Those Von Trapps were a hearty bunch
At the end of
The Sound of Music the whole Von Trapp family escape Austria, right before it is annexed by Nazi Germany, by hiking over the Alps into Switzerland.
Last week we spent 8 days in the glorious Arlberg region of Austria. As this is the area of Austria that borders Switzerland I can only assume that the Von Trapps were hiking right where I was skiing which means that they scrambled through areas like this:
and this:
and this:
That was one tough family.
Luckily for our trip we came prepared with skis and boots and hats and long underwear and lots of Thinsulate. Since the days of the Von Trapps a bunch of nice people have also gotten together and built amazing ski lifts and gondolas and mountain houses where you can have all the hot spiced wine you want before hurtling down freshly groomed powdery slopes.
All of these wonderful amenities made for an amazing week. The weather was perfect. We skied through a could here and there but overall we had enough sun to require multiple daily applications of sunblock and allow at least one day of hatless skiing. I was definitely scared of the size of these mountains for the first day or two. I adjusted and only had a few fits of frustration that unfortunately mostly got taken out on H. Man is he patient with me. What a lucky lady I am to have him around the keep me going and push me to the next level when I want to give up. So overall my skiing improved a lot. I'm pretty proud of myself.
Then there were the mountains. They were like nothing I could have imagined and something that I'm still having trouble finding words for. The shear size of them was breathtaking. The sharp, steep, powerful rock faces covered in thick gentle snow was a sight I could marvel at for hours. I couldn't help day dreaming about what it would have been like to witness prehistoric rock plates crashing into eachother and rippling up in one amazing collision into what we see today. But you can see for yourself what I'm talking about. Here are a few more photos and there's a link at the end to the rest of our photos from our trip.
Here's a map of the whole area. Our ski passes covered all of these mountains and we tried almost all of them out. H definitely did the most skiing of our group and probably only missed one or two lifts on this whole map.
Thursday we headed up to the observation deck on Valluga, a mountain top that's one of the highest in the area at around 2,800 meters. We could almost see the Olympics from there. Here are two shots from the very top. You weren't really supposed to bring skis all the way to the top, but we saw quite a few nut balls ski off the left side of the first picture and find their own way down.
We stayed in a charming little town about 10 minutes from St. Anton. You can see our town somewhere down in the valley in this shot. Luckily there were beginner trails heading down from the tops of all of the mountains so I was able to take in these views with everyone else and still make it to the bottom in one piece.
I made a big giant batch of goulash (a type of beef stew) before we left and we stayed in a little apartment where we could snuggle down and have home cooked meals at night. Here we are enjoying said goulash and some local beer.
Here's the view from our front door on a foggy evening and a few more alps.
And here's a link to more if you're not tired of this stuff yet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbbenko/sets/72057594072033891/
Hittin' the slopes
Well...in about half an hour we're supposed to be Austria bound. H is not thrilled that he'll be doing all the driving. That's right, I still can't drive a stick shift car. I promise I'll learn. We just didn't get those lessons in before this trip. So we'll be gone for a week. So no new posts for you! Not that I really post all that much more than once a week. And not that anyone is really watching. I mean, come on people! Throw me a comment or two so I know you're still there. Have a great week. I know I will. See you on the flip side!
Mmmmm...Alps.
Arteests
So as I mentioned before, instead of buying things to hang on our walls we decided to make our own. So I now present you with the results of our first efforts as painters. Part of me is really impressed with what we came up with and the other part thinks that we're pretty much on par with some wierd student projects I remember seeing in high school. What do you think?
Can you guess which is mine and which is H's?
The day to day
So I just posted a big long composition on an interesting aspect of Croatia's economy and I realized that unless you have some real interest in Croatia and/or economics, this may not be all that interesting. So I thought I'd give you a little update on a few other things and a photo or two.
In the spring I plan to spend a lot more time outside taking photos of Zagreb and sketching some of the amazing architecture they've got here. So I'm sure I'll make you good and sick of all of that stuff at some point, but until then here are two photos of stuff within 5 minutes of my front door. The first is from one of the tram stops I frequent, down the street on which we live during a particularly nice sunset. The second is one of my favorite buildings we pass on our way into the center. Neither are my best photographic work but I thought you might enjoy them anyway.
