Janingalina

so, like an idiot, i wrote a big catchup summary and mailed it to myself, and promptly forgot about it. ha. that's why i've been gone for 3 months. that, and it's been a little crazy in jessica-land.

lemme tellya 'boudit.

in december and january i took a scuba diving class with 2 girlfriends. we got through all of the theory, and did all of the practice sessions in the pool without any major problems. scuba seems cool, but i'm not going to put any more money into this little hobby until i can get myself under more than 2 meters of water, and see how i like it. that should happen at our open water test weekend at a lake somewhere near Dresden at the end of April. (god willin' and the creek don't rise)

I was in Barcelona over New Year's. I was the mustachioed bandit twirling everyone's girlfriends on the dancefloor.



I was especially inspired by an earlier visit to a Dalí exhibition. Special thanks to my coworker Christian for making me feel so welcome, and doing some dorky tourist bus-riding with me. :)




later in the month, i started a knitting night. you got it, Stitch 'n Bitch Bamberg! We've been meeting every Thursday at a cozy little café that has good things to nosh, a nice waitress, and good music on the PA. what more could one want? oh, also we always seem to get the good booth in the back to spread out at. muy bueno.


the first night i taught 3 chinese coworkers (2 chicks 1 dude), a spanish/french coworker, and a german girlfriend from around town to knit. I felt really accomplished, teaching knitting in my 3rd language to people who were mostly learning in their 3rd or 4th language. At this point Wei's finished her hat, Susanne's finished her hat, Katja's still working on socks, and Sandrine has about 6 inches of what will be a very colorful scarf. Me? I spent a couple weeks screwing up the heel on Hannes' second birthday sock. Literally, i knit and ripped it like 10 times, until i got just the right combination of focus/free-time and spanish red wine (mmm! Rioja!). anyway, meeting up with the friends to knittel, quatsch and enjoy refreshing adult beverages makes Thursday nights a highlight for me. it's cool that i'm able to share something i really enjoy with friends i've made here, and to do it where/how we do is just great. i can't wait for it to get warmer, because then we can move knit-night to the biergarten!



i went snowboarding with the siemens lawyers again! funny how there are no hill-pictures from this trip, just pix from the bar at aprés-ski.



i managed to get Serious Klaus to smile and dance around a bit, ditto the Slow Swiss Boy Michael. it was good fun. Saturday i rode with the whole group first thing. Instead of taking it slow, we started out on a black diamond, rad. (for reference, black diamonds in the Alps = Shit yourself in Michigan). I managed that ok, but on the second run into the valley of death (which took me 3 hours to get out of last year) i slid about 10m down a vertical wall of ice. In the end, it only took me about an hour to get out of there this time. But that was the end of the line for the snowboarders and the skiiers, we went our own ways after that. I spent a very fun and challenging afternoon riding with Stefan and Patrícia, who both ride better than i do. And then Aprés-Ski! the most fun part of skiing. We met up again in Moosewirt, the disco crammed into a log cabin. it was a very fun drunken debacle. hooray. after that we headed across the slope for schnitzel at the next restaurant.

Sunday morning i woke up sore, but not too hung over. I couldn't keep up with the others anymore, though, so i rode all day by myself, meeting up with the group for lunch breaks and pauses. i was rockin good tunes in the ipod, and takin my time floating down the mountain. i took time to sit and contemplate, to look around me. the alps are amazingly beautiful and i love having a chance to be out there.

after skiing, there was a period of relative quiet. i was sick on and off and just kind of ticking along slowly.

ok, there was a small exception to the quiet, Fasching. It's like if you roll all the drinking from Mardi Gras, and the costumes from Halloween together, and have it for months before Fat Tuesday. nadine and I hit the town as a pirate and a german girl. there was much dancing, much drinking, and a good disco-time.

In mid-feb Hannes and I went to Thüringen, the next province north of Bavaria, part of the one-time East Germany. There are signs showing where the wall was when you're driving into the area. First we went to the Garden Gnome Museum, because Gräfendrodach is the hometown of the Garden Gnome. Unfortunately, we got there about 20 minutes after it'd closed for the day. (which it does at 2pm. damn!)




But then we went to Erfurt, the capitol of Thüringen, and it was pretty. We did the touristy thing, ate german food, went into german churches, took a hike in the German mountains, ate more German food. It was a very Deutsch-touristy weekend. And that was when the flowers started to bloom here.




Then next weekend was so warm I went for a long bike ride with pals Sandrine and Laurent. We were planning to do like 5-8km, and ended up doing 35-40. which was fun, but i did it in a dumb skirt and knee-socks, because i thought we were just going to pedal a little bit, then drink some coffee or something.

we did get out into the country-side. saw some horses, ate some ice cream with coworkers. we sat outside in t-shirts and ate ice cream. it was probably about 60F.






Then, holy hell, i had the best time snowboarding with Stefan and Patrícia. We went to Zillertal, where there are like 5 ski areas connected by a little toy train.



first we rode a big train down there, though.



We stayed in the green Valley



have i mentioned that i love trains? and mountains? and snowboarding? ...so yeah.
this is what it looked like on our first day:






We started in Gerlos and rode through like 4 ski areas over to the other end of the valley. after lunch we rode back.

The next day, the weather was sketchy, so we rode the train to the end of the valley, and the bus up to the glacier. It's almost all above 3000m. On the glacier, the weather was pretty clear. All the lifts were open, and it looked like this:



Day 3, the weather even wonkier. We were on the glacier again, because the snow there was really better in comparison, but the weather was still sketchy. The morning was good riding. I switched up my binding setup, so that my front foot has a more aggressive angle. that helped a lot, and by the end of the day i was pulling some good carves. :D

early in the day it looked like this:



The weather was very changeable. It would snow one minute and be clear the next. In the afternoon, though, it got to be white-out conditions. We were riding down a hill and stopped for a little rest (the runs are kilometers long!). Then the wind blew, and I couldn't see P 5m below me. then she was there, but i kept sitting for a minute. then she disappeared again. I thought, "shit, as soon as i can see, i'm getting off this mountain! this is dumb!" but fun.. :D

Lunch was in this cozy little hut next to a cave. the kaiserschmarrn was fantastic! it's a dish best described as scrambled french toast with apple sauce. mm.



We quit early. Luckily in Zillertal there are other cool things to see. We headed to the Sennerei, where they give tours of the cheese-making facilities. We missed the tour by about 20 minutes, but we bought a bunch of fresh, local-made Alpine cheese, some Farmer's bread, and some Olives and had ourselves a picnic dinner back at the pension. (that's a temporarily abandoned "Settlers of Catan" game in the background. It got a little cutthroat after dinner)



The last day of the trip was extremely frustrating. The weather was beautiful, but there was reportedly hurricane-strength winds at the higher altitudes, so almost all the lifts were closed. we tried to do the bunny-hill, but that didn't last long. most of our ski-day looked like this:

thank goodness the hot choc had a little rum in it. certainly helped console us. the ride home was crazy though.

we all had our boards and bags and all our shit. which we were prepared to schlep through like 4 trains to get home. well, one train wasn't running at all because trees fell on the rails or something, so we got to take an extra bus, a subway, and another train. We got home 2 hours later than expected, completely exhausted. but damn, the first couple days of the trip were SO worth it!