Fresh 5th December snow near our house, late evening. It had finally stopped snowing, thank god. We had done two shovelling sessions on this Sunday and my shoulders were hurting.
When I got out to take a look with the camera, the bushes and trees had turned into surrealist sculptures, lit up by the yellow street lamp. It was totally silent.
Dreamed I was an eskimo
Frozen wind began to blow
Under my boots and around my toes
The frost that bit the ground below
It was a hundred degrees below zero…
And my mama cried
And my mama cried
Nanook, a-no-no
Nanook, a-no-no
Don’t be a naughty eskimo
Save your money, don’t go to the show
Well I turned around and I said oh, oh oh
Well I turned around and I said oh, oh oh
Well I turned around and I said ho, ho
And the northern lights commenced to glow
And she said, with a tear in her eye
Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow
Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow
This is one of the special places that I have to visit now and then, in summer or in winter. Today was the coldest day so far in this November. The ground was muddy. Surprisingly, walking uphill in the cold wind was a very pleasant experience.
Actually these landscapes looked somewhat different … bleak and depressing maybe but I liked driving through them for hours yesterday, listening to Frippertronics and music by Perotin.
Sabine took a day off – we spent the afternoon visiting Cologne’s beautiful new ethnological museum, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum that has moved into a spacious new building and opened a week ago. We liked the museum a lot. Some people still think that a museum about ethnology is a boring collection of dusty artifacts – this is certainly far from true here.
I liked the section about rituals and religion most – not so much because I’m fond of rituals or religion but because it features many beautiful sculptures and statues – and I loved the circular room with the world map and the many masks. What a wealth of ideas, colors, and shapes!
I liked this place a lot and will certainly come back.
Later, on the way to the Indian restaurant, we met this lady. In a way, she felt more alien to me than all the strange masks did.
That time of the year again – a Ridhwan retreat week in the Kloster Schöntal monastery, I’ve been blogging about these retreats before.
Sabine and me came directly here from our Lake Constance vacation. Since we spent a weekend here in June, she loves this wonderful place as much as I do, so she took the opportunity to take a nice walk (while I was busy setting up the recording for the talks) and spend another night in the monastery with me before taking the train home the next morning.
The weather was still warm and sunny although the nights got quite cold. Schöntal in autumn is full of beauty …
The week was wonderful again, it was a full week with very little time to take walks … but then, it often felt like we were taking inner walks. We were about 120 people, each of them somewhere in their inner process of finding themselves, but we did it together, so I sometimes thought of a large group of people climbing a high mountain together, each of them taking a different route, but feeling like a group nonetheless. I had several deep experiences that were completely new and unexpected – I surprised myself. How often does one surprise oneself?
„Because of an innocent misunderstanding you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.“Adyashanti
Last day of our 1-week vacation at Lake Constance, and the sky was all grey everywhere.
Everywhere? As we could see on the webcam image of the Säntis mountain …
… it was just the Lake area that was covered with high fog. We had been on top of the Säntis already so we decided to drive to Bregenz, the Austrian city on the east end of the lake, and take the cable car to the Pfänder mountain – this mountain is not as high but its top still looked out of the fog layer on this day.
View from the ground …
… (fruits of the season) …
… and the view from the top of the Pfänder over the lake and the fog layer towards the Säntis range on the other side.
The Vorarlberg area of western Austria is famous for its beautiful mountains, forests, and the cheese made of the cow milk.
It was as warm as in summer up here …
We walked for a few miles and met idyllic little villages inhabited by friendly people …
Eventually we took the cable car down into the fog again …
What a nice place – so many very different landscapes can be found around the Lake Constance area. We just had one week but we easily could have spent more time!
Ravensburg is famous for a number of things, one of them being the publisher of games and children’s books that is named after the city. Ravensburger is very famous in Germany – all children probably know their logo, have played their games, have read their books. I am no exception. We went to see their beautiful new museum which shows how the company evolved and how games and books are made.
One game that is part of my childhood is the original Memory game from the late fifties. This is how it looked.
