I decided to split my posting about the skiing trip into some smaller postings. So I hope I won’t get you bored with a giant posting, which nobody reads… So you will get a story to each of my already published image galleries. Today it’s for Day 1.

Luckily I had a wrong meeting time in my mind (12:00pm instead of 12:30pm), so I reached the meeting point at the university some 20 minutes early. Since we had a big Ford minibus, with a huge loading space, we didn’t have any problems in loading the luggage. I only had to take five pairs of skiers into my roof carrier. Departure time was planned for 1pm, but since Jochen was little late we started at 1:15pm. Driving convoy got a little boring after some time, we took a little breakfast break at some Burger King restaurant near the highway. We reached Hard (AT) by 5:35pm to fill our tanks with cheap Austrian fuel. Another 90 minutes later we reached our target in Rueun. The second of April is Annika’s birthday, so there was a little party planned for the evening. So this was a very good time for the first get-together with our other travel colleagues. Some of us already showed there skills they have: singing, dancing, partying  or simply drinking. So you bet it went late… I hit my bed around 3am..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 11:51 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Here are my top songs of the skiing holiday:

• Sasha – Slowly
  While cruising down the slope in a relaxed mood, and getting outpaced by some racing people. You can have a look at the music video here.
  

  "everyone out there
  keeps rushing around
  but we'll just be floating
  safe and sound"

• Farin Urlaub vs. Racing Team – Zehn
  Being pulled up a Ski-tow, this song can be really fun. You hast have to take care that you don’t jump to high !
  

  „HeyHo da steht ihr nun, ihr seht gut aus und ihr seid jung,
  Und was uns jetzt noch fehlt ist Publikumsbeteiligung.
  So einfach isses nicht, wie ihr wahrscheinlich denkt.
  Das Leben ist kein Baumarkt und ihr kriegt nichts geschenkt.
  Eure Gesundheit ist was uns am Herzen liegt,
  Und außerdem seh´ ich´s gern wenn ihr schwitzt und euch verbiegt.
  Ich zähl´ bis Zehn und dann will ich euch springen sehen!
  1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7,8,9 - ZEHN”
  



• Die Ärzte – Monsterparty
  This Ärzte song was first published in 2002 with the Unplugged Album “Rock’n Roll Realschule”. Its lyrics are really a great! So we did spend quite some time with Markus’ phone to listen to this song.


• Heiko und Maiko – Sonnenschein
  We had a lot of sunshine, so this relaxed club tune was really fitting.
  

  „Aufgetankt und voller Kraft, spüre ich das Leben, fabelhaft. Was gestern war ist mir egal, die Welt ist nicht nur digital. Statt zu rennen, einfach gehen, barfuß auf der Wiese stehen. Schau wieder in mein herz hinein und seh' darin den Sonnenschein.“



• Texas Lightning – Over the mountains
  Is a new interpretation of Reinhard Mey’s great song “Über den Wolken” and the lyrics are really well translated (You can reach them via this page). There is also a song snippet accessible here. It was expecially fitting when we had this view over the clouds.

• Jack Johnson – Upside Down
  Definitely the number one song for the holiday! Unluckily we didn’t manage to memorize the whole lyrics. You might also want to have a look at the sweet music video here.
  
  

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 12:11 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

After spending most of the day in front of my notebook computer I managed to sort through all of the almost 1700 pictures of last weeks skiing holiday (878 made it online). There are a few real highlights amongst them! I also want to invite you to use the comment feature if there is some interesting information you want to add to the picture. To prevent comment spam you have to register at the image gallery (“Register” at the upper right) to use this feature. You can access the latest comments to images via “Latest Comment”.

