Summery Summary

This post is going to be rambling style, taking a leaf out of Scriptor Senex's book, so to speak; if you have not yet been to his blog, please make sure you go there, and I am quite certain you will not regret it.

I've been on about how I feel about the end of one and the beginning of the next month before, and a quick look at your own calendar will tell you that indeed we once again crossed such a threshold on this past weekend. It also marked the end of the first half of 2012 - unbelievable, isn't it? Didn't we celebrate New Year's Eve only yesteday?

June was mostly a summery month here, although we had by no means only sunshine.

Here are some random images and words referring to last month:

My orchid, which was a birthday gift from a friend of mine a few years ago (and happens to be the only potted plant in my flat, not counting the herbs on the window sill in the kitchen) had been blooming for a long time now, after an even longer rest. Only yesterday, the last blossom fell. I wonder how long it will be this time before it comes back.

The cherry tree in front of our house is strategically well placed - I can pick cherries directly from my kitchen window. And so I did; several times I was able to fill my muesli bowl and then enjoy the cherries while watching "Midsomer Murders" or the occasional football match (it was, after all, the European Championship) on TV. 


Have you ever wondered what has become of the forgetmenots that I mentioned several times on my blog last year? Well, I had transferred the terracotta planter from the outside window sill to the one in the stair case, to keep them safe from frost and hoping they would resume growth after the winter. I watered them regularly, but one day I came home and found the whole planter gone and emptied into the dustbin. My well-meaning neighbour must have taken a pity on the sad looking lot. They could have asked me first, but they never did, and so the forgetmenots didn't get a chance to see the next spring.

For my birthday this year, I received a set of seeds for three kitchen herbs, basil, coriander and thyme. On the 14th of June, I planted the seeds according to the instructions (it was one of those sets where the soil comes in the shape of a compressed tablet and turns into "proper" soil as soon as you add water).

They are doing well, I think, and I am looking forward to "harvesting" my own herbs.

The view from my kitchen window shows green, green and more green - it is a time of the year I love very much. There are also beautiful flowers in the neighbour's garden, and many birds come visiting (as well as the occasional cat).

Speaking of cats, Lucky (that's his name) is convinced that his humans have bought new furniture for their patio just to accomodate him :-) This is what I see most mornings from my bedroom window when I look down after having pulled up the blinds.

June was divided into two halves for me; I was on holiday the first half and back to work the second. The month ended with a BANG - literally! We had a massive thunderstorm on Saturday night, which put an end to my plans of going to the market square festival of my home town. Instead, I watched the spectacle from my window. Just before all hell broke loose, I took a few pictures of the very dramatic sky, complete with a plane that hopefully reached Stuttgart airport before conditions made flying difficult and dangerous.


And today, it is the 2nd of July, and I am looking forward to see what this month has in store!

Fashion Calendar: June

It is obvious to anyone who reads my blog that I love clothes; I've been going on about them many times, sometimes with interesting discussions ensuing from my musings, such as here.

What I love most out of all types of clothes are dresses.

A dress is just the perfect item - it allows you to be ready with one single bit of clothing (not counting what is worn underneath), and all you need is a matching pair of shoes and maybe a handbag and jacket, if temperatures so require.

My dresses range from the type I only ever wear at home to the ones that I can team up or down for either business or just doing the groceries shopping, and I have a few that need a special occasion to be worn, such as a party, a ball, going to the opera or to a posh restaurant.

Not that long ago, my Mum presented me with what is currently my most beautiful dress - and waiting for an occasion to wear it:

It is from Laura Ashley and originally must have cost somewhere around 250-300 €, I guess; my Mum got it for just over 40 € from Ebay.

Now, some people say they'd never wear clothes bought Second Hand, but in this case, the lady she bought it from lives nearby and we have both been to her place and seen what an exceptionally clean and tidy household she leads, she herself being a very neat and well-groomed person. When she says she has worn the dress only once to a wedding, I believe her.

And now it is mine, and I already know with what accessories I am going to wear it - with the exception of the shoes.

In case the occasion should be a ball, I'll of course be wearing my dancing shoes. They are black and therefore do not match the dress perfectly, but they are proper dancing shoes and allow me to spend the majority of an evening on the dance floor without my feet suffering. Should the occasion be a night at the opera or ballet or something else, I'll have to think again.

The shoes I am wearing in the pictures are certainly not the ones I am really going to wear with this dress; the heels are chipped in two places and that would just make the whole outfit look somewhat shabby. So, in all likelihood, if the occasion arises to wear this dress and it is not for dancing, I'll have to buy new shoes... *sigh* :-D

A Nice Little Walk

This is the continuation of my holiday report from Lake Garda. If you have missed the previous posts or can't remember what we last did, simply click on the label "Travelling" to find them listed.