Another interesting museum, this one about the history of the town, is right across the street. I’ve never seen nor heard about these beautiful large medieval guild member wheels. They had the names of their members painted on them, complete with their emblems. This is a wheel for the wine grower’s guild.
On the next morning, the fog was very dense over the lake.
We took a round trip walk to a village called Baitenhausen. It was very warm, almost like summer (in October!). The orchards were full of apples, pears, and plums, and the leaves all around already wore their autumn colors.
We always thought that the little angels sing all the time, but we found that some of them prefer to practise martial arts.
The view over the valley …
Back in Meersburg, we went to that wine restaurant with the terrace and the incredible view over the lake. We were reminded of Italy, maybe of Cinque Terre. Life was good.
Many delights here. One was a beautifully clear night sky with the milky way overhead. Here is a 15 second exposure that gives an idea of the night view …
Next morning – it is warm enough to have a breakfast on the balcony. In early October!
A walk to a village east of Meersburg …
… where we found a really good ice cream place. Ice cream! in October!
We took the bus to Friedrichshafen, home of the Zeppelin (which could not fly today because there was too much wind) and to the very nice Zeppelin museum. We didn’t visit the museum this time because we had seen it the last time we were here, but we went to the cafe of the museum. They have Zeppelin cakes, a nice red-white striped canvas overhead which reflects nicely in the spoons, and beautiful 30s architecture.
A strange encounter at the bus stop …
Finishing the day with a visit to Überlingen …
We found a really good Pizza place in Überlingen. I actually took a photo of the Rucola-Parmigiano pizza (tasty and beautiful!) but I won’t show it here because you might think that we are busy eating all day. Which we are.
After seeing the mountain range across the lake from our appartement every day, we finally went there to take a closer look. The highest peak of this part of the Alps is the Säntis. We were conveniently taken up the mountain top by a cable car – the view was breathtaking. In the distance we could see Lake Constance …
Now and then, we could see mountain climbers in the snow, sometimes on top of dangerous looking cliffs. How happy I am that I don’t have to do that!
Sabine enjoying the view … (she had forgotten her sunglasses and had to wear old scratchy ones that we found in my car)
A trail was starting here … I took a few steps, imagining what it would be like … the snow was knee high, and very near that rope, there was the abyss … this kind of fun is clearly not for me.
Switzerland was the first country that invited refugees from Tibet when things got difficult there. Good to see a stupa here!
Going back down after a few hours in the sky …
oh, and on the way out we had this close encounter with an alternate reality …
I’ve been living near the Rhine for all my life but I never wondered where it came from. I learned now that the Rhine springs are located in several parts of Switzerland, that it is a large river already before it flows into Lake Constance, and that it flows through this lake and comes out at the other side. After that there are the famous Rhine falls near Schaffhausen in Switzerland. Both Sabine and me hadn’t seen this place yet although it is the second largest fall in Europe.
Lots of water, fast water. Visitors can stand on platforms very near the raging waters, or even on top of them, and there are boats that visit the rock in the middle of it. Standing near these amazing amounts of water is a humbling experience. The ground shakes.
Another tourist spot is a historic town called Stein am Rhein, not far from the falls. Lots of medieval houses here, and lots of tourists – I don’t want to know what this place is like in summer.
In tourist season, we would probably have queued to get a cake and a coffee like this. The cake was good, the coffee was so-so, but we sat near the Rhine and the view was wonderful.
A visit to a monastery …
Old keyboards … too bad I couldn’t try them …
Back home, waving up to our Zeppelin friend …
And a beautiful view of the alps – and to the Säntis, tomorrow’s travel destination.
We’re having a wonderful week at Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Southern Germany. The weather (after some very wet weeks) is unexpectedly wonderful, and the appartement that we rented is also quite wonderful – a large flat under the roof of an old villa. We like it so much we could easily move in. And it is not even expensive.
