More Pictures from the Rotondohütte Hike

I finally got some of the pictures that other people in the group took from the hike with Martin's lab group. Karin, Mattias, and Johannes took the pictures below. Some of them just have better views of things than I got.

Day one, early on:



Drinks on the deck followed by dinner in the dining room at the hut. Note that I am behind everybody in the first picture, lying down on the lounge chair, recovering. Stefan is passed out on the lounge chair in the right of the picture so I wasn't alone!







Day two, the steep snow field that my pictures did not do justice:







A few more of the snow fields we tackled on day two:







And let's not forget all the rocks we had to climb:







Happy to be almost done:



A little Swiss pride (courtesy of Johannes):

Oerlikon Farmer's Market

Sunflowers, anyone?



I have not yet figured out what people do with a single sunflower, or a bouquet of sunflowers. They're quite large ... do they make special vases for oversized flowers? I see a lot of people wandering around with a single sunflower that they have purchased and I always wonder what they are going to do with it. But perhaps they plan to cut off the stem and make a nice little centerpiece like one of these:



Herbs:





Mmmm ... olives. Martin and I bought some. The Mediterranean booths are the best, you can smell them a mile away and they're impossible to resist. We also bought some grape leaves which turned out to be quite pricey. I also would have gone for some marinated feta or stuffed peppers but once we heard the price of the grape leaves Martin made me walk away.



There are also many booths selling fish, cheese, fresh ravioli, spices, jams, breads, etc. The usual farmer's market fare. This one occurs on Saturday mornings in Oerlikon (still in Zürich, but near where we live and not downtown). Every Tuesday and Friday there are farmer's markets in downtown Zürich which are also quite nice but all are more expensive than going to the grocery store, as most farmer's markets are.

Tonja's Farewell Dinner

Last night everybody from my German class gathered at a little Italian restaurant in downtown Zürich for a farewell dinner for our teacher, Tonja. Tonja is moving on to create course books for German language classes as opposed to teaching the classes. I think she'll be great at it because she was an excellent teacher.

One of the students, Ludovica, works at the restaurant that we ate at. She organized the evening and bought Tonja some gifts and a card that we all signed. It was a nice send-off for Tonja.

Here is Ludovica and her boyfriend, Jon-Paolo (I really have no idea how to spell his name, but he's Italian so just pronounce it with an Italian accent):



And here are a bunch of group pictures of the lot of us. All of the girls in these pictures were in my class. Only two of the guys were ... the rest are partners of all the girls.



Karolina (Poland), Nicole (Australia), Marcela (Brazil):



Karolina, Ligia (Venezuela):





The two guys on the right side of the table were in my class, Erlend (Norway/USA) in the back and Steve (Sweden) in the front of the picture:



Tonja is the woman in the brown shirt in the back left of this picture. You can also see we were just served our dessert! Everything on the dessert plate was amazing. That cannoli was possibly the best one I've ever had.

Davos Hiking - Frauenkirch to Arosa

On Sunday we took a bus to Frauenkirch where we started a 6-hour hike to Arosa, which is a town on the other side of a bunch of mountains. It takes 2.5 hours by train to get from one of these towns to the other because the trains have to go all the way around the mountain range that we hiked over.

Maybe this is the Frauenkirch (it's a church at least) - it was pretty and right where we started on the trail:



The trail started out in the woods, which was a nice change. It was nice to be out of the sun for an hour:



Then we walked above tree line in some nice meadows filled with wildflowers (and cows):













Then we were at the top! The Schutzhütte was actually a very tiny little shack when we thought it might be something more impressive ... perhaps with a restaurant with some beer. But whatever.





And here is our goal, Arosa:



Lots of pretty flowers and meadows on the way down. The trail on this side was horribly rocky and really hurt our feet though.







And here was our balcony at our hotel room in Davos. Lounge chairs with warm blankets for those of us who are always cold! Nice.

Davos Hiking - Schwarzhorn

On Saturday morning we bussed it over to Flüela pass, about 15 minutes outside of Davos, and hiked to the top of Schwarzhorn. The hike took us 4:15, and it would have been perfect - not too long, not too steep, beautiful vistas - except the entire top half of it was covered in a foot of fresh snow! And hiking in snow on any sort of incline is not fun at all because it's extremely slippery. But we got amazing views from the top! Schwarzhorn is over 3100 meters high and is one of the higher peaks in that area.

So this was taken from somewhere near the start of the hike. We hiked up to the top of the rocky-and-snowy peak on the right:





All the lakes here are this amazing green color from the minerals in the rocks in the Alps. I love it:



This is what the hike looked like towards the top:



Some views from the top:









I was pretty cold at the top, eating lunch in the snow. So I was wearing all of the shirts we had packed for the day. Nice mountains in the background though!





Here's the town of Davos, from the peak of Schwarzhorn:



Here's what hiking through the snow looked like, on the way down:



And here's a really big cairn:

Davos Hiking - Wildflowers

Here are some pictures of wildflowers that we saw on our hikes in/around Davos this past weekend. There were many pretty flowers and we only stopped to take pictures of a few of them so what you see below is only a very small selection of the fields of wildflowers we saw on our hikes!