Salzburg

This past weekend I briefly visited Salzburg to meet up with some people I worked with last summer (one of them studies there, the other is on a Fulbright program elsewhere in Austria). This marked my second time being in Salzburg, the first was back in 2006 with my family. We didn’t really do any of the cultural things for which Salzburg is famous: sound of music tour, mozart everything, etc. We did hike up the hill to the Salzburg fort (Festung Hohensalzburg) and wandered around there for a good while. I will say though, other castles and forts were more impressive and cheaper (€7.40 admission).

This trip was more about catching up and hanging out with the other guys than doing a lot of touristy stuff, so I don’t have a lot of pictures from Saturday. However, Sunday, they both had work to do and I booked a late train, so I went wandering around.

My favorite thing that I found was the Mirabell Gardens, which has a lovely park area, and then very finely trimmed gardens that nicely frame the fortress and a few other landmarks.

Of course, the most interesting parts of a city are the things you find by surprise, such as this street fest to promote eco-friendly transportation:

They had the marvelous idea of putting grass down on the street, which really gave the whole former thoroughfare a different feel. Obviously some people were placed there by the organizers, but a lot of families also parked on the new found green space just enjoying the day outside. I have to say this was my favorite environment-related demonstration I have ever encountered. It wasn’t preachy, protesty, or in any way offensive, just a simple but very powerful suggestion.

And that was a quick (second) look at Salzburg. I’ll be heading back into Austria on Thursday when I go Vienna, so more to Austrian adventures await.

Flickr set

Czeching out Prague

I’m sorry. It had to be done.

But indeed I did tour the city of Prague this weekend. Since my dad was there for a conference, it was a prime opportunity to see another European city, and on a slightly larger budget than normal.

Prague is the first former eastern European city I have visited (I guess with the exception of Berlin, which counts half…). That said, there didn’t seem to be too many signs of communism around, probably since it only amounts to a tiny blip in the city’s lengthy history, and has been experiencing some healthy economic growth recently. It really looks like the sum of the other cities I’ve visited thus far –

Packed with tourists, but cleaner than Paris and older than Berlin.

Mostly, we just wandered around looking at all of the touristy things. For dinner, our hotel recommended the Jazz Boat, which is an evening cruise with a live jazz band. The food was artsy, small, and expensive, but otherwise the music and the cruise was enjoyable.

Oh, except for the fact that 2 minutes after we pulled away from the dock it started pouring rain. This was fine as we were heading south on the river, since the right side of the boat was getting the rain blown at them. And then we turned around. That said, after the wind died down it was fine and the waiter came by with a squeegee to dry off the table.

On Saturday, we headed up to the hills across the river to see the Prasky hrad – the Prague Castle.

In addition to the impressive cathedral within, this site is also famous for the resistance of the Bohemians against the Habsburg rule. The distaste of the Bohemians with the Habsburgs is most fondly remembered by a group of the the former chucking 3 of the latter out a window of this castle, in an event now known as the Defenestration of Prague.

After touring around the castle with my father and some of his colleagues, we stopped for lunch and some beers at a restaurant nearby. When asked what size we wanted, small or large, we said large. We then got this:

After finishing our liters of beer, we stumbled off for our afternoon hike up to a touristy observation tower to get a better view of the town.

We then walked all the way back down to the hotel, where we took a well deserved nap. We met up with more of my dad’s coworkers for dinner at a fancy restaurant.

Sunday I got to enjoy the 7 hour trip back to Tübingen, which wasn’t that bad except for the rowdy group of old men talking rather loud preventing me from napping. Must’ve been soccer fans or something.

Also, be sure to check out My Flickr Set from Prague!

Soaring the Swabian Alps, Pt 2

Segelfliegen vom Schwäbischen Alb // Soaring from the Swabian Alps from Bathrobe Man (Scott I) on Vimeo.

Since the last post was more about pretty pictures, I figured I’d make another post with more details of my weekend. and to make up for the lack of pictures, there is a video instead.

Gliding is really popular in Germany. It stems back to the post war periods where the Germans were forbidden from building motorized aircraft, so they built gliders instead. There was one point where the number of gliders in Germany was greater than the number of gliders in the rest of the world. While this is no longer the case, Germany still has a fairly high concentration of gliders. This was evident not only by the ample activity at our little airport, but also in the airspace above where numerous gliders on cross country flights were flying. In fact, motorized planes were a rare sight in the airspace around the airport.

The way soaring works is thus: Plane get dragged into the air somehow, either by tow plane or winch. Winches are really popular in Germany, although the takeoff is a little more dramatic than with a tow plane. Once in the air, you try to climb higher by finding pockets of rising air, usually caused by uneven heating of the earth’s surface (hotter air rises!). Once you find these thermals, you circle tightly to stay in them and climb. The wings of the glider are very efficient to allow this to work. When significant height is gained, you can continue on. When you don’t have too much left though, it’s time to think about landing. In landing, you basically come in high and fast then throw the air brakes on and drop in. The landing is pretty rough since there is no landing gear, just one wheel on the bottom of the plane.

What you can see in the video is generally the start area, where we hooked the gliders up to the winch ropes. The gliders then get dragged along the grass next to the path, climb into the air, and when over the winch, they release the rope. An old Mercedes with a special roof rack drags the ropes the kilometer or so back to the start area. The planes then land on a grass runway to the left of the path, pull off to the side, and get pushed back to the start area.

Soaring the Schwäbische Alb

I don’t even know where to begin to describe last weekend. It was quite an experience.

I went soaring.

This was with a group which used to be associated with the University of Tübingen, which is still loosely affiliated in name: Aka-Flieg Tübingen. They offered an introductory soaring weekend at their airport on top of Übersberg.

We went up Friday night where we grilled, talked about flying (in german), and drank some beers.

I don’t think life gets much better than that.

Well, unless you toss actually flying in there too. The weather was variable, but we headed down to the other side of the field mid morning and set up camp for the day.

The gliders would be launched from a rope attached to a 280 Hp winch at the opposite end of the field. While 280 Hp doesn’t sound like much, consider a Cessna 172 (plane I normally fly) has 180 hp and weighs twice as much. For the gliders, this leads to rocket-like takeoffs.

In all, I got to fly twice on Saturday and twice more on Sunday, between dodging rain showers and playing rounds of soccer (lasting only as long as the gliders were aloft)

Soaring is definitely a different type of flying than what I am used to. First of all, the lack of motor makes things a lot quieter. Conveniently, the controls work the same, which leaves my brain free to track down the thermals crucial to staying aloft. Definitely a great experience, and I’ll probably try to get back in the air again while here in Germany.

Blues Dancing in Heidelberg

This weekend found me in 3 different cities: Frankfurt, to celebrate my birthday with former coworkers, Tübingen since I live there now, and Heidelberg for a blues dancing workshop.

I’ve not done much, or really any, blues dancing before but it is quite interesting. It is both very chill and still technical. You can steal a lot of steps from other dances, and the basic forms are simple, but there is a lot of thought to be put in to communicating with your partner and matching the music.

This workshop was led by Chris and Campbell (www.campbellandchris.com), who are from Texas but currently doing a mini European tour. Very exciting. I was at first a little skeptical about paying presumably extra for some random people from the US to come teach, but they actually turned out to be absolutely fantastic teachers. I don’t know how much blues dancing I’ll do, but a lot of what they taught in regards to lead-follow relations can be applied to ballroom as well (so if any Tufts ballroom people are reading this, remind me to bring up hugging and micro blues)

Anyway, after the workshop, we had some time to go wander around Heidelberg, which is great because I’ve wanted to see the city for a while, and it has a famous old castle on the hill side that is somehow a major tourist attraction.

Our arrival at the castle was perfectly timed just before closing and the security guard let us into the castle for free, marking probably the first time some German in a position of power has been helpful to me, and unsolicited at that!

Probably the coolest thing in the castle was the Kings old wine cask. This thing was HUUUUGE.

Note the platform on top of it with the (blurry) person for size comparison. Very impressive.

And now to go finish the homework that of course did not get done due to my extensive weekend traveling…

Happy Mother’s Day!

Story behind the photo also adorable. Now that it’s spring, there are tons of baby ducks and geese around. Friday I was in Frankfurt along the Main river, where there was a continuous parade of water fowl families across the lawn to the water.

Culture Shock

This is part of a project I’m working on for a class. We are required to ask people what they know about culture shock and gather stories, opinions, etc. Since there is quite a wide range of people reading the blog,  I figured I could post this here and if anyone has a bit of free time, they could answer the survey.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGdsU1laWHpQUmZaR2c4RFdxVk1WbXc6MQ