The Hills are All Snowy; They Make Me Want to Ski!

I have a half day tomorrow. The subway works are striking all day and there's really no other effective way for me to get to work. I do need to go over to BMW and see the wind tunnel again, which I can do by bus, but after that, I'm done for the week. Awesome.

Let me tell you about my business trip.

On Tuesday I went on a business trip in a foreign country. It was pretty easy to get there, having started in a foreign country to begin with. Ha. The place was this factory that makes lifts for car dealerships and test equipment for research facilities. We went to go look at some test equipment they had proposed to build for a climatic wind tunnel we are designing for a company in Sweden. A climatic wind tunnel simulates weather, like snow and rain and such.

The factory was situated out in the middle of nowhere Bavaria in the foothills of the alps. Inside there were a bunch of funny little rooms in and around the offices and manufacturing space. One of these rooms was a little bar with an old-timey wooden interior. On one wall hung a picture of "Mad" King Ludwig of Bavaria, the guy who built a bunch of crazy castles over a hundred years ago, and on the other, a picture of John Wayne. Their cafeteria also had very traditional-looking wooden chairs and tables. Quaint.

The meeting was tough for me to sit through, knowing very little about the equipment from the start and having to try and muck my way through specific technical German. My conversational German is getting better, but talking about cooling and ventilating motors in German is an entirely different beast. I survived.

As we finally left to head home late that afternoon, the two guys who had brought me along informed me that we were taking a scenic route home. The two guys were Steve and Klaus, by the way. Steve is an American, with a very goofy American accent in German, and Klaus is a German, with a very funny German accent in English. Both fairly friendly.

The aforementioned "scenic route" involved driving south through the foothills of the Alps to see the cute little Bavarian towns and the little bit of countryside we could see through the fog and snow. On a clear day the drive would have been absolutely majestic, I imagine, but we had to imagine most of the mountains surrounding the road because of the fog. We even stopped at Neuschwanstein Castle, the famous Disney-inspiring castle built by King Ludwig. You really could not see much at all. Here's me with the castle, if you can see it at all:



We could have driven closer, but Steve's dinky little car probably would not have been able to make the ascent. Going to Neuschwanstein is a staple of the German tourist experience, so I will definitely be back in fair weather.

The snow was really fantastic. In some places it got up to a meter and a half. Another picture perhaps:



Absolutely wonderful. Everything was so simple and alpine in and around the villages. It reminded me of the big ski resorts in the states, though every single little bit of what I saw was completely authentic and not a cheesy replication. The ski resorts at home should probably remind me of here.

We stopped for dinner before leaving the Alps. As I'm told, most of these villages have their own special beer, a tradition dating back to the time when monasteries were everywhere in the mountains. Monks used to make a lot of booze back in the day.

My goodness do I want to go skiing now. It looks like it will happen too; I've got a trip to Austria in the works and a couple day-trip possibilities on the horizon. I'm gonna go Alpine Skiing! For real.