Österreich und Corona

This past weekend the Pemulis family left Munich for the first time in 5 months. We drove deep into the alpine mountains of Salzburger Land in Austria where we had rented a cottage for a 4-night getaway. The cottage sat at approximately 1400 metres above sea level in a small town surrounding an alpine lake called the Zauchensee.

The trip got started as I made my first use of public transportation since March to head to the north of the city and pick up our rental car. As somehow seems to be rather common (and which you wouldn't expect in Europe -- let alone Munich) I was led to a Ford station wagon. It was pretty sweet with all the standard cool stuff you expect nowadays like rear camera, radar alerts, integrated navigation system, etc., but often ending up with a Ford when renting a car in Germany feels a little weird.

I successfully manoeuvred the shiny black estate car toward the south side of Munich and before heading home I had a quick stop to make at the local baby store where we had on the previous day purchased a very expensive child seat. The man (I should say boy actually) installed the seat in our car and I was ready to head home to start packing up the car. First, however, I experienced a very authentic Munich Moment when leaving the parking lot of Kinnings Baby: besides my rented Ford, there were 5 other cars in the parking lot. 3 Audis -- all station wagon A6s, and 2 Porsches -- a Panamera and a Cayenne. So clearly this was one of the "common" baby stores...

Over the next 6 or 7 hours (approximately) we packed up the car to get ready to go. Somehow this takes longer every single time we go anywhere. But finally, after a lot of stress and struggling, and tears and sweat, we were all loaded up and off we went! One nice breakthrough of this car trip (both out and back) is that Heinrich was happy in the car! He didn't cry at all and he slept a little in both directions. This is a huge development as with every single other car trip (including as recently as February when we were in Spain) he would scream at the top of his lungs for the duration of the ride. This was, as you might imagine, less than ideal. Spoiler Alert: while he learned to be happy in the car, he is further than ever from learning how to sleep.

We arrived at the cottage quite late in the day and of course we had an original plan of grocery shopping in the nearby town after arriving but upon arrival the grocery store was already closed. Since there was no food in the cottage, Helga and I headed down the hill to town to get a pizza (or 4) from the local pizzeria. Interesting that while in Germany there are strict regulations about mask-wearing, in Austria no one was wearing masks in the grocery store (which I went to the next morning) or in the restaurant. While of course here in Germany you don't wear a mask if you're sitting at your table (you have to eat after all), all of the employees are doing so at all times. Here it was as if Corona didn't exist. It was almost strange in its semblance of normality. Anyways, we paid for the pizza and headed the 10 km back up the hill to our cottage for a traditional Austrian dinner: take-out pizza.

I will spare the details of the night as it was the same as at home and repeated each of the four nights that we were there: Heinrich not really sleeping at all and screaming and yelling as loud as he could for a good portion of the night. Fun times. In other unfortunate news Helga had caught a cold (it did take 3 weeks of being at Kindergarten for it to happen though) and so she wasn't sleeping that great either -- but nowhere even close to in the same universe as the disaster that her younger brother represents during the nights.

One of the highlights of the area where we were staying was the high quality hiking and trail running. We went for a couple of family hikes

and both Joelle and I got to each do a couple of epic trail runs covering quite a few hundred metres of elevation gain.

On Sunday we took the chair lift up a few hundred metres to explore the mountain a little more. Another funny thing about the regulations here is this: as I mentioned previously there are no requirements for masks in stores or restaurants. However, for the open air chair lift, with only our family members on board, masks were required for everyone aged 6 and above. Weird.

But the trip and wearing the required masks was worth it because up high on the mountain it was really nice, we had some nice lunch (beer for mom and dad and ice cream for Helga), and there was a big Spielplatz.

All in all it was a nice short vacation and great to get out of the city for the first time in a very long time. We look forward to our next excursion to the mountains... coming soon!

