Life Stages: Retreats

I've experienced lots of retreats and weekends to get away from the chaos of the day to day and focus on God.  This weekend was another one with the young adults (mid twenties to early thirties) at Highrock Church.  We were out on a lake in New Hampshire, and were sharing the camp with a large group of middle schoolers.  Some basic observations:

- Camp rule:  You must have been born in the 1900's to have coffee (cutting out a very disappointed half of the middle schoolers.
- Middle schoolers require 1 leader for every 5-7 students, in contrast to our group requiring 1 leader for our 50 young adults.
- College retreats were very structured with particular things set out to learn and do and come away with (different tracks with a curriculum etc).  With the young adults, all that was needed was a speaker to provide some input, and then a space for us to talk to each other.  That was enough to foster the most valuable conversations tailored by default to each of our needs.

I accidentally woke up at 6:30 the first morning and beat the sun.  Morning photography on a lake is so cliché, and yet I always appreciate it.  I went running through the orange forests later in the day, sadly without a camera.  Love it.

There was a lot more to the retreat than beauty, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.

Letchworth is Lovely

So there is this lovely Stat Park nearby called Letchworth.  This is my 5th year as an RIT student and I've never been there.  2 friends and I decided to take the hour drive over and run through the gorgeous terrain.  We did about 8 miles in a little over 1.5 hours because we kept having to stop for pictures.  There are 3 sets of waterfalls along the way that were super cool and they are all set in a deep gorge.  We decided to do the gorge trail (most of the photos) and then tacked on the Mary Jemison Trail (video 1).  Love it!  Sorry the videos are shaky!  Enjoy.

 

Autumn's Glory

In front of my apartment after an early morning run on a glorious, brisk, Autumn day.  Favorite season of the year.

Biking Far! (to Nürnberg)

So Nürnberg has always been just out of reach.  It's a 30 minute commute by train, but it's about $10 for a round trip, so not something I want to do so often.  It's about 14 miles away, and now that the weather is delightful, it is bikeable.  I did it the past two weekends.  This picture is from the first.  It's nice being in Nürnberg with a bike because then you are not stuck in the city center, but instead can go out a little further and find nice places like this.

Saturday, I biked to "Summer in the City" to hang out with some friends at the artificial beach there.  Quite pleasant.

Yesterday I just ran 14 miles.  Maybe by the end of the summer I'll run to Nürnberg and back?  We'll see. let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

(side note - I finally got 10,000 views to this blog  =)

Closing Time with Parents

For my parent's last real day in Germany we traveled back to Nuremberg, and got them checked into a hotel right across from the airport.  Their flight was 6:30 Monday morning, so minimal travel was best.  We decided to take the subway and then pop out in a part of town where I had never been before.  It took a few minutes to get oriented but it was beautiful and there was a good panini shop nearby.  Eating there was a relief after all the heavy German food we’d been having.  Karen joined and we all went outside the city to Docu Zentrum where Hitler gave many speeches and marched his army in a parade before audiences of 200,000 people.  There had been a big schwastika built into the wall but they blew it up after the war.  Now the whole area is a big sports complex.  They were playing American football when we were there.

We headed back into the city for a nice Italian dinner.  We also got some white asparagus.  It is in season in Germany this time of year, and everyone is really into it.  I had some and it tastes fine, but just very plain.  I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Anyways, it was such a blessing having my parents get to come visit me here.  We had a lot of good quality time together, lots of catching up, and of course the fun that you’ve seen through my last few entries.

Garmish-Partenkirchen (cool mountains)

So it got to be Saturday morning so we took the train to the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  They had the winter olympics there back in the day.  It is know as the German gateway to the Alps.  Sounded cool to us.  It's a tiny town with the Alps as the main attraction.  We arrived and took this train below over to the foot of the mountain.  From there we transferred to the 'Cog Wheel Train.'  It has wheels with teeth so it can climb steep hills (like the alps).  Suddenly we disappear into a mountain and come out 25 minutes later at the top (almost).

