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.

Bonnie banks

So it's February, and that means its time for the first post about something I did in 2016! In fact, pretty early in 2016, on the 2nd of January to be precise. As regular readers know, I have spent a lot of my time in the UK in Scotland over the last few years, and I always make sure to be there for New Year's. Long running traditions are a must if you want to be able to catch up with people, as they can rely on where to find you! This year was great as I was able to catch up with some old friends who had been off celebrating New Year's somewhere else in previous years (heresy!).

Despite the overwhelmingly rainy theme of the current British winter we were even able to find a nice-ish day on which to head out of Glasgow on the train and take in the scenery of Loch Lomond, our first hello to nature of 2016. I'd last made this trip two years ago at around the same time of year, and so I decided to lead my companions along the same trail I took back then.

This time the weather wasn't quite so clear and a thick grey ceiling of clouds hung over us, albeit relatively high up, allowing the sun, already nearing the horizon even as we arrived, to light up the view to the west with subdued yellows, then oranges, then purples. The thick green carpets of moss remained unchanged, covering fallen tree trunks, branches and drystone walls alike. As we made our way along the extremely muddy path we alternately tiptoed and jumped our way between islands of wood and solid ground between the rich black mud and murky puddles.

We got a lot farther than my previous trip, but a mystery remains for next year as my (utterly uninformed) insistence that continuing to follow the path might eventually lead in a circle was wisely ignored by my companions. As we retraced our steps dusk fell, the sliver of sky visible below the clouds out to the west colouring the whole view across the Loch a subtle purplish-blue colour. Accompanied by the squawks of hundreds of crows (or other corvids), at this point just silhouettes against the darkening sky, we retreated to the pub for a pint and some chips in good British fashion.

Click the link for the small gallery of Loch Lomond photos, many of them taken in the twilight towards the end of the walk!

Hope you have had a good start to the year and bis bald,


der Tom

Bits and pieces from the end of 2015

Ever since I got my new camera (more than 2 years ago now I think) I have always tried to only take a photo if I think it has the potential to be a good one, not just to document where I happen to be at the time. This is no guarantee that any of the pictures I take are, or even have to be, good, but it does mean that on the odd trip or hike I end up with only a very few pictures I actually think are worth showing off. Usually these then languish on my hard drive, unblogged.

Well, no more! I have a small collection of photos from the last bit of 2015 with which to fill you in a bit on where I've been and hopefully give you a few pictures to enjoy on the way. The first three pictures in my miscellaneous album come from my trip to Krakow in November to meet up with a friend who was an invited speaker at a TV convention there. I very much enjoyed my all too brief stay in the city, and would love to go back. I have a very long list of Polish foods I didn't manage to try (though I did get me some pierogi, mmm) and we didn't make it inside the huge castle at all! Granted, the official 3 days in Krakow guide also advises you don't bother going into the castle as there is too much to see and you just don't have time. Refreshing, is how I would describe the 3 days in Krakow guide. The one weird thing about the city is its architecture, coming  across as a mixture of Vienna, Graz and Prague, and generally making me feel a bit like maybe I just made a wrong turn down a Viennese side street and ended up somewhere with a language with far too many accents on the words!

The second set of photos are from a VERY foggy late November walk in the Wienerwald. Nothing special about the route, just the classic up from Huetteldorf via the Jubilaeumswarte down to Neuwaldegg. You can see why I didn't manage a full album of photos out of this one, you could barely see more than 10m in front of yourself the whole way! But, fog has its way of making everthing wonderfully strange and unfamiliar, and I did manage to get a few shots that summed up the walk, as well as the photo of a very handsome bracket fungus I am rather proud of.

The final two images in the set come from somewhere that in some senses is much closer to home, and in other senses much further away: the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire. My friends and I from Bucks have long had a tradition of a walk in the days after christmas. The date has now settled on Boxing Day +1, and this year's walk was on a new route out in the countryside around Chesham. Exactly what one wants in a Boxing day +1 hike - green hills, lots of mud, a good pub at the end of it and gorgeous wether - warm and with sun breaking through the dramatic scudding clouds.

So there you have it, a few choice shots filling you in on activities of mine that would otherwise remain secret... I know some readers of this blog think I ONLY go to stunningly gorgeous places and on stunningly gorgeous walks, but that is just the editorial effect of me only wanting you to see nice photos!

So long for now and bis bald,

der Tom.

The 1st of November - the best of autumn hiking

Autumn is the best season for hiking, but I never thought I would be able to pinpoint an ideal day for hiking. As it happens, it appears there is one: the 1st of November. As you probably don't remember, on the 1st of November 2014 I enjoyed a fantastic and sunny hike up the Schneealpe. The hike in today's post took place exactly a year later, and once again we enjoyed blazing autumn sunshine, unbelievable autumn colours, and all round lovely views.

