Austria Skiing 2014: Ischgl and See

This year we returned to Austria for another weekend of skiing. It was so great last year we just had to go again. This time we chose a different area though and skied at Ischgl on Saturday and See on Sunday. You can pretty much drive along any valley in the Alps and every single town you drive through has a ski lift going up into the mountains with a few runs at the top of it. Some are bigger resorts and some only have 1-2 lifts. In our case, Ischgl was a bigger resort and See had 4 lifts, one of which was the gondola up from the bottom and another was a pulley lift which I don't really count.

We had a gorgeous sunny day in Ischgl. The fun thing about Ischgl is that it has 44 lifts! In a relatively small amount of space. So they crisscross and run all over the place and it's horribly confusing but you can pretty much get on any of them and be someplace with an easy or medium trail. And a lot of the lifts hold 8 people per chair so we never saw a single lift line though the resort wasn't all that crowded to begin with. It was really nice. Below are pictures from Ischgl, starting with pictures of myself and Martin with some mountains.



Here's our friend Kara taking a picture down the slope. Her and her husband Eric came with us from Germany for the weekend.



On Sunday we woke up to snow on the ground and snow falling from the sky so we decided to stay closer to our hotel and ski at See. It was cloudy and snowy but the powder was great and it's been years and years since I've snowboarded in fresh powder so it was nice. Then after lunch the sun came out and it was the most beautiful day:



Our friend Eric took this great pic of us:



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We had some amazing tomato soup with cream and chives on top of it. And crispy croutons floating in it too. We bought pretzels to go with it (we are near Germany, after all) and they went surprisingly well with tomato soup. I think it was just the salt though. :) I highly recommend the soup at See!



Look at how gorgeous the afternoon was!



That's right I took the gondola back down to the bottom. Dealing with powder is tiring!



Here's Kara cleaning off our car to leave on Monday morning. Looks like we only got about 4-6" Sunday night (I had cleaned 4-6" off Sunday evening from the snow on Sunday morning) but it was still snowing heavily when we left. It was nice to see some snow! Apparently the Pfalz isn't going to have winter this year.

Feuerzangenbowle

Feuerzangenbowle is a traditional German alcoholic punch, similar to Glühwein. They sell it at Weihnachtsmarkts but there's usually only 1-2 booths selling it as opposed to 10-20 selling Glühwein. It consists of warm spiced wine with a sugar cone suspended above it. The sugar cone is soaked in rum (with a minimum of 54% alcohol) and lit on fire so that it melts and caramelizes and drips into the wine. The fun part is that the more rum you add, the higher the flame goes. And in the end it all tastes amazing - I like it better than Glühwein. It's spicier and sweeter and much more palatable, in my opinion.

Last night we went to a friend's house for dinner and they had a feuerzangenbowle set so they made it for us. The process starts with some warm red wine with cloves, cinnamon, star anise, and oranges in it. Here is Christian warming up this concoction on the stove:



Here is the set, which consists of a pot filled with the spiced wine, tea lights underneath it to keep it warm, a metal grate to go over the top of it for the sugar cone to rest on, and a ladle to pour rum over the sugar cone and later to scoop out the wine with. And the sugar cone you just buy at the grocery store, they sell them here special just for Feuerzangenbowle:

Here some rum has already been poured onto the sugar cone and it's being lit on fire. As it burns, you continue to pour rum over it until you've emptied the bottle. Below are many pictures of the process as it's a fun 10 minutes or so:



Then once all the sugar has melted you get to spend the rest of the evening drinking it.