The Covid-19 Biergarten Experience (TM)

In this brave new world we need to adapt or die (so to speak) and eventually life must go on. If you step back and think about it for more than two seconds it's really quite astonishing that this is "a thing" but it is and so we accept that there has to be a balance found between keeping people alive and the other very important thing of companies continuing to make money. And so there's a push from politicians / businesses against the push from public health experts about when and how much to open up economies and societies and whatever else and I have to admit that people also need to be able to do things that make them human like socialize so it's not all just greedy business owners. But, in doing these once-normal things, we can't just jump right back into how things were before (though unfortunately many will see the opening up of life as we knew it to mean exactly life as we knew it and put all of us in danger but that's another story I suppose). We have to adapt and to participate in things like, you know, living, we have to approach it quite differently. Restaurants can now open here in Germany but tables have to be some very large distance apart and everyone has to wear masks (except when they're eating of course), etc. And then there's the ever-so-important part of Bavarian social and family life: the Biergarten...

The Biergarten / "Beer Garden" is -- not joking -- like really important in Bayern. It's not the roped-off licensed area for over-19's at outdoor festivals like in North America. It is where you go on Sunday with your family and friends. A beer garden isn't really a beer garden without a playground for children and, unlike in a restaurant, you sit wherever there's room and it's not weird at all to share tables. You're supposed to. You have to. It is all very informal, very low-stress, and very relaxing. But not so much in the Covid-19 times...

To research this story, on a recent unfortunately rather blustery day -- a Sunday, in fact -- I visited a popular local Biergarten with both family and friends. The very first thing that you notice that is now different than before is that when I said above that the Biergarten is not what they often call the "beer garden" in North America, one of the many aspects making it not that kind of beer garden is its openness; there is almost never any kind of specific single entrance or exit and there are definitely not gates or barriers or something of the sort to clearly delineate and enforce what the confines of the Biergarten are and are not. Well, not anymore. The Biergarten was roped off with a single entry point and a single exit. Fine. But related to these people funnelling devices is a new requirement which makes sure that you do not forget that you are living in the time of Corona. There is a long table with stacks of paper forms and some pens. It looks very much like the registration area at a small running race where you can sign up the day of the race but you first have to fill out a form and then pay your entry fee. Here, however, you must write down the name, address, and phone number of your entire party as a form of analog contact tracing. This is the primitive version of what Apple and Google are trying to do with mobile phones and what China is probably doing by Satellite and Artificial Intelligence. The idea is that if anyone who was at the Biergarten on that day eventually gets Covid-19, then everyone who was also there will get a call saying you had better quarantine yourself and you had better get tested. Now I'm not 100% sure how this information gets back to the Biergarten people. Like I'm not sure if it's voluntary on the person who gets sick to remember they were there two weeks ago and to call the place up and say "hey I was there two Sundays ago -- can you call all those people?". I sure hope not because if I got sick with Coronavirus I think the last thing on my mind would be "hey I better call that Biergarten where I was a couple of weeks ago before they hook me up to this ventilator"...

On the way through the entryway you have to wear a mask. When you go up to buy your beer (only bottles except they'll give you a glass for Weißbier because drinking Weißbier out of the bottle would be unthinkable for a German, Corona or no Corona) you also have to wear a mask. When you are sitting at your table (tables are now all spaced nicely far apart) you do not need to wear your mask. When you arrive at a table there is a small laminated card saying that this table is safe to sit at because it has been disinfected. When you leave the Biergarten you must bring that card with you on the way out so that people know your former table is now contaminated. They will then sanitize the table and put a brand new card back on so that the cycle may repeat itself.

All in all the visit was pleasant. While we probably wouldn't have chosen by ourselves to let Helga go play in the Spielplatz, it may have been therapeutic to have that outside push by the anonymous parents of the child she really wanted to go play with and for whom playing in the playground was clearly no problem at all. And it was definitely therapeutic for Helga (as long as she doesn't get Corona as a result). She needed that freedom and social interaction and for a brief moment in time she almost looked like a kid enjoying life and living in simpler times. Perhaps we can look forward to one day experiencing more than just a moment.