Day 1 – a little hike …
… seeing beautiful gardens – we have not nearly as many flowers in our garden at home because the climate there is much colder: We are hundreds of miles southwards of home here, and because of the large lake, winters are usually very mild, so mild that lots of wine grows around the lake.
After a few miles of hiking, a coffee is obligatory …
… feeding the hungry ghosts …
In the harbour, a very unusual combination of racing car, speedboat, and slide …
We saw our old friend Zeppi again. Since we were here in 2003, taking a wonderful (but unfortunately very expensive) flight with the Zeppelin around Lake Constance, this wonderful vehicle (we think of him being a very kind very large dog-like being for some reason) was asking when we would come back. Of course he spotted us beneath him, and waved down to us … of course he couldn’t really wave very wildly because he had to take care of his passengers.
Walking through colorful autumn forests …
Looking down on the lake through rows of wine …
Fruits from the huge cedar tree in front of our house …
and the view from our little balcony …
Inhabitants of the village trying to make the lives of us tourists even more colorful …
Last saturday was very full. I worked until noon (no pictures of the ColdFusion code that I wrote, that would be too boring), then I headed towards Cologne. On the way, driving towards the S-Bahn station, I realized I would have to wait for quite a while, and I stopped by an unusual exhibition that I had always meant to visit.
Michael Kramer is an artist who lives not far away from my hometown. His studio, I am told, looks like a scrapyard – one thing that he does is creating sculptures from scrap metal. His sculpture „Die Stadt“, the city, is spread out on a large flat roof. Visitors can walk around on the roof and look at many very different kinds of cities made from a million strange looking metal parts. I loved this place so much that I almost forgot that I had planned to take the next S-Bahn station to go to Cologne.
I managed to catch the train in the last second … it took me to Cologne where I met Sabine in a sports museum. Now I don’t care for sports at all and I don’t care for the sports museum even less but today Greenpeace was here on a 30-year-anniversary tour (the German leg of Greenpeace was founded 30 years ago, 10 years after Greenpeace came into existence in Vancouver), and both Sabine and me were curious what it would be like.
(On the way from the Cologne main station to the Greenpeace event I met Dorothee, a friend of Sabine – we talked for a couple of minutes. I wasn’t aware at this point that I was going to have four (4) chance meetings of this kind on this day.)
I met Sabine and my colleague Michaela – I handed her the data CDs that I had worked on this morning – and we had a coffee together. Soon after I ran into my old friend Karla who was also interested in Greenpeace as it turned out.
The Greenpeace event was interesting and moving – we listened to a 1-hour talk about the history of this organization in Germany. I had forgotten so many things and realized that without these people, the world would be in a much worse shape than it is now. They had helped to stop major environmental crimes that would be unimaginable today. I felt moved and very grateful that this organization exists.
One ugly German word that made Greenpeace famous during the eighties was „Dünnsäureverklappung“ – chemical companies got rid of their highly toxical acids by simply dumping them into the North Sea, and Greenpeace successfully stopped them.
On this day, families could take their kids on a ride with one of the famous Greenpeace rubber boats on the Rhine. They went pretty fast. I’m not sure I would dare to do this. I get seasick when I brush my teeth.
Sabine had enough adventures for this day, and drove home. I went to several concerts in the evening. The annual Kölner Musiknacht took place on this day – it offers dozens of concerts at many places throughout the city. One 15€ ticket pays for all concerts.
I had heard the quite wonderful jazz band Sepiasonic one day on the radio, 3 years ago, and my ears got really big. What was this? It sounded like a very poetic crossbred between Canterbury bands such as Hatfield and the North and modern Scandinavian jazz groups such as Hanne Hukkelberg. I loved it. Sepiasonic? They had a website with some music but no CD.
Anyway when I saw that they played in Cologne I was very happy that I could finally see them live, and I was not disappointed.
