spend the holiest holiday of the catholic calendar hanging out in Berlin and dancing the Lindy Hop. I booked a hostel room in the middle of the super-gentrified (but thus chock full of cake-filled cafes) area in the vicinity of Schoenhauser Allee, hoping that it would be relatively near a number of parties. Berlin has a very big Lindy Hop scene and on a holiday weekend it wasn't hard to find multiple dances with live bands going on every night, so I just chose the nearest ones!

The whole trip went by in a bit of a blur. It came after an intense week of messing up experiments and helping to write a book chapter and it took a while for my head to calm down, especially seeing as I knew that afterwards I would have to climb back on the science wagon and head off to Dresden for a conference. The dream-like feeling was not helped by the somewhat shifted time one ends up living in when dancing till 2 or 3 am every night...

After my first afternoon checking out the neighbourhood restaurants (had delicious Vietnamese food) and exploring the local parks in the drizzle, I set off half an hour on the tram for my first taste of Berlin Lindy hop night life, getting home predictably late and getting up predictably later. I had earmarked a couple of bookshops the day before and descended on one of them to provide fuel for all the hanging around I planned to do over the rest of the weekend. After going to another laundrette (my second ever, and within a week of the first...) and sitting around some more with my purchases, I resolved towards sunset to use the sudden burst of spring sunshine to take some cool pictures of the places I had only spied in the rain a day earlier.

All the pictures in this post stem from that one 2 hour stroll around town, which was extremely pleasant and spring-y and ended with a magical sunset over the Mauerpark, silently shared with the masses of young Berliners sitting on top of the hill and soaking in the first good days of the year. Honestly, I never really liked Berlin so much the last few times I visited it, but I think now that is because I only ever saw it in winter, where the grey and rain and early darkness hide its airy green spaces and make its broad avenues seem closed in and unfriendly. In the spring the whole place seems so much friendlier, full of light and children and parks, and the broad boulevards become places to sit along and soak up the sun rather than ice-slicked deathtraps.

That evening I attended an even better Lindy Hop dance than the evening before, with better sound and a bit more space to move around. The next day I was even more exhausted than before and after breakfasting on cake I headed off to a tea dance with the idea of packing things in early and getting a bit more sleep that night. The tea dance had a decidedly 50s and 60s bent and I enjoyed it but was utterly puzzled by the fact that although jive and boogie look ust like things I can already do in Lindy Hop, it was still really difficult to dance with partners who only knew those dances... A mystery to be solved in the future, no doubt.

The rest of my weekend was filled with more lazing about, more reading, more eating, and a tiny bit of work to get myself ready for the coming conference. Hope you enjoy my photos of my sunny stroll in Berlin, once again in their new home on flickr.

Happy Spring/Summer and bis bald,

der Tom

Ljubljana Sweet Swing Festival 2016

Most of my March was taken up with a long and rather complicated series of travels around Europe, mostly due to 'business' but partly also for pleasure. Some of the places I went I even got time to wander around with a camera... Today's blog will show off my hasty photos of the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana, in which I had the privelige to spend 5 days.

I say hasty photos becuase I didn't really do much traditional tourism at all during my trip, as I was actually there for a Swing Dance festival, the 10th Ljubljana Sweet Swing Festival (to be exact). This was my first ever international swing dance festival, and I really had very little idea of what to expect. Oh, of course I had the schedule, but I wasn't quite sure what it would actually be like.

The swing dance festival experience was a weird one, because I ended up feeling like I was living in some completely parallel world. Several things contributed to this. One is the jetlag-like effect of going dancing at 10pm, getting home and showering at 3am and getting up again as late as you can (usually not as late as you want as there are classes to be attended!). The other is the way that I basically spent the whole time not dancing preparing for going dancing again. My thought processes reduced to: 'must rest before dancing to dance better, then get food to fuel dancing, then go dancing'. Or: 'hmm, what food can I get before dancing to fuel the dancing that will fit in the time I have before dancing' etc... As we were staying in a hotel literally 2 minutes walk from the amazingly large Grand Union Hotel venue in the city centre, there was the added effect of shrinking the world down to a very small (but picturesque!) area.

