golegrand

a first for me last saturday: since the day we arrived in merano almost four months ago, i finally left my nearest environment by another mode of transportation than my own feet. till then actually, i went once by bus to the hardware shop a couple of stations away, and otherwise only walked in town and on pathways, and hiked on mountain trails – as for the furthest to something like 12 km outside the city limits. so, it finally happened on saturday that we took the train in the afternoon for a short trip to bolzano . bolzano the capital city of south tyrol, and with a population of nearly 107,000 it’s also far the largest city of the province. there, we went to say hello to ötzi , the 5,300 years old iceman, at the south tyrol museum of archeology. cool thing. and to get back on our feet again after such a memorable moment, we choose the "stadt café città" for a delicious apfelstrudel , and a millefeuille as well because italian/south tyrolea...

a bit of linguistics today, a favorite topic of mine :) tough, this might be either for the german speakers of you – interesting, amusing, surprising, unique, unusual… "südtirolerisch", the german south tyrol dialect, still puzzle me every day. here a collection of first words and phrases: behebung = bargeldabhebung am bankautomat (withdrawal) bis speida = bis später (see you later) griaß di = hallo, grüße dich (hello, to one) griaß enk = hallo, grüße euch (hello, to more than one) guat morget = guten morgen (good morning) hoi hoi = hallo, ahoi, moin, hej… (hi) identitätskarte = personalausweis (id card) kondomium = mehrfamilienhaus (apartment building) mochtes guat es zwoa = macht es gut ihr zwei (take care) nommitog = die begrüßung am *nachmittag* (saying hello in the afternoon) pfiat di (pfiadi, pfiaddi) = tschüß, auf wiedersehen (goodbye, to one) pfiat enk (pfiadenk) = tschüß, auf wiedersehen (goodbye, to more than one) verkühlt sein = erkältet sein (to h...

hooray! after almost two broadband-access-less months, me setting on tenterhooks (try to imagine!), our home is finally connected to the internet. that was like pulling teeth. so here they are, some photos of our new environment , enjoy. that aside, south tyrol is the very antithesis of hamburg: here you count the cloudy days, no the sunny ones. it's winter, and it's cold, however with nearly blue sky and sunshine non-stop. we made the right decision. i remember a friend native of the region saying once south tyrol is a land of plenty… he is so right.

griaß-enk! living in south tyrol, getting up in the morning looking at the mountains soaring up toward the blue sky, breathing the clear air, believe me, it's a big big gift of life. experiencing the beauty of mother nature to that degree is literally intoxicating for us guys-from-the-big-city. first advent, the last sunday of november, was supposed to be sunny again after a whole week with no sunshine – yeah things like that may happen here too. after a couple of days they also become a real talking point in the news. so, anyway, we decided to take that opportunity of nice weather returning for a hike to hochmut , a farmer hamlet at 1,360 m above see level, that we already visited several times during summer over the years (for those who activated the link: i wrote "a hike", not a cable car ride to the upper station). we started our tour up 1,000 m in a strange low sky scenery: low clouds were covering the valleys and mountains around, letting just the merano ba...

omg yeah we did it. we left our life in hamburg and moved to south tirol to live a dream, and there is no single day going by where i’m not thinking that we’re completely insane. in fact south tirol is a multilingual autonomous province in northern italy – german, italian and ladin being the official languages – but it’s still an absolute foreign country to us, a big unknown that we have to discover day by day, step by step… it’s not that i need to learn only italian as a new language, no, there are two, as the german dialect spoken here, called "südtirolerisch", is far far away from the standard german (at least and by chance the one used in authority and media). believe me, when i hear our new fast friends speaking with each other, it's as clear as mud to me. so it’s been almost one month here in merano. the two first weeks were just busy getting the most important admin paper work done, as well as meeting our new environment as new residents, not as tourists ...

while we're sorting out our belongings in the aim of our next big adventure, last week i reopened my old blue metal trunk (which carried my few basic stuff on my way to hamburg 1991), 15 years after i left it in the darkness of our so-called basement, and threw tones of handwritten notes, documents, handbooks and tapes from my past life as a german philology student and later teacher for french. and i found this one – my first work typed on a computer, the  commodore 64  my brother wasn't using anymore, some time end of 1989, shortly after the fall of the berlin wall. the paper was about the propaganda of the old german democratic republic.