We were talking about buying something on the balcony last summer, especially when I moved a chair from a living room to the balcony and back several times. Something that would be used for sitting there in the morning to enjoy breakfast in the air and in the evening to drink wine in the shade. But we somehow had to address to many things and no time left to develop this idea further.
Last Friday we went to Easter trip. We had a beautiful warm weather, around 25 degrees and I saw a newspaper tip for a nice trip to a waterfall. I thought that in this lovely April weather everything is melting and so there could be a lot of water. After a small survey, I found two other even bigger waterfalls near the original one. From parking places it was up to 20 minutes walk to each one and so we decided to see all of them.
Last weekend, we went on a trip to the lake Walchensee. It’s about an hour from our home by car in a beautiful environment surrounded by the mountains. This time we didn’t go alone, but we took our visitors as well. The weather was amazing and was also pleasantly warm although, it wasn’t warm enough to melt all the snow on the hills above. Near the lake we took a cable-car and we travelled four minutes about 800 meters higher.
Finally, I have an explanation, why I and my dear Andrej had disappeared from Skype since Friday. I flew to England and Andrej was offline, so he didn’t have to explain where I was. On Monday I had my final oral examination for my PhD and so I spent a long weekend before it by consulting everything with my supervisors, preparing a presentation and reading again and again my work and related papers.
This is another option (not counting the Tyrolean Alps around the corner) to go skiing when you are in Grainau. And not only that. Cable cars operate here also in the summer and there is a wide variety of hiking trails offered by the hills. One of the black slopes was closed due to the preparation for the World Championships (5a on the slope plan), but we didn’t miss it at all.
I must say that this place is simply wonderful. We haven’t been to Zugspitze (the highest peak in Germany, 2962m), because we somehow couldn’t stop skiing in such a beautiful weather. But we agreed that we would make this trip in the summer. I’ve never really thought about the name of the peak until now, when I found out that you can go just below it by train (der Zug). This cogwheel train (Zahnradbahn) goes from the main station in Garmisch-Partenkirchen through three stops in the Garmisch classic ski area, then through Grainau toward the lake Eibsee and after a while from there it is lost in the tunnel (4.
This time we traveled only about an hour and a quarter by car from our home to the village Grainau. We wanted to ski and get to know our surroundings better. We stayed in a very nice and cozy house with a great breakfast (Gasthaus Geigener). The weather was quite good, we skied whole the week except the two days and my darling named our vacation week assembly. One snowy day, we made a train trip to the nearby Tyrol village Lermoos and then we went back to Garmisch Partenkirchen, where we found a great Italian restaurant for lunch and we saw the ski springboard and slopes for the upcoming World Championships.
Generally, a man, who has lived abroad for longer time, usually finds out that he lacks some food or ingredient, which he would otherwise get on every corner in his native country, but in a foreign country there is no rumour or even hearing about it. In England, I somehow got used to the fact that poppy seeds are considered as dangerous drugs, the proper bread could be found in a Polish shop, cheese selection was a little bit limited and the overall problem was to find anything not low fat.
This year I made several New Year’s resolutions (I will sometimes write about them). One of them is to ski this winter properly. Before Christmas, we decided to visit our friends in Switzerland and we were going to look at several ski resorts near Zurich. But this plan failed, because during our planned weekend heat wave arrived from Spain and at 1100 m it was suddenly 7 degrees. Finally, we opted for the more distant, but higher placed resort Laax, where we were skiing at around 2500 m at a pleasant temperature just below zero.
This year we decorated our first common Christmas tree. We bought lights, decorations and gifts together and we had an ideal Christmas atmosphere. We even found out that it is possible to buy a fresh carp here. Although we celebrated Christmas in Slovakia, we left two wrapped gifts under our tree at home, so we could unpack them afterwards. I was expecting anything but a sewing machine. I haven’t even dreamed about it (well, maybe I thought about it sometimes that it would be useful).