Ever since Monday morning it has been a mad dash for a presentation deadline for a project in Seattle.  While I was at the office late last night, I decided to take a break away from my computer, and snap a few shots of my little area. I like the plants everywhere and the big vine that grows up into the ceiling and spreads out everywhere.

The office itself is a large building that used to be an old printing press facility. It is kind of wharehouse-like with tall ceilings, big beams and exposed pipes everywhere. It has a nice informal feel to it and since our office includes a huge workshop where models are being built and water features tested, it fits very well. In fact, the workshop is a pretty cool area in itself and I will take pictures of that and the office sculpture artist at work one of these days. My desk is in an area with 5 other landscape architects. Although everyone had gone home by the time I took these pictures so it is a little bit quiet. Since the building is perched on a hill, the windows all look out onto the lake and the Swiss Alps. I suppose there are worse places to work in the world!

Everyone has told me that biking in Europe is a must-do experience and everyone at my office kept asking me when I was going to buy a bike. Everyone here travels by bike and not just for fun or exercise but as a primary mode of transportation. There are already so many people on bikes that I can hardly imagine what it will be like in the summer when the tourists finally roll in. But before that happens, we decided to take advantage of the bikes allowed to us with our apartment and set out on a ride.

We grabbed the bikes and first headed to the nearby town of Nußdorf to grab a few items from The Real or as they call it here, The European K-Mart. After that we headed to Meersberg for a round trip of about 25 km. It was an amazingly beautiful day without a cloud in the sky and the bike path went along the lake the whole time while going through rolling farmlands and small medieval towns that seemed to be out of an old story book.

We also went through a couple resort towns that were completely shut up and deserted since the tourist season hasn’t kicked up yet. Of course, it was closed up with good reason. Even though the sun was shining it was so cold that a layer of ice had formed in the harbor of the towns. In Meersberg several people were out walking and enjoying the sunshine, but not without heavy coat, hat and gloves.

image via Lisa Town

A castle on the hillside welcomed us into town and we stopped for a break at a fabulous little restaurant on the lake. We shared a salami pizza, “the best spinach cream soup” (as the waiter told us, very matter-of-factly and without so much as a smile, funny guy) and ended it all with warm, homeade apple struedel in a vanilla bean sauce. It was a beautiful day and we were lucky enough to ride back as the sun was beginning to set over the mountains with beautiful colors reflecting on the lake. This area truly is a beautiful place and it’s times like this when I realize how lucky we are to be here.

So as it turns out, the Alps aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sure they are nice to look at but when it comes to snowboarding, I don’t see how they are any better than home. In fact, the mountain we went to wasn’t good at all. It was so bad in fact, we took off our snowboards and decided to climb up to a little peak that was above the highest chair lift so that we could check out the view. Perhaps it would’ve been better with more snow but when there are even bare patches at the very top, that’s not a good sign. How fitting that we are here by the Alps with no snow but everyone in Washington and Oregon are getting record amounts. Jealous.

Despite the lack of snow, we had a great time because the sun was shining, the views were clear as a bell and it was just so darn pretty. We definitely decided that we should do a little bit of hiking in the Alps at some point.

It all started when I got invited by Jeff, an American co-worker, to go on a little trip with him, his girlfriend and a British landscape architect, Jessica and her boyfriend and German architect, Achim (who I learned is the funniest German guy ever!). Marshall and I took a train Saturday night from Überlingen to Lindau, at the other end of Lake Constance with Jeff and met Jessica at the train station there. Jeff’s girlfriend wasn’t feeling well so she ended up staying home but perhaps we’ll meet her in the future. I also realized that we should check out Lindau some time in the future because it looked like an interesting town. The train station was sort of out on an island in the lake and there was these neat light scultpure towers in the water.

On a somewhat side note, we saw a huge bonfire on the train ride and later found out that it was part of, or rather the end of, Fastnacht. Jessica thought it originally had to do with people throwing out old Christmas trees and burning them and just sort of got turned into a huge bonfire craze over the years. Now people literally build these huge forts and light them on fire. Apparently they get progressively bigger each year and villagers try to outdo others. Those that build them then guard them by parking cars all around it, sleeping in their cars until the night of the big lighting which was last Sunday. Sunday just happened to be the day we went up to the mountain so on our drive back there were bonfires in every town we passed….it was truly amazing. You’d see fires lighting up along the ridges and in valleys. Most were pretty big and some were just flat out HUGE. Definitely one of the craziest things I’ve seen so far. It felt like war signals or something.