This week we also had some fun with plumbing. The pipes and some fixtures in this apartment are over 50 years old. The valves have all been replaced over time with plastic valves. My line of work in the US has made me a bit of a plumbing fixture snob, but I think most people would agree that plastic valves are not a good idea. So after we replaced the bathtub valves more than once and they were still leaking, I convinced H to replace the whole thing. He decided he could do it himself. It ended up being quite an undertaking, requiring many trips to the plumbing parts store. And more than once the scenarios from the Cosby show were brought to mind where Cliff volunteers to "fix" things around the house and Claire cringes and secretly calls the repair man. But in the end, I have to give it to H. He did a great job and we now have a shiny new faucet set that works wonderfully. Here are two pictures of the project. The first is the darkest moment,the second the brightest.
Finally this week we undertook quite an ambitious painting project. As a kid I was always creative and a good amount of that has carried through my life, but somehow I actually never ended up with much training in any aspect of the fine arts. We still don't have anything hanging on our walls so we decided why don't we buy some paints and canvases and make our own art. So after quite a few hours we ended up with a painting we are pretty proud of. H gets the credit for design, composition, and actual painting. My role was as advisor and color mixer and I think our colaboration resulted in something better than either of us expected. However, I don't want to post a photo without the artists consent so you'll have to wait for that one.
Land of Opportunity
As both my and H’s careers have been shaken up a bit with this “break”, I’ve been letting my entrepreneurial imagination spin. Afterall I live in the land of opportunity where anything is possible. A little elbow grease and hard work and commitment to a good idea and you can achieve anything. There are plenty of big ideas just waiting to be snatched up. Wait…did you think I was talking about America?
No no no, Croatia is the land of opportunity now. Everywhere I look there are ideas ripe for the picking. It makes me wonder if we wouldn’t stay here and try our hand at a small business if we had no obligations in the States. In American dollars, the start-up capital is pretty small, and the best part is that hard work really gets you far here. It’s not that there are no Croatians that work hard, but compared to Americans Croatians in general don’t have a strong concept of hard work. Of course this isn’t really a bad thing. In fact it seems pretty great to me. Having time for 3 coffee breaks and some quality time with a newspaper during the work day is something that could do Americans a lot of good (not to mention the standard 4-5 weeks of vacation time).
Part of this disparity in work ethic can be attributed to the “European way”. Most countries in Europe have a much more active café culture than the US, and there is also the social culture of the town square that encourages workers out onto the streets and into the coffee shops at all times of day. But I could spend days on that topic. However, when it comes to entrepreneurial efforts there are a few other factors at play.
Sure the money is an issue. The economy here is still struggling a bit. There are plenty of people with no jobs at all. So start up capital could be an issue. But there are bank loans to be had, and as I’ll talk about some other day, the support of the family and whatever money they can provide is much stronger here than in the US.
However, the bigger factor at play here in my opinion is what I call the Communism hangover. Croatians as young as 40 remember well what it was like to live and work in Yugoslavia, and of course the cultural influence of communism reach many generations back in time. In a communist system creativity is far from encouraged and the rock solid job security drives work ethic to amazingly low levels. Now that the market has opened up a bit there’s a lag in the realization of the amazing opportunities that small private business offers. Even the small private business owners that I know don’t fully realize that just a little more work, some good marketing, and a good handle on what your consumers want could lead to amazing things.
It will happen. Young people are starting to think bigger. Each generation is working harder, thinking more creatively, and earning more. And within the context of the European work day culture that I mentioned before I think that Croatian business owners have a real shot at striking a sane balance between work and play that Americans have clearly lost sight of. But for now, entrepreneurship will just have to be a fantasy for me. The best we can do is to invest what little we have in the market of a country where the government has not yet realized the killing to be made in capital gains taxes.
So well adjusted, I even bore myself sometimes
So I haven't exactly been keeping up with this whole blog thing as well as I had hoped. It's not that I don't want to it's just that I don't have as much to say as I used to. I don't know how all of these daily bloggers do it. I always hesitated to start a blog because I just wasn't sure my creative writing skills were up to the task. I'm just not the kind of person who can make 4 paragraphs about dog poop interesting. (trust me, there
are people who can do this) This is especially tough for me because I don't even have a dog.
However, when I first arrived here there were plenty of blog topics rolling around in my head as I was introduced to the quirks of Croatian culture. Unfortunately, I've now adjusted to these things well enough that most of the things that I found strange at first now seem pretty ordinary. But I'm not going to let that stop me. If I found this stuff interesting at one point then hopefully so will you. So in the coming days, before my peaceful little life is invaded by 15 hours! per week of Croatian classes, I'm going to try to whip up a few post about my favorite cultural quirks in Croatia. I'm also working (in my head at least) on a post about my role as an American here. Stay tuned. There's more to come.