Walking regularly features on my blog, such as when I told you about a long walk I went on earlier this year, or when I was walking in the rain. So, if by now you can't bear to go on yet another walk with me, I advise you to skip this post and wait for the next one, which should be a Fashion one :-)

The place is still Lake Garda, Riva del Garda, to be more precise. The date is Friday, the 8th of June.

From the evening of our arrival, we have been looking at the ruins of a castle from our hotel room, high above us on a steep mountain slope:

(our room was at the back of the hotel; what you see here is the front with the glass-covered breakfast room)

It looked like a challenge to get there, and we were ready to face it today after breakfast.
To our surprise, we found the castle to be easily accessible by a well-paved path winding up the slope in serpentines that were not too steep even for families with children; it took us maybe 25 minutes to get to the top.
Twice, we stopped underneath large trees to shelter from the rain that kept falling on and off, and also to take some pictures, both of the view across Riva as well as of this abandoned house which - you guessed it! - very much appealed to me:

At the top, the castle ruins were open to be explored, and since it had begun to rain once again, we waited for a while in the one area that still has parts of a roof.

The sun made some brave attempts to come out, and we decided to go back down on the same path and then find our way to a waterfall I had been reading about in my guidebook. It was described as a walk along the Sentiero Ponale, a path/road leading along the lake, and sounded like a nice little walk - just what we wanted.


So we set off, water bottle and a handful of roast almonds and of course the camera in our bags, as well as the small umbrellas we'd be quite sure we were going to need at some stage.


The Sentiero Ponale is important enough to have its own website, where you can look at pictures and read up on its history - if you understand Italian, that is. If not, let me give you some background:
Giacomo Cis, a wealthy merchant who found himself without a heir, decided in 1848 to use his economic (and, along with that, political) influence in the area to have a road created that would finally link the Valle di Ledro to the rest of the world. Up until then, the people who lived in the Ledro valley had been isolated by the geographical nature of the place, and travelling across the rough mountains there had been really difficult and dangerous.
In 1851, Mr. Cis died, just when the finishing touches were given to the road. It was opened to the public shortly after his death.

The road soon became well-travelled not only for its practical use, but also for the spectacular views it offered at every turn. For a long time, it remained open to everyone, until in 1990, it was closed because it had become too dangerous, with extensive repairs having become necessary to the many tunnels and the path itself. In 2004, it was re-opened - but only to people on bikes and on foot, not for cars.
Since then, it has become a hugely popular route for mountain bike enthusiasts, something we did not know until we found ourselves faced with bikes racing towards us almost every step we took, which made it rather difficult to fully enjoy the walk and the views.

It started to rain more frequently and heavier as the afternoon wore on, and it took us a long time to get to the waterfall mentioned in my guidebook. By then, we were - in spite of our umbrellas - quite wet, and exhausted not so much from the actual walk but from the constant state of alert we had to be in due to the cyclists who were, I must say, quite inconsiderate not only of each other, but even more so of anyone else who was not on a bike, in spite of big signs along the path that warned them to reduce speed at the narrower and steeper bits and to be aware of others who had just the same right to be on the path as they did.

For about half an hour or a bit longer, we walked further up with our map, thinking we'd make it to the next small village and maybe catch a bus (or even a taxi) back to Riva from there, since we didn't really want to walk back the same route.

In the end, we decided it was too far to get to the next village, turned around and walked back all the way. It wasn't so much the distance (we estimated our whole walk to have been somewhere around 14-16 km long) but the combination of rain and cyclists that made us arrive at our hotel quite worn out. 

The pictures I have taken - this is only a small choice, there are more on my photobucket album; simply click on this picture and then "next" to see them - hopefully show what a beautiful place it actually is.
With the damp warmth it almost felt like walking in a rain forest in some tropical country.

This building puzzled us - what would you think it is (or was)? The ruins of a palace, or a monastery of some kind?

Well, I found out it used to be a hydro-electric power plant, built in 1905, to make use of the steep drop of the Ledro river into the valley.


We had a good rest at our room, showered and changed before we set out to find ourselves some dinner. And later, all tiredness was forgotten when we discovered that a band was playing on one of the smaller piazzas in town, and we danced on the square along with dozens of others until they packed up their instruments - it was, all things considered, a great day with "a nice little walk" and ended with us dancing under the stars!

Why Do They Do This?

Like most people (I suppose), every now and then I am puzzled by why something is done in a certain manner. Usually, a bit of logical thinking can make me come up with a conclusion I find satisfying, but not always, as was the case when I wrote this post.