Edit 10.04. 1pm: I also want to mention, that you'll also have to register at the image gallery to access the pictures in the original resultion of 1535x1024 pixels. Without registering you'll only have access to resized low-resolution pictures.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 22:51 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)

Back in my later school days I was convinced, that skiing was just not my cup of tea. I had been on two vacations with school at the age of 13 and 14 and had problems to handle this sport. My equipment didn’t fit, since I was still quite small at that time it was also quite heavy to carry – it just was no fun. Now wonder that I merely improved my skills from the first to the second year.
But meeting new people can chance your life and such experiences. Some of my friends at the university convinced me to start skiing once again. And this time everything went well. Since this time I really wanted to do it. I bought new equipment, and I had the challenge to show my friends, that I could do it. Luckily I was not the first newbie in skiing at the upcoming holiday in Ischgl. And being “beginners” we were really well cared about.
From a social point of view it is although quite interesting that a few of the people that joined us on that holiday are still good and important friends and still a part of my life. Like Georg who met me in Malaysia or Bianca, who also visited my in Malaysia and who had this great Birthday party in January in Zürich. There is also Jochen, who will be joining the upcoming holiday in Laax – and not to forget about Tim, who is one of my best friends. Unluckily back at those days digital cameras where still rare, so I don’t have coverage of the event..
But I made good progress and when we repeated the event one year later I was already able to deal with all kind of slopes. From that time there was no year, I did spent without a few days in the mountains.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Things to know at 19:56 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday I’ll be going for a long awaited holiday. Well… actually I was quite lucky, that it could be arranged. I will go skiing with Feki.de next week in Laax. So I’m at home now at my parents' and I’m getting my car and my equipment ready for the departure on Saturday afternoon.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 23:37 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

I finally managed to get my pictures of my last holiday online, and I won’t keep a short review on the holiday from you.

This first paragraph was written on the coach to Tirol: I'm currently sitting inside the coach which will bring us to Imst (Austria) and try to get comfy with the English keyboard layout of my PDA keyboard. Didn't use this gadget for quite a while now. In Malaysia it was quite a companion on the road - but in Germany I'm carrying around my notebook anyway. Right now we had a short break at the Rasthof Holledau and we are about to plan tomorrow’s trip through the skiing area of ISCHGL!! Tim has checked the weather conditions for tomorrow, and the forecast is really promising - plenty of snow and sunshine!! So we are planning to use the long downhill slope to Samnaun, do some downhill skiing there and then return to Austrian soil to ride some of the more demanding slopes and to go for decent Apres Ski afterwards!


Day1 – Ischgl

Since I’ve already spent about 14 days of skiing in Ischgl, and it is the area, where I really learnt skiing some years out time there can be regarded a home game. Arriving on the slope the snow was great, temperature wasn’t too cold and the sun was shining bright. Although we had to get warm with skiing again (at least Martin and me, who didn’t have the chance to practice our skills this season yet) we chose a few demanding slopes for the beginning. But we didn’t go too fast on them. After spending the morning on the Austrian side of the skiing area, we went down the downhill run to Samnaun. We took our traditional way into the village, and this year there was plenty of snow – so I didn’t hurt my skiing equipment to much while skiing down on a parking lot .

In the afternoon we gave a try to the Swiss part of the skiing area, and riding down on “wide red highways” was some fun, too.

We hit the bus on time to stow away our skiing equipment, and then made our way into “downtown Ischgl” to go for some Aprés Ski drinks. The “Trofana Alm” was already completely overcrowded, so we only could catch a place at the snow bar. We only had two hours to party there, but more wouldn’t have done any good (at least not for my wallet - one beer with 0,3l content was 4 EUR).


Day2 – Serfaus

Since the snow conditions were really bad here in 2005, we didn’t have a chance to explore this skiing area the previous year. So we were really anxious to explore the area. The skiing area is split into to main parts: Serfaus and Fiss/Ladis. In the morning we headed for the slopes of Serfaus, and decided to give Fiss/Ladis a try in the afternoon. Again the weather was clearly on our side and we had bright sunshine for the whole day. But in the morning not all of the slopes lay at the sun, so we headed for the sunny slopes first. We were really astonished how few people were skiing in Serfaus – we had some wide red highway slopes completely for ourselves. With great conditions we were speeding down the slopes a lot and were really busy in gathering kilometers on the ski runs. To reach the area of Fiss/Ladis we had to get back down to Serfaus, and I really got to admit, that the slope which led us down through a forest could be in any picture book.


Day3 – Hochzeiger

Our last day skiing came too fast. Since our coach planned to leave Tirol before hitting the big traffic jams, we only had time until 3pm to enjoy the weather and the slopes. But of course we managed to enjoy every minute.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 17:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)