it’s a strange world we live in:

you may also have a look at their instruments.

what surprised me the most: they’re from vienna, austria.

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 funniest group photo we ever made - titled "one at a time":

the soundtrack is a song we recorded with this choir. i had to speed it up a little to fit, though.

stay tuned for related photos from a choir contest in bregenz/austria.

here’s an alternate version for the heidi themesong. barbara and i had some extra-time in the hohe tauern national park in june, and somehow we ended up recording it.

in case you’re wondering: yes, she was actually chewing on forget-me-nots for the video. when we were done (after several attempts), there were no more flowers around her. :-)

for those of you who don’t know heidi, it’s an animated series about a girl who lives in the mountains. the original opening video can be found here.

here are some photos and videos from a gaming night at lisi’s place.

four notes that might help you understand the craziness that you see:

• we played the game where everybody adds a sentence to a story, but sees only the very last sentence.
• everybody read one of the resulting stories (we uploaded the two best videos).
• the lecturer had to wear the hat.
• i like to cut food ...differently. and i like to motivate others to do so. :-)

[view photos: gaming night at lisi's]

two weeks ago, i came by the nest of a great spotted woodpecker (dendrocopos major). i would probably have passed by unknowingly, but the young bird kept calling wildly for its parents...

[view photos: woodpecker offspring]

we tried to do a birthday countdown for anna. started with 70, but didn’t get very far...

that same evening: when three of us ordered sparkling water, coke, and a soda, the waitress said "oh, how responsible. are you the drivers?" - "umm, yeah... kind-of." (just that we were all going in one car. :-))