Swiss master clarinetist Claudio Puntin, jazz singer Insa Rudolph, and jazz guitarist Kim Efert (I loved his compositions and style – a kindred soul!) were accompanied by an amazing band that consisted of drums, bass, and three flutists – a very unusual setup but with everyone being a master of their instrument, very effective in creating interesting improvised soundscapes and highly sophisticated tunes in odd meters. When Insa Rudolph’s voice effortlessly soared above complex harmonic structures, and three flutes played playful and experimental compositions that reminded me of Egg and other Canterbury bands, I was a happy listener.
I talked to Insa after the concert and asked her about the CD. Apparently they are working on it and it might be released at the end of this year. Something to look forward to!
My next concert was two hours later. I walked through cold streets towards the Cologne Cathedral which was illuminated brightly. When I got there I saw that it was full of people for some kind of catholic event which had nothing to do with the Kölner Musiknacht.
Although this cathedral (when empty) can trigger some sort of feeling of presence in me, I’m not at all interested in Catholicism and cheering crowds of young Pope-the-popstar-fans. Actually I think that it is sad that so many kids get conditioned this way instead of learning about their conditionings in order to wake up from them, but I don’t want to go into that here. The cathedral remains a place of power to me regardless of what might go on in the people who come here.
The WDR Funkhaus, the old central building of the largest radio station in Germany, sits right across the cathedral. I have spent many hours of my life in its beautiful concert hall, seeing amazing concerts of many kinds, mostly avantgarde and world music. I hadn’t been here for a while. Coming here on this evening gave me a warm feeling of coming home.
The Iranian concert was scheduled for 10 pm – it was not yet 9 pm and cold outside, so I decided to attend the 9 pm concert with Baroque string music – more precisely, „NeoBarock“ with compositions of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. The violins were tuned in unusual ways but coming from the quite stunning performance of Sepiasonic, I found that I couldn’t open to this music.
Although I think of myself as very open to basically all kinds of music, I have problems being interested in some periods of classical music. Although the musicians played with breathtaking virtuosity, I found myself getting bored with the predictability of the compositions.
The 10 pm concert was a different category altogether – classical music, and modern music in the classical style, from Iran. The band played three long compositions that gave the instrumentalists ample space to improvise and show off their quite amazing virtuosity.
One of the percussionists was Peyman Nasehpour. We had met two years ago because he is a friend of Rick Walker. In May 2008, Peyman drove a couple of hours just to meet Rick at the livelooping festival that I had organized in Cologne. On the day after the festival, we all met again in Cologne and had a beer together – a delightful mix of musicians from many countries. I have been a Facebook contact of Peyman since (he even gave a frame drum lesson to me via Skype once), and he had invited me to this delightful concert.
Before the concert began, I noticed my old friend Walter and his wife in the audience. We met afterwards and talked, and then we saw that Kerstin Kilanowski had also been in the audience. Kerstin and me had been colleagues as students working in the department of education … 30 years ago? Our common colleague and Kerstin’s friend Gisela Schinawa also came and greeted me … she wondered where my long hair was … it seems I have changed a bit during 30 years …
I can’t remember an August that has been this wet. July was sunny and hot, very hot, too hot too long, and August has been raining almost all the time.
The mushrooms seem to be the only ones who enjoy this. I’ve never seen the forest uphill of our house so full of them. I just took these photos during a 30 minute walk.
Amazing how many nice photos can be shot in 3 days. We spent this weekend in Zeeland, a coastal province of the Netherlands, mostly staying in or near Middelburg, Domburg, and Veere. At this time of the year, this part of the Netherlands is full of German tourists because of the school vacation. We went there even though it was somewhat crowded because it was probably our last chance for this year to go there, and the weather was not bad.
And we managed to meet all of our targets during this weekend: 1) lie on the beach, 2) take walks on the beach, 3) swim in the North Sea, 4) have coffee and apple pie in one of the cafes on the beach, 5) eat Dutch pancakes, 6) buy Dutch food (especially various kinds of chocolate and licorice) and Indonesian Kretek cigarettes which are hard to find in Germany.
