puzumaki

For our anniversary, we took a weekend trip to Dresden, a place Herr has been very interested in visiting. We rented a car (we were upgraded to an Audi when the car rental learned it was our anniversary), and drove through a snow storm to get to the Schloss Hotel in Dresden - Pillnitz. We had the second best room in the palace (the first was already booked), but it was really nice. Because we got in fairly late, we ate dinner at one of the two restaurants. The food was fantastic, and we had the whole place to ourselves.

We started the full day tour of Dresden at the Frauenkirche. The church was just rebuilt in 2005 after being bombed in the second World War. We did not go in immediately, but rather ran into a little pub and drank some hot chocolate (tea for Herr) to warm up for the strong bitter wind blowing through the platz.

Once warm again, we walked south passing the Kreuzkirche and catching a tram to the main train station. Then we returned to the Frauenkirche to tour the interior, and paid extra to go to the rotunda for a blustery yet clear view of the city.

We ate at a small sushi restaurant before making our way to the Semperoper opera house. They had an english tour that we joined an hour later, after visiting the Zwinger. I really want to go back to Dresden this spring now to see the grotto with the fountains on. The Zwinger is mostly a big open courtyard encompassed by a museum. We hung around there until the tour was ready to leave at the opera house.

The opera house was interesting enough, although we were unable to see a performance there due to conflicting schedules with the ticket offices… but we did stop by the Residence Palace to see some of the state treasures. This building is easy to spot at a bird’s eye view due to its massive puffy looking glass dome.

The Residence Schloss was another building razed and recently rebuilt to house the remaining artifacts of the Green Vault (and other museum collections). In order to enter the Green Vault, one must enter at a specific time through an electric airlock after depositing just about everything except your underwear in a locker. Once inside, however, you get to experience how the pieces of art were originally displayed, not the modern style of separating each onto a pedestal with five feet of clearing space.

For dinner, we went to the fancier restaurant at the palace where Herr ordered a full five course French cuisine (we were given a sixth, complimentary of the chef). Admittedly, I was falling asleep watching him eat so much while I only ordered a main course, but the food at both restaurants was excellent. We had live music, a fire, and only a few other couples to enjoy the evening.

In the morning, we decided to go to Leipzig for Herr to railfan a bit (at Europe’s largest train station)… yes, it was his idea. The city was kind of scary though, with parts of it in disrepair. Herr enjoyed a nice romp in the Audi at 230 kph (roughly 140 mph) before we hit another snow storm on our drive back.

Lately I am listening to a lot of popular music, but a lot of international music as well. Some of these artists have made it into the mainstream, but others… well, you may not have heard of them yet. Here are a few I have really enjoyed. (If anything, check out The Baseballs!)

Katzenjammer (Norway)

Blaring horns and catchy beat, A Bar in Amsterdam is a very energetic song. The animations are fun too. I ran into this while on Imeem, now just a sub site of Myspace.

Movits (Sweden)

Herr actually heard of this group first, I think while listening to NPR or something. I can’t recall exactly, but their Fel Del Av Garden is a great pseudo rap/big band/swing song, and their album title song Appelknyckarjazz is very entertaining as well.

The Baseballs (Germany)

I just found out about this group today. If you loved the sound of the 50s, look no farther! The Baseballs take modern lyrics and transform them into Elvis hip-swinging slicked-back grease-haired 50s rock. Very amusing if you are familiar with the popular songs they cover.

Emiliana Torrini (Iceland)

While I was flying back to the States for work, I heard this on their international music segment. Jungle Drum is cute and perky, although a tad weird… but hey, quirky is in, right?

Zee Avi (Malasia)

A ukelele is the main instrument with a fun but slower beat. I cannot recall how exactly I stumbled across Zee Avi, but it is good stuff nonetheless.

Little Boots (United Kingdom)

Found this artist on a 2010 upcoming artists to watch for list. The music itself is simplistic but really catchy, but as far as dance electronica music goes, that is par for the course. I have played Remedy several times, sometimes in a row, and it lifts the spirits a bit.

Xavier Naidoo (Germany)

I was in a hotel somewhere a few months ago when I saw this and really liked the message and beat. He has a great voice too. Plus, I liked how the video came together. I found out afterwards that he is a neighbor of one of my friends here. How cool, eh?

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

This year I want to make my resolution more of a project for myself than just something I think I’ll do and don’t ever get around to it. I came up with some decent ideas, each being something I really need to do, but only one would be what I focus on. The suggested resolutions:

1. learn a new language (probably German but also French or Mandarin)
2. focus on music (singing, cello, piano, etc)
3. focus on writing (this, along with being cute, were my resolutions last year)
4. only think positively (a lot of negative thinking last year)
5. lead a more active life (not just physically speaking)

All are things I am trying very hard to obtain, and honestly, if I could keep myself to a routine, it would be something like this: wake up at 5 a.m. and exercise for an hour/hour and a half, be to work at 7 a.m., take lunch to walk the dogs, get home at 4 p.m. to practice instruments, eat a light healthy/organic dinner, study languages and read nonfiction (graphic design, history) until 8 or 9 p.m., then read for leisure until 10 p.m. to do it all over again. I’d alternate the study time with writing time because I really want to get my stories moving again. But I just can’t get myself to do all this! It’s so sad.