What pays for all this weird parallel-universe stuff is, of course, the dancing. When it works, it really really works, and the positive effect of 4 days dancing and courses involving 5 sets of international teachers and four different live bands really can't be overstated. At the end of the 4 days I was dancing better than ever before, and even though I can't stay at that level right now, knowing I could get there for a little bit is pretty good too!

After the whole festival was over we had one sunny morning to explore the centre of Ljubljana for more things than just restaurants. It seems a very nice place, feels very spacious, there are somegreat old buildings, and there is definitely a strong focus on outdoor street life that marks it out as a city where the summers are long. One really cool thing I didn't realise till going to the city is that there are amazing views north to the (Slovenian) Alps. In March these were still covered in snow and therefore perfectly visible in the clear air. As Ljubljana lies on a plain, almost the whole height of the mountains can be taken in in one go. The train journey back via Villach travels towards, parallel to, and then under these imposing peaks, and it was really a top railway journey, with peaceful half-empty carriages and great views!

As picasa will be discontinued (my old photos will still be accessible but I can't add more), I have moved over to a Flickr account, which seems to be a comparable site with some quite nice features. Thus, you can see my pictures from my last morning in sunny Slovenia at this flickr link!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Trip to the Zillertal - skiing (!) sledging and a stroll

At the tail end of January I hopped on a train westward from Vienna, passing Salzburg and crossing briefly into Germany before plunging back into Austria, finally alighting at a station just before Innsbruck: Jenbach. Jenbach is located at the mouth of the Zillertal or 'Ziller valley' for you english speakers. This approximately North-South striking valley is a favoured winter destination for skiiers, as well as a great summer walking paradise (not to mention a geological treasure trove!). In January of course, the rocks aren't so visible under the layers of temporary white rocks usually referred to as snow.

I was in the Zilletal to visit a couple of friends who have taken over running a cafe there for the winter. Newly built and directly attached to a major ski lift and ski hire shop, it's a pretty great location! As I volunteered to translate all of the small german stories etc they wanted to put in the menu, I was rewarded with free ski hire for one day. When the offer was made back in the autumn, I realised that there was no way out: after over 4 years in Austria, I would have to try skiing!

I was very nervous, but thankfully my friends were also being visited by a former kite-surfing instructor who was of course good enough at instructing people to do anything physical that she made an excellent teacher. With her on side it was time to head up the mountain and try out the beginnerest beginner 'slope' (one bit was flat) there was. Up around 1800m or so there was snow aplenty, but it was unseasonably warm for my entire stay, meaning that we had gorgeous sunshine and I had no need of most of the traditional thick ski gear. Skiing was scary, but honestly easier than I expected (that just means I thought it would be impossible...), and after 3 hours of instruction I felt like I had enough control to be a bit less scared and I could even make a few turns! I was also exhausted. It is a very annoying fact that whatever muscles you develop doing your favourite sport (for me, dancing), whatever other sport you try will inevitably require completely different ones...

That evening we went sledging on the night-lit sledging run. In Austria, sledging means you sledge down a whole mountain (don't panic, it is a very winding course) after going up on a cable car. And of course, it wouldn't be Austria if you couldn't stop half way down at a comfortable Gasthaus (primarily reachable only by sledge in winter??) for tasty foods and even beer, if you're feeling extravagant. Sledging is actually a bit scarier than skiing, as you really don't feel quite as in control in my opinion.

The next day I just wanted to chill out, so I took a walk along the floor of the valley in the afternoon. One of the big ironies of landscape photography for me is that most of the elements that make easy and good landscape photos are actually man-made, providing fantastic lines leading the eye through the image. All the photos you will see today are from my walk, and most if not all of them illustrate this. The dramatic sweep of power lines down the valley glinting in the low winter sun really is beautiful, in person and in the photos in my opinion. These photos also illustrate clearly one of the big things about the alps that is different from some other mountainous regions: the Alps are an entirely human landscape, made to be used an lived in with very little 'wild' feeling until you get very far up or very far from civilization...

That's all for now, check the photos at the link and bis bald!

Der Tom

PS in a horribly inconvenient move, google is discontinuing the current platform I use to upload photos. Their replacement is absolutely not the same thing and I will be looking for an alternative. Anyway, though my photos will be preserved online by google, the links used in this blog may cease to work... We shall see what happens when the service starts shutting down in May. If the links do break, I will probably add new links to the newest posts first.