On Sunday, we went to Veere for the second time because the Grote Kerk was open to the public – this church amazed me because it was so huge and looked so unusual (a fire destroyed most of it in the 17th century – it never was really completed). The church isn’t used for religious purposes anymore but mostly as a culture space (usually for modern art exhibitions and classical/jazz music). While we were there, we had the privilege to watch a rehearsal of Graindelavoix, a Belgian choir which sang 16th century music (Missa de Sancta Maria Magdalena, by Nicolas Champion).
Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode.
Requested file could not be found (error code 404). Verify the file URL specified in the shortcode.
I found that this music moved me deeply. It gave me a kind of continuous stream of goosebumps at times, something which I hardly get from music these days. Buying a CD of this stuff was the first thing that I did when I got back home.
We also climbed the tower of the church and got this nice view.
A last walk on the beach under dark clouds, a last coffee. When the first rain drops began to fall, we decided to return home. With a large box full of trophies.
Recently, I was the only participant showing up on an official but small-scale Adobe Coldfusion Developer meeting at Starbucks, on a very hot day that probably turned off the other potential developers. The representative from Adobe had decided to raffle two tickets to a U2 concert in Frankfurt as an incentive to come to the meeting. So I did not only get a tasty ice coffee and a bag with Coldfusion PR material, but I also went home with two U2 tickets, each worth more than 90 Euros.
I gave the other ticket to my friend Matthias Ebbinghaus who was very excited to get to see his once-favorite band live for the first time, and for free! I’m more a child of the seventies – U2 is a good band no doubt, but they never ranked among my favorites. I looked forward to this anyway, and we got rewarded with a very nice evening.
We took the high speed train to Frankfurt and found our seats among the other 55000 fans in a huge stadium.
U2’s „360 degree tour“ takes place under a structure that they referred to as their spaceship. It looked like a giant green bug to me first, but when the amazing light show took off, I could see what they meant.
We both weren’t really impressed with the sound quality but we figured that in a huge place like this, it is probably not possible to create a real good sound quality for everyone. The people around us didn’t really care though – everybody was standing most of the time and dancing to the tunes most of which were even familiar to me.
I took a little while to get beyond my inner judge who criticized the silly rock star movements and cliches, but after that, I could let myself fall into the show, and I liked it a lot. It helped that the four musicians keep trying to transport a positive message.
Too bad we had to leave a little bit early so we could catch our train back to Cologne. Thanks for a very nice evening Adobe !!
25 years ago, a guitarist from Cologne called Michael Frank started a band called The Absurd. Their mixture of rock (often including odd meters and political lyrics), jazz, and free improvisation was always open-minded and full of crazy ideas, experiments, and fun. Many musicians (including myself) were members of The Absurd for a while.
After 25 years, today’s incarnation of this band is still alive and kicking. We met for a hot July weekend in Berlin to record in the Andere Baustelle studio that belongs to a member of Berlin’s most famous experimental band, Einstürzende Neubauten.
We were 16 musicians this time, some from Berlin, some from Cologne – a real big band, with several guitarists, several drummers (one at a time) and percussionists, several bass players (two at once at times), lots of singers and brass players, plus keyboards and vibraphone. When all these people were all in full flight, the sound was mindblowing. I was reminded of jazz orchestras like Centipede at times.
Travelling to Berlin by train was already fun 🙂
We were very happy with the studio personnel and gear (although it was so hot in there at times that the air conditioners had a hard time to cope).
My workstation was an ancient Marshall tower. I played the Turkish Cümbüs during the piece „Zukkaattakk“ and my little Höfner Shorty guitar (with an inbuilt speaker!) into my modified Ibanez UE400 multieffect – so I was mostly using real vintage gear this time.
Studio work is exhausting …
A wonderful weekend, big fun with good friends. I haven’t heard the studio recordings yet, and I don’t know how much of it will end up on the silver jubilee vinyl that is planned. I think there was lots of incredible energy, I hope it got caught on tape.
On Sunday night, we did a „video concert“ in the studio. We played all pieces while being filmed by several cameras. For some reason the realtime video podcast didn’t work but we have the video material. Here’s Sercan Özökten’s video cut of „ZukkaAttakk“ (play it VERY LOUD to get an idea of the energy that was in the room) and „More Miles per Hour“.