 Amazing no?  It was April, and people were skiing here.  It was 30 degrees C (86F) at the bottom of the mountain but 4 (39) at the top, and windy.  From there we took a short ride in the cable car to the very top. You can see below how the train had to just pop out of the ground at the facility because there is no other access to it.  We enjoyed excellent food at the restaurant there.

From the very top we took a good look around.  Here is the Austrian side - mountains as far as you could see.  Can you imagine?! Hannibal took elephants through here!  

And here is a look at the German side.  The Eibsee (lake) is below. 

 Here is our picture with the gold star marking the highest point in Germany at 2900 odd meters.

Back at the bottom, at the Eibsee, it was hot again so we posed. 

Fränkische Schweiz with Americans

This week my parents came to visit.  On Thursday we ventured to the Fränkische Schweiz.  It was quite pleasant.  We started with Ebermannstadt which is just a small German city that is the entrance to the region. A quaint main street and a nice stream winding through it all, plus a sweet old lady who served us coffee made it all delightful.

After some time we moved on to Tüchersfeld and climbed up this large rock that just sticks out of the middle of the city.  Really cool features.  Here was the view from the top.

Easter Weekend - part 1 of 2

This past weekend was Easter weekend for those of you who missed the memo.  At PUMA that means a 4 day weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday).  Karen and I grabbed the chance to see two lovely cities while visiting a retired intern from days gone by.  We started off in Vienna, Austria.

We arrived Friday afternoon and checked in at the hostel.  My first experience in a dorm setting (6 people to a room).  We then made our way to the city center for a look around.  We quickly found these brilliant traffic lights. 

 Nice gardens, parliament, the city hall, and an Easter market with loads of painted eggs, some very ornate and others simple, but all real.  We split a giant apple cinnamon frosted pretzel.  We made our way to another market and tried Langos, this fried bread bigger than your face, coated in butter and garlic salt.  So delicious, and made us both feel rather bad upon finishing... We had just finished talking about our families’ heart attack histories.  I was sure I was going to have my first heart attack right there.

It seems everyone in Austria likes Mozart since he is from there.  We saw one guy dressed as Mozart with PUMA shoes.  I did take a picture, but am not bothering to post it. 

We stumbled across this cool “Explosion” on the south side of town.  I think it was supposed to be a frozen shock wave, milliseconds after some sort of bang.

After collecting ourselves at the hostel briefly we set out again to find some Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with an apricot layer in the middle and a special blend of chocolates from various manufacturers who produce chocolate solely for that purpose.  On our way we swung by the Nike store, because their shoes are absolutely amazing.  I love the new NikeFree 4.0.

After a short night’s sleep we both got up around 6 (don’t ask me why, it just happened).  Karen went for a long run, which I had to skip out on because of injury before we headed away from the city to see Castle Schönbrunn.  Absolutely HUGE building and property.  It included a labyrinth with games throughout it that included poles to climb, bells to ring with your feet, and crazy mirrors.  It made for a fun morning.

 Lunch was at a ridiculously large market.  Wiener (Viennese) Schnitzel from veal and Almdudler (served in CocaCola cups?), a drink like ice tea that tastes like Litchi.

Clock museum in the afternoon was full of fun little treasures.  Karen got in trouble for touching the clocks.

 The main event came that evening.  We had read that we could get standing room tickets at the Opera for 3€ so we lined up and got some.  “L’Eliser d’Amore”  (The Love Potion) was playing.  It had quite the shallow story line, but the opera experience was a fun one.  They have this crazy system for the standing room section that enforced by the staff.  Once you have your spot, you mark it with a scarf and then it is reserved for you.  You can’t mark it with a jacket, or a bag, only a scarf.  The guys next to us didn’t have scarves so they made the pages from the program into a scarf to draper over their spot.  Impressive.  That was the program for Vienna.  Stay tuned for the second half of the weekend in Graz in which we meet Markus and have even more fun.

Munich Cont'd

We visited Weihenstephan Brewery, the oldest in the world.  The guide was a doctorate student at the Technical University of Munich doing some beer related studies.  He was very Bavarian, and earned 5 liters of beer a day for his studies.  There is some crazy partnership between the university and the brewery.

 I don't know what these buildings are but I'd like to spend more time with them.