Maybe someone has an explanation for the puzzling way of a TV channel to deal with the airing of a series:

Some months ago, I started watching Midsomer Murders on ZDFneo. The series is simply called "Inspector Barnaby" here in Germany, and probably just as popular as it was/is in the UK, where I first watched some episodes when on holiday at my mother-in-law's.

Like all series, it is divided into seasons and episodes, and since it has been going on since the late 1990s, there are quite a few of those! In the course of the years, the recurring characters such as Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby, their daughter, the police doctor and some others have of course aged, and their circumstances changed (the daughter studying, then working; having a boyfriend, later getting married and so on). The Inspector's assistant changes, too; the first one is (I think) promoted and replaced by a second one, and currently, the series is filmed with a third man who was introduced as Barnaby's assistant a few years ago.

Imagine how daft it seems, therefore, that on ZDFneo, the series is not aired in its proper order.

We get to see a double feature every Monday night, and sometimes, the first episode is younger than the second, with - for instance - the daughter being married already and then you watch the 2nd episode of the night and find her still studying, and two different Sergeants working alongside the Inspector.

Why do they do this?

To me, there is no reasonable explanation. Yes, of course each episode can be watched independently of any other episode; none of the story plots span more than one, it is mainly the frame of the Barnaby's home life that runs a thread through the entire series. So, nobody will sit in front of their telly unable to follow one episode because it is not aired in the order that it was intended to.

But WHY the disordered way of airing them?

I imagine the procedure of buying a series for a TV channel being a normal business process. Say, for instance, the people from ZDFneo decided to buy the first season of the series, air the first few episodes and look at the number of viewers before deciding whether to buy the next seasons or not.

So, in the normal course of events, they would buy Season 1, Episodes 1-20 (that is just an example, I don't know how many episodes there are to a season) and air S1-E1, S1-E2, S1-E3 and so on, to be followed by S2-E1 etc.

Is it too difficult to keep them in order? Can't they be bothered? Have they bought an episode here and there instead of a a full "package" of a season? Or is there a secret algorhythm behind it all? Am I the only one wondering about this?

Read in 2012 - 16: To Love Anew

This book by Bonnie Leon was part of the "shopping spree" I went on earlier this year after receiving a Kindle for my birthday - it is available as a free e-book on Amazon, and that's why I downloaded it, admittedly without really looking at it first.
Had I done that, maybe I wouldn't have added it to the collection of fiction on my Kindle; it is what you could call a religious novel, and since I am not part of any religion myself, the constant references to the importance of all-enduring Christian love and faith were a bit much for my liking. Having said that, it does fit the story well, since I suppose in those days for many people their faith was the only thing that kept them going, as it is probably the case for a vast number of people today, although maybe less so in what we like to call our "Western" society but more in developing countries.

We start in London in the year 1804, and meet the two main characters independently of each other. Hannah is a seamstress who, by no means wealthy, leads a sheltered and modestly happy life with her widowed mother, sharing a small rented place where they both live and work, making fine clothes for London's elegant ladies.
John is a wealthy business man, married and well established with his tool-making company, a trade he has learnt from his late father.

When Hannah's mother dies of a fever, the former customers don't show loyalty to Hannah and move their orders elsewhere. Now that she can not pay the rent anymore, she is turned out of the only place she has known as home, and wanders the streets of London, trying to find work.
She does find employment as a scullery maid with a magistrate and his wife, but after a terrible incident, she flees the house and is once again on the street. When hunger leads her to steal a loaf of bread, she is caught and sentenced in court to 14 years of deportation to New South Wales.

John's cousin betrays him, and he is left with no money, no business, no wife and almost no life - only by intervention of his attorney, who still trusts in his innocence, he is spared the gallows and sent to serve a life sentence in New South Wales instead.

The inevitable happens: Both "passengers" on the prison ship taking them on the horrible journey to Australia, Hannah and John meet, and are instantly drawn to each other, knowing very well that they do not stand a chance to anything ever becoming of their relationship.

They first have to survive the six month journey and of course there is no guarantee they will ever set eyes on each other again once arrived at the prison colony.

To begin with, live does not seem to improve much on land compared to the apalling conditions on the ship, but then the tide turns, and John and Hannah get a chance for happiness.

The morale of the story is that one should never lose faith, and leave all revenge to God; now, one can simply read this book as historical romance and still find it a pleasant read, which is what I did. It kept me company all day yesterday on the train to and from work; I finished the whole book in about five hours.

Everything the book says about how crime - even something as insignificant as stealing bread out of real need - was dealt with in those days, and how little a human life was regarded (not that this has changed much in some parts of the world). Also, how the system of deporting "criminals" to the prison colonies worked is certainly well described and researched, and I do not consider having read this book a waste of time.

My next read is going to be some non-fiction again.

Verona

After a day of much walking (see two posts back), RJ and I were ready for something a bit less strenuous and decided to drive to Verona, which is about 90 km from Riva.

It wasn't difficult to get there; we had a map, we had SatNav and of course we had two pairs of eyes capable of looking at the road signs. RJ had been there before and knew it was nearly impossible to find a parking space really close to the town centre without having to pay a fortune, but we were lucky and found a space not too far off, maybe half a mile along a road lined with banks and cafés, where at the time of our arrival, many business people were taking their lunch out on the pavement under the trees.

My first impression of Verona's town centre was this one:

A huge piazza, lots and lots of people (don't be fooled by the apparent lack of people in the pictures) - and the arena, of course.

We walked around it on the outside; neither of us felt we wanted to go in for a closer look, it was that packed with tourists and already the crowds were getting to us a bit. The arena itself is certainly impressive, as I hope my pictures can partly convey.

Off the piazza, the roads lead further into the centre. This shop-lined street had all the big names sought out by shopaholics all over the world; Gucci, Prada, Luis Vuitton - you name it, they had it. Not really our kind of place, but the worst was yet to come.

Everybody is, I believe, more or less familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet (Julia in German, Giulietta in Italian), made immortal by Shakespeare's play.

Now, legend (or history?) has it that this unhappy couple and their families lived in Verona, and Juliet's house is a major tourist attraction. We had a look through the courtyard where, between throngs of people's heads and shoulders, we just about managed to catch a glimpse of the balcony. Yes, THAT balcony. It was awful: crowds of young people were yelling, whistling and laughing down in the courtyard, and a few bewildered-looking tourists (young, female, pretty) who had paid admission to the house and were now standing on the balcony were looking down at them, clearly not wanting to kiss each other in spite of the crowd demanding it. We turned on our heels and fled.

For a moment I thought it was a bad idea to come here, but then RJ suggested we walk towards the river and then along it on the other side (I told you, he had been to Verona before).

We did that, and as soon as we were just a few yards off the most badly beaten track, things quietened down (as much as they do in an old town centre, lived in and worked at by many people), and it became a lovely afternoon.

Here are some of the sights we saw; I could have taken a picture every few yards, really! If you want to see more, you can go to my photobucket album and browse it from this picture onwards.

We had a meal at a tiny osteria, where we were the only guests; it was way past lunch and way before dinner time, but the kind lady still served us in the most friendly manner. The drive back was uneventful, and we were not even fined for having overstayed our parking space by several hours :-)

We both agreed that the next day, we would be going for a nice walk away from lots of people. That will be, of course, another post.

Read in 2012 - 15: Neben der Spur

A German book for a change, written by Ella Theiss, a German author who is an email friend of my Mum's and sent her this, her latest work, with a personal message for her in the front:

"Neben der Spur" is crime fiction against a backdrop of a topic of current interest for many German readers: biological (vegetarian) food, how it is produced, and the ethics and morals behind it.

Set in and around the German town of Mainz, with an excursion to the Czech Republic, the story starts with the 100th birthday of Hermann Hepp, whose company has been producing bio-vegetarian soups and condiments since before WWII.

Journalists gather for the celebration, one of them being young Karoline Rosenkranz, and it does not look as if any exciting story could come out of this, but then a bomb explodes and a chain of events is set in motion that leads to said journalist investigating the matter on her own accord, nearly resulting in her being murdered.

Both the past and the present bear many secrets, some of them just very sad, others really dangerous, and while for a long time Karoline's suspicions are partly wrong, in the end she does manage to uncover the plot and finds love along the way where she never sought it.

I must admit I would not have read this book had it not been lent to me by my Mum, and while it is a pleasant and fun enough story, I wouldn't call it a "must read". The story is well told, with the chapters jumping in perspective mostly between Karoline and old Hermann (with some other characters getting their own chapter every now and then), but I always find it difficult to get "into" a book when I can not really relate to the main character which is, in this case, Karoline. I am not very fond of her with her silly obsession about dieting and her rather chaotic approach of life in general and her work in particular, but I am sure a lot of readers will like her exactly for that.

Early into the story, it becomes obvious who is behind the strange goings-on, but that person's relationship to another character in the book is only revealed at the end and came as a surprise to me.

The whole setting is well researched, and the author thanks those who helped with her research into such varied topics as preparing for a piano concert, living with an autistic child, and communication in and with the Czech Republic.

It had its gripping moments, and some funny bits, and there is a recipe for home-made vegetarian condiment by Ella Theiss herself.

Now it will go back to my Mum's, and I'll decide what book to read next - I have so much choice these days with my Kindle and the books I was given while in England.