Summertime (in early March)

It is summertime in Grenoble. Yesterday reached 24 (!!!) degrees celsius and today it's about 20 or so. We took advantage of this weather (despite my currently poor ability to walk due to ankle issues) by strolling around the city centre, eating lunch, drinking coffee, reading in the Place Victor Hugo (or writing! if you were Sandi), etc. We were hoping to go to Annecy today but since we decided at the last minute all of the hostels and cheap hotels were booked already and we need to save our money since right now we only have one income and we need to pay our first rent, the deposit (a month's rent) and an agency fee that is almost a month's rent for when we get our apartment this Wednesday... Anyways, so we didn't go but we'll go soon hopefully -- maybe for our birthdays or something if it's still nice out. Oh ya, in addition to it being so warm it's also been completely sunny with no clouds to speak of for weeks. It's rained just once since we've been here (more than 3 weeks) and that was like a sprinkle around 2 weeks ago. Anyways, instead of going to Annecy (we could have still gone by taking the train at 7 in the morning and then taking the last train back which is at 7:30 pm but that didn't seem like a GREAT idea because it's not that much time there and it's kind of dinner time that the train leaves for home and in addition to being really nice in the day it's supposed to be quite the place at night) we decided to take it easy here (see above).

There's this rad iPhone app called Instagram (http://instagr.am/). You take photos on your iPhone and then you can choose one of about 10 or so filters to apply and then you it automatically shares the photo (if you choose to participate) with the Instagram community and you can also automatically have it posted to Facebook or Twitter or some other crazy young-person sites. But -- thankfully -- you can also just save it. So it seems that you can end up with some pretty cool pictures. Directly below is the place we ate lunch -- some tasty sandwiches. Delicious. Really. In fact, I wish I was re-eating my sandwich right now (but a different one of course because the original one is probably like pretty gross right now and re-eating THAT one would be disgusting. But if I were a cow I would do that all the time. But they mainly eat grass and already-eaten grass is probably better than already-eaten French sandwich even though the first time around the sandwich is probably better. So the grass has more staying power -- if you will -- but the sandwich is better the first time around. But actually I don't even know that for sure because I've never actually tried already-eaten grass.. I'm just imagining here). So they put your sandwich on a baguette (natch).¹  Then, you get to choose what to put on it. So far this sounds a lot like Subway, for example, but it's pretty much a whole different category of food. But anyways you choose stuff but their stuff is not like "white or orange" plastic cheese like at Subway, but like huge thick slices of fresh goat cheese or blue cheese or camembert or whatever. And so we had these sandwiches and they were good. Got it?

After eating lunch, we continued walking around a bit. We went in Les Galleries Lafayette to look for some cool stuff but we didn't find much. We ALSO went in a book store and I bought three French (language) books. One is Une fantaisie du doctor Ox by Jules Verne, one is Gatsby le magnifique by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one is La Légende de now pères by Sorj Chalandon. The first one is quite short so I figured it would be a good one for me to start doing some French reading. The second one is of course the Great Gatsby translated and thought it would also be good because I know the book and won't be lost while reading it if I don't understand some stuff, and the third one is another actual French book (a new one) and it was in the section where the staff or whoever suggests some books and I think it one some prize for young French authors so I thought that one would be good. Below is a picture of some statue in a square in the city centre.

After some more walking my ank was bothering me so we decided to sit down in the Place Victor Hugo. There is where Sandi wrote in her journal and I started reading my Jules Verne book. After a while we were a bit tired since we stayed up late-ish last night and woke up early because I guess now that I'm a worker my body is used to getting up early so we had to go for coffee. There's this awesome thing in France called Café Gourmand that pretty much any restaurant has where you get a coffee with three random mini desserts. Maybe I've mentioned this before. Or maybe you know this already. In any case, we got those and sat outside in the sun and they were pretty darn(ed -- ?) good. