Last week I was in Switzerland again and we had the chance to go for a short walk. Beautiful colors because of Autumn.

Last weekend was the Albanifest in Winterthur. Christine and me walked over it on sunday evening (and quickly on saterday afternoon). Most action took place on friday/saterday evening so it was rather quiet. We only went in one ride which gave us a cool look over the city and a bit of weird feeling in the stomach after but got some funny pics.

I said I was gonna try to put up a photo a bit more regularly, well last days I’m spending in Switzerland so I’m not that much behind the computer, but it doesn’t mean I take no pictures! Last weekend I was in Zürich where I walked around a bit. Unfortunately the weather was not that great, but think I made some cool pics. For example this .. traaaaaaaam

Ok, finally some time to put something on this page again. As some of you know, I went to Chile on a studytour. Ofcourse I made a lot of pics there and I wrote something about every day. For the next week I will daily try to put a day of Chile online, maybe with a nice picture. I’m still processing some photos so for some you have to wait a bit longer. ( Have a look in the archive for March and April 2007 )

After Chile I already went to Switzerland again and to keep you nice and warm I have a cool panorama for you.

It’s been a while since the last post, didn’t have that much time for week assignments from GOT and actually didn’t make that many pictures in general. I have been trying to do something like wintersport though. Went, full of courage, completely dressed in Aldi snowboard gear to Switzerland. Christine and I booked an appartment in Arosa and bought a pass for 5 days. For me, this was the first time to be in such an area and already the busy pushing crowd at the lifts impressed me that much that it took me some time to get used to that . But I picked up my rental board and boots and went up to start the most painfull and body wrecking hobby ever. After 10 minutes it was already clear that the 6 lessons (6 hours at an indoor track in The Netherlands) couldn’t help me from getting my body as sore as possible. After some nasty falls I kinda started realizing that when doing this for 5 days my body wouldn’t survive.

So after a nice drink with Christine (she flies over the snow with her board as an angel surfing on a cloud) and a serious pep talk, I decided to take it a bit easier and started doing the turns as I learned them to do at the safe, not crowded, without bumpy places and straight indoor piste. I started to get a bit more confident again and during the week it went actually pretty OK.

The views are incredible over there, when you’re standing at 2500 meter, with a nice blue sky, sun shining in your face you think, hmmm, wintersporting is actually not that bad. (without paying attention to every sore muscle in your body every morning and evening) Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures up there, I didn’t dare to take my camera up while boarding, too afraid of breaking it.

Conclusion for this week: Painfull, but a very nice experience. The weather was very good (not for the snow), I got a slight tan in my face and most important, I was with my Schäzzli for a week

The holiday took place in switzerland once more. Plan for the first week was:
1. To organize a nice bbq
2. to plan our big trip over the mountains.

The bbq turned out really nice with a luxurious meal (believe it or not, I still have hamburgers in the freezer;) ). For the rest we enjoyed being back together, undertook a biketrip to a big river (almost dried out) where we went for a “swim” and grilled some Servelats and bananas. And ah yes..planned the tour.
Actually we thought to invest about two weeks for hiking.. The last week was left to relax in the Tessin. We decided to shorten the trip a bit and calculated 10 days for our via alpina.
With biiig backpacks and good travel mood we left the town Adelboden in direction of the Kanton Wallis. After 1 hour of hiking it started to rain and some weird mountain mosquitos were sticking on us. Nevertheless we continued our trip and camped on a flat part of the Engstligenalp. Tired and exhausted we tried to find some sleep when suddenly a couple of weird cows got the idea to attack our tent. Probably a joke of some funny kids from the farmerhut. But in our supertent we were save;)
The next morning we woke up with a wonderful sunrise.

It was a full day of hiking. After we lost trail two times and wandered around 9 hours until we arrived tired but still alive in Leukerbad where we put our tent (this time on a public camping place).
Because we still felt every muscle in the next morning we decided to relax one day and caught the bus to Lenk. Too late we recognised that twan’s sunglasses were still hanging on the back of the seat in the bus..(i can’t blame him for it because one day later the same happened to me:p). We decided to go on and took the train to gampel where we camped another night.
Next day we still suffered from the too heavy backpacks and had to admit it was impossible to climb the rest of the mountains to the Tessin.
And faster as we could think of it we were sitting in the train to the sunny Tessin.
To be continued…

Last February, Christine and I also went to Luzern for an afternoon. It was carnival there and after walking around in the city we had to take the train back and we walked over this crosswalk. I had to look back and make a picture. I have to admit that this was not the way it looked like when I made the picture. I did some serious processing in this one, not to make it look more real but to reach a certain feeling when looking at this picture.

When I was in Switzerland last February, I went for a nice walk with Christine and her mother. When we were waiting for the train on our way back I saw this old man crossing the railtrack and ofcourse had to capture him. I’m not sure what he is carrying but think there are patatoes in those bags. Therefore we called him ‘the patatoe man’ or in Swiitzerdüütsch, ‘Herdöpfelmaa’.