3 days in Switzerland, giving a ColdFusion training for three developers of a Zug based company. The training was a mixed affair – the participants weren’t beginners at all but a beginner course had been booked. On the 3rd day they were all researching on their own which is much more fun than being taught. Too bad I didn’t get most of their conversation – „Swiss German“ is very different from German.
Zug is not far from Zürich, a smaller town but also very rich and multicultural – I liked the place a lot. And then, they have the wonderful lake, the mountains … and the weather was just perfect. Too bad I only had two evenings for myself.
I spent the first evening walking through the old town and hanging out with the other tourists …
On the second evening, I took the cable car up the mountain right behind Zug, armed with a map for a 1-2 hour roundtrip hike that one of my ColdFusion colleagues had kindly given to me. I was rewarded with breathtaking vistas and a beautiful landscape to walk through. Wonderful!
On a meadow on top of the mountain I met a herd of twenty cows with bells – here’s what they sounded like:
The cows came towards me after a few minutes and surrounded me, clearly interested in my digital recorder. Or maybe they wanted to be close to me. I liked them and they liked me. When I turned around and continued my walk, they all followed me for a few minutes.
On the next evening, I got into a plane and flew home again … after a very nice mini vacation (although of course I had spent most of the day in an office building, looking at a computer screen and talking about programming). I’ll be back in July when I’ll do a second course.
Two hikes today, on the last day of our Swabian Albs vacation. It was still very hot, and it is still quite warm now while I type this, sitting on the balcony of our temporary home at 9:30 in the evening. Wonderful! I love summer.
We first hiked in an area that used to be a military training ground for many years since the late 19th century. It was expanded in 1938 – and a complete village had to be abandoned, its inhabitants had to be relocated. Today, the area is a nature reserve but you are not allowed to leave the marked paths because explosive or other dangerous material might lie around.
The church and the little schoolhouse are the only buildings left of the abandoned village – all buildings were destroyed. The church was severely damaged and was later rebuilt by former villagers. An impressive place, and a monument to several different sides of what we humans are.
A painting shows how large the village was before it had to be abandoned, and got destroyed. Amazing what people do.
The little village church with a damaged roof … it looks new and shiny today.
Inhabitants of the village.
We left this area which had mostly paths with no shadow at all, and drove to a narrow valley with a little stream. Much cooler here, much better to walk.
At the end of our hike, we rested for a while beside the little stream. The sun was very very hot. The water looked very very clean. Very tempting to jump right in !! but as Sabine found out quickly, the water was extremely cold – too cold to take more than a short dip.
This is COLD !!!
Half an hour later we had a gorgeous strawberry milk shake and a coffee in the very good cafe that belongs to our hotel. These cookies looked so tempting that I gave in and bought a large box for us and another one for our dear neighbours who took care of our plants at home.
The Grosse Lauter river valley was one of the most beautiful little valleys I’ve ever seen, mostly because of the apparently intact ecosystem and the variety of plants and animals. We walked along the river for a while but we couldn’t go very far because it was very hot and the path had almost no shadows …
The thing that mesmerized me most was the blue damselfly population. These beautiful insects lived along the shores of that little river, dancing in the sunlight, and apparently not afraid of us. We have never seen anything like this. There are various kinds of dragonflies even back home in our garden but not these ones, and not as many. I spent a considerable time trying to take photos of their dance. A difficult task. Sabine was very patient with me. Making a little video (see below) was somewhat easier.
We made a little detour and took a look at the Zwiefalten Abbey – we’ve been to the Schöntal Abbey a week ago, it is a place that I know well. I thought Schöntal was an excessively decorated baroque church, but it was dwarfed by what we saw in Zwiefalten. Incredible, and even though I don’t particularly like baroque churches, it was quite impressive. I made a couple of dozen photos from one position – maybe I can turn it into a 3D photo later.
