here’s a demonstration of how the last row of the bus through namibia and south africa was extraordinarily shaky:

“oftramol nagglts lei hintn” is the south-tyrolean way of saying “oft wackelt es nur hinten”, which basically translates into “most of the time, it’s only shaky in the back”.

my explanation, about halfway into the video: “curiously, only the last row seems to be that shaky. look ahead… and back in our row…”

the wool has been shed, …

… and i think i’m ready for the trip.

i’m leaving in less than 12 hours, and i just now finished (most of) the stuff i had to complete, which only leaves packing on my to-do-list.
sorry to everybody who i didn’t get back in touch recently – i’ve been extremely busy in the last two months.

update at 03:48: ok, now i’ve gotten into the packing mood, and i’m getting “i-gotta-pee”-excited. :-)

update at 09:50: it looks like 90 minutes of sleep aren’t even enough for dark circles around the eyes to develop…

here’s the first batch of photos from our trip to prague, in the end of may.

for our drive to prague, we had fritz’ gps-navigation system with a map of austria & germany (not enough), and a printout of google’s directions (the whole route from innsbruck to our hotel on 2 pages; not enough). it wasn’t surprising, then, that we ended up somewhere in the middle of prague and didn’t quite know where to go.
luckily, there was a friendly czech couple who offered their help, and described the whole route (still about a 20-minute-drive) on their detailled city maps. we’d probably still be there if we hadn’t met them!

the following day we went for a long walk in the city center and checked out some of the architectural sights.

continuing the tradition of going to odd museums for climatic improvements (like the heated bagpipe museum in budapest, at -15°C outside temperature), we went to see a barbie exhibition in hracek toy museum (which is located on prague castle). after all, we had just walked all the way up to the castle, it was extremely hot and they had airconditioning. :-)
nicole and philipp caught up with us that day, but for some reason decided to skip the exhibition. ;-)

[view photos: prague, cz (part 1)] [part 2] [part 3]

[related post: looking for a mailbox in prague]

while in prague (the photos are on my to-do-list), we almost overlapped with lorenz, who, back then, was on a semester abroad in brno/CZ¹.

unfortunately we didn’t get to meet up, but i remembered one photo that he took when he visited prague himself, and decided to pay tribute to that. :-)
 

[view photos: almost-overlap in prague]

…and while i should be asleep, let me state that prague (cz) was fun:

we held a meeting at the meeting point, downtown prague

just returned from a 2-day-trip to lienz/osttirol this evening, and i feel like i have to name one of the major advantages of travelling with lots of children: in about 85% of all cases, there’s wiener schnitzel and french fries for lunch/dinner/both¹. :-)

while i’m on the topic – there’s a funny german saying that i’ve found a few days ago:

 

 

went on a trip to timisoara/romania with the wiltener sängerknaben (wilten boys’ choir) from april 8th to april 14th.

we flew with austrian arrows! :D (check out the show if you haven’t already.) furthermore, our co-pilot (who i happened to meet the day before flying; small world.) turned out to be a former sängerknabe himself. small world¹!

it was somewhat disillusioning to see how different standards can be, just 500km from the austrian border (see accommodation photos – we were staying at a boarding school).
for example, take the showers. they were/looked extremely old and fragile, and water was leaking everywhere on the way to the shower head. the actual problem was that we didn’t have hot water the first two days. the problem was told, fixed, and we did get (very) hot showers, but cold water was off…
i thought it was rather funny in its own way.

while in timisoara, i saw the strongest differences ever between rich and poor: for example, trabis driving next to the occasional porsche that can rarely be seen on the roads at home.

at mcdoner (gallery), some of us had a sheworma. when someone discovered a french fry inside their wrap, we thought it was a coincidence. however, shewormas (apparently) feature a whole base-layer of french fries.

enough talking – here are some photos:
 

[view photos: timisoara, romania (pt. 1)]
[view photos: timisoara, romania (pt. 2)]