This was a long hike and encompassed a climb of 1000 vertical metres, but because those metres were spread evenly over the whole hike it really never felt that exhausting at all. We set out directly from Payerbach-Reichenau station and wound our way along the edge of the limestone cliffs overlooking the two towns. The route headed upwards along a very familiar pathway through the narrow gorge called 'Eng', which is in fact the german word for narrow... The Eng is overshadowed by steep walls of rock with precariously perched conifer trees, glowing in the sunlight at the tops of these walls but cold and in shadow at the bottom of the gorge.

We finally escaped the chilly but dramatic gorge and came out onto a wide meadow in front of a Gasthaus. We enjoyed our packed lunches sitting on the grass in the sunshine and then headed up on the steeper final leg of our outward journey to the peak of the Krummbachstein. At 1600m this is pretty high, but it suffers in popularity due to its close proximity to the Schneeberg (2000m). Nonetheless the summit of the Krummbachstein rises to a single sharp peak which is well isolated from the surrounding mountains, affording a 360 degree panoramic view.

The peak was drenched in sunshine but also exposed to a strong cold wind, requiring us to brace ourselves firmly and dress up warm while we enjoyed the exceptional panorama. There is a great view of the whole side of the Schneeberg, the flanks of the Rax plateau and the Hoellental. Spruce trees are liberally spread throughout the numerous evergreen forests covering the flanks of the mountain and many of the mountains nearby. These trees are special among pine-like (coniferous?) trees because they change colour then lose their needles in winter. Without them the alps in autumn would be much more boring at high altitudes! As it was, the bright yellows of the spruces contrasted dramatically with the deep greens of their neighbours, dusting the whole view with autumn gold.

The return walk was nicely graded and lead us into a different arm of the same gorge that eventually forms the Eng. The sun was nearing the horizon but had moved around to shine directly along the gorge, backlighting the vegetation with late afternoon sunlight and later painting the pale limestone cliffs a luminous orange. We headed back to the station before sunset, marvelling once again at the leaves of the trees in the village on the last proper autumn hike of the year!

Czech out the full gallery at the link...

Bis bald (und frohe Weihnachten!),

Der Tom

Up a mountain in Carinthia

Continuing my account of my long weekend in the vicinity of Villach...

Both my hosts and I were a little under the weather (I had simply ignored this fact the day before because: well, did you see the photos?) and while consuming large amounts of sage tea (good for the throat dontcha know) we all admitted that a full on mountain attempt was probably beyond us. But none of us wanted to give up the chance of an alpine peak, so we settled on a compromise - drive up the handy alpine road to 1400m and walk the rest!

This turned out to be a great decision, giving us a nice relaxed walk and maximum time in the autumn sunshine surrounded by amazing views. Our chosen mountain was the 'Hausberg' ('home mountain', basically the mountain climbing equivalent of 'local pub') of Villach: the big limestone chunk that is the Dobratsch. Its name is a testament to the mixed-language history of the area, something that is obvious considering the fact that modern day Slovenia is very easily visible from its peak.

We made our way up the nicely graded path, winding between steep grassy hillsides with remnant patches of early snow. The dramatic rise of the Dobratsch above its surroundings (thanks to the erosion resistance of trusty old limestone!) affords great views in most directions. On the way up, the most impressive view was to the east over the valley containing Villach and eventually Klagenfurt. As with the previous morning, a thick low blanket of fog and cloud was tenaciously hanging on, only slowly breaking up to offer glimpses of smaller hills and some of Carinthia's many lakes. A really magical view, with an added hint of schadenfreude knowing that the people who didn't get up early are stuck in the grey mist while you are enjoying the sun!

Up at the top are a very modern Gasthaus, a huge antenna tower, and two chapels, one of which is not ruined. The actual peak lies just above a steep steep drop towards the valley below. The views from this point were really fantastic (I'm saying that a lot in this entry), with the broad and steep-sided valley receding into the distance in a perfect demonstration of perspective, surronded by craggy snow capped peaks. All the more enjoyable for me of course was the way that this valley was so obviously a product of geological forces. The knife straight transition between flat valley floor and mountainous terrain on its southern edge is a textbook example of a fault, and in the valley proper you could see the knobbly deposits of earlier ice ages cut through by the modern floodplain of the river... By this time there was no mist at all and you could see all the way across to the Hohe Tauern some 80km away!

We made our way down on the other edge of the plateau, this time looking out to the south and east at the high ramparts of the Slovenian alps and the dramatic wisps of cirrus cloud above them. A short hike, but rich in amazing views and far better than hiding in the valleys!

Enjoy the photo set at the magic hyperlink!

Bis bald,

Der Tom