Jessica drove us from Lindau to her house through this winding road through the dense forest. It is really neat how much forest is in our area and all the amazing farms and country villages. When we got to her apartment we met Achim and then him and Jessica made the most amazing spaghetti dinner. It was with a modified half-homeade sauce along with a salad with homeade dressing. There is also a fabulous lettuce here that I love that is somewhere between leaf lettuce and romaine but huge and frilly. I have no idea what it is, some ridiculously long German word I’m guessing. We also had this vanilla bean and blackberry yogurt that truly tasted like frozen yogurt in a jar. Basically all of their food was so good.

She also introduced us to this drink called Almududler which is a popular drink in Austria, so popular in fact that is known as the national drink of Austria. It’s a sort of carbonated beverage that tastes like a beerish sparkling cider because, although it is not an alchoholic beverage, it somehow has hops in it to provide extra nutrition and is apparently then great to drink before and during activities like skiing. It was indeed quite tasty.

Since their apartment was “basic” as she called it and really not a ton larger than our place, Jeff, Marshall and I literally slept with blankets and pillows on her living room floor. We all got up at 6 in the morning and had bread with amazing homeade jam, tea, juice and musli. We then piled in the car and drove for an hour or so through the sleepy countryside and many little villages and farms till we reached the base of the mountains in Austria. We rented our gear there, from a very unhappy man, and then went on up to the ski area. It was ridiculously clearn and beautiful and looked a lot like the Olympic Mountains, very dark blue with snow-covered tops.

When we breaked at lunch time I was amazed at how they truly served little more than sausages and beer. There is also a really strange dish here called Currywurst which is litterly a sausage in curry sauce. Everytime I see it I am half interested to try it because it is so strange but I’m also equally afraid of it.

At the end of the day we were all thoroughly exhausted and we ended the evening by hitting a small and very funky little cafe in the town were we had rented our gear. The people were crazy friendly and made some seriously amazing hot drinks. Even though the Alps may not have lived up to the hype today, the chocolate sure did! The cafe itself was cozy and had all these large blocks of wood as tables and chairs and strange animal pelts all over. The pelt or hide on my chair block had apparently come from the smallest cow ever.

images via Lisa Town

We then drove back to Jessica’s apartment, picked up the last of our stuff and then she drove us back to the train station where we rode it back to Überlingen. We got back after 10:30 or so Sunday night and were completely exhausted. We could do little more than just fall into bed.

Before we came to Germany several people told me that Germans, and many Europeans in general, seem to act as if you don’t exist when it comes to certain things. For instance, you can be standing in what you think is a line and people will walk right in front of you. Or you can be standing in front of a wall of products in the store, trying to figure out which product you want (in my case, trying to figure out the German lables) and then someone walks right in front of you to look at the very same walls of products as if you weren’t even there. This rule, or lack thereof, apparently applies to walking on the sidewalk as well. People just don’t seem to acknowledge the presence of other people. To Germans I’m sure this behavior seems normal but to an American who’s used to a society of people who prefer large personal bubbles, this sort of thing can often seem uncomfortable. Which in itself has been an interesting lesson for me in understanding how different cultures view personal space.

You know how sometimes you want to pass someone on the freeway but then suddenly that one slow car decides to speed up once they realize you are trying to pass them? The people walking on the street here do this. Or the thing that drives me out of my mind is that they will pull right out in front of me in some sort of effort to beat me. I will be walking to or from work and then someone will pull right out from a side street and practically mow me down just to get in front of me. This is just not appropriate pedestrian behavior! And then, to top it off, they will walk slowly. Even older people with cains will do this. But why? Do they really want me right behind them? I just don’t understand it. It’s completely maddening! Meanwhile I, being the large-bubble-minded American, kindly wait for people and actually feel bad when I am approaching someone too closely. I have a bad feeling that by the end of the year all of my sense for good manners will have gone right out the door. To everyone back home…I apologize in advance.

How do I describe this madness? Unlike the Heiligenberg parade that I’d seen earlier which encompassed a whole region of towns, this was only for Überlingen. This particular video is not of the parade in it’s entirety though, it’s the end of the line where they all disperse and…crack whips and mess with the crowd. It’s a total whip fest. How they don’t all hit each other is beyond me. But the months of “practice” around town of boys and adult men and the many sounds of whips throughout the town all comes down to this.

The black and brightly colored costume they wear, also adorned with bells, I believe is called the Hänsele. Although I’m not entirely sure what it represents or what the whipping is for sure as I’ve heard various stories and I’m not sure what I’ve been told as true and what has been a joke. So I’ll just leave that as a mystery. Maybe I’ll get to the bottom of it one day.

image (c) Lisa Town