So, I asked Herr what of the resolutions I should make the official one. He decided leading a more active lifestyle would lead to the other ones (and honestly, I am getting the lethargic I-sit-at-a-desk-all-day body shape), so now I am supposed to be leading a more active lifestyle.

I started out walking the dogs right before we got major snow and ice problems and could not safely continue doing so (getting pulled by dogs on ice equals big ouchies). We are also performing in musicals, and that keeps us pretty busy. We are building a gym and music studio now, and we’ve both taken exercising very seriously. I do it right away in the morning so I can continue to sleep while I do stretches. Hey, it works well!

I am curious to find out what everyone else’s resolutions are, and how they are progressing. Herr’s is to stay fit, so that’s obviously going well with our new gym and my own goal.

1 January 2010

New Years Day was slated for a full day in Zurich. However, when we got downtown, it was more like a ghost town. Everything was closed (they even had posters everywhere stating it). It made me horribly depressed; it looked like it would have been a lot of fun to spend a day hanging around the shops. Herr attempted to cheer me up by walking around the lake, but it was such a dreary grey and windy day, we ended up back at the hotel two hours later.

So the first day of the new year, I spent watching movies on the tv and just relaxing. Herr left for a few hours to take photos of trains and visit the empty campus of ETH (where Einstein went to school), and later we went for another swim up in the pool (did I mention the views?). All in all, it was best for me to have a day of relaxing, and even though I was still sad about everything being closed, I felt a lot better.

2 January 2010

Herr really wanted to go to Konstanz, and I wanted to go to Rhine Falls, so our goal was to get them both in today. It took us a while to find Lake Konstanz, but when we did it was great. The sky had cleared up, and it was a true port area with port entries and docks with boats. We couldn’t find the catamaran that was still in service at first, but as soon as we sat down at a fantastic restaurant on the pier we spotted one coming in.

The restaurant had fantastic Mediterannean/Asian cuisine; I had a potato pear soup and Herr enjoyed a delicious Asain noodle dish (I helped him with it :P). We hopped on the catamaran for a 50 minute trip to the other side of the lake where the Zeppelin Museum is. We walked inside a Hindenburg replica and saw other aircraft/blimp/car related Zeppelin things but just missed the trip back we were supposed to take to Konstanz.

We ended up stopping by an ice cream shop and having a fancy kiwi sundae as we waited for the next catamaran, but it was already getting too dark to go to the falls. We just headed back to the hotel and planned to see the falls the next day.

3 January 2010

Our last day in Switzerland, Herr had originally planned to drive three hours south to go up the mountain to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn is visible. The skies were bright and sunny, and at the last minute, instead of taking it easy and swinging by the falls, we turned around to the mountains. Unfortunately, the farther south we went, the cloudier it got.

Zig zagging through the mountains, the directions read to get on a train then continue driving for a few more miles. This really confused us until we came to an auto train, where you actually drive your car onto the train, and wait in the car as the train takes you by rail through a very long tunnel. That was an interesting and dark experience (the tunnel is not lighted).

We eventually found the base of the peak with another pseudo rack railway that could take us to Zermatt. Now, I should say, none of this was free; going up a mountain is horribly expensive. So I was pretty grumpy when we got on the train. Zermatt is an interesting town in that no personal vehicles exist. There are mini hotel vehicle things, but you really just walk everywhere. Even as far up in the mountains as we were, the Matterhorn disappeared into foggy clouds. We saw the base of the craggy peak, but not the entire mountain. It was a bit disheartening.

As we waited for the train to take us back down the mountain, we stopped for a bit of cheese fondue. It seemed fitting to have our last meal be cheesy. The drive back (thank goodness the auto train was still operating at 6 p.m. on a Sunday!) took about five hours. In hindsight, we really should have gone to the falls, or just one of the mountain peaks. We are planning a trip to Austria later this year and have agreed we’d take the long way home through Switzerland so I can see the falls, and maybe even the ice caves (or regular caves), the two things I really wanted to do in Switzerland.

I do feel much better having gotten a break, but I was pretty stressed out for other reasons because of it as well. It is now the most expensive trip we have made in Europe, and it is making me wary about taking another trip anytime soon. We’ll see though, because we are finding ourselves more and more busy with the local theatre. But the views in Switzerland are definitely to die for.