golegrand

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.

our followers already noticed it. we love hiking. european alps, colorado's rockies, utah's desert, australian outback… so far, however, it's (only) been about some-hours or one-day hikes. this summer brought us to a new experience. let's say, it was on armin's mind for ages and at the end i got myself into it – a multi-day trekking tour on the merano high mountain trail (aka " meraner höhenweg " in german and "alta via di merano" in italian) in south tyrol, italy. my sine qua non condition: we wouldn't do it on our own. and here we are . the trek took our group of 11 hikers plus 2 mountain guides on a six-day, almost 100 km long journey around the majestic mountains of the texel group nature park range. we looked up to breathtaking views, enjoyed clean and scented air, met mountains farmers, slept in shared rooms with up to there unknown people, and learned how delightful simple life can be, far away from mass-consumption and urban ma...

yesterday at the elbe river in hamburg … one year before at swan river … … and the indian ocean a day later … ouch.

as for us, 2015 has been really cool. sadly, it's been an atrocious year for the world… let's hope we all can make it better with 2016.

today’s featured image: la mescla – where the verdon and artuby rivers meet. a detour off the martel track in the verdon gorges. so, this is what's been up since that awesome night with my friends the foo fighters in hamburg… june rocked hamburg. slash featuring myles kennedy & the conspirators were playing here too, and obviously we went to the show. great gig. july didn't brought us the summer as expected. hamburg was mostly stormy and felt cold. the fact remains that now, we're trained to run under pouring rain ;) we had an aussie migration consultant evaluating our chances for a permanent residency visa in australia, but the assessment results were not too optimistic – meaning a race against time (let's face it: we're too old), a lot of money and stress, and at the end no guarantee to be welcomed to stay – so, sadly, we've decide to abandon the project of spending the rest of our lives down under. instead, we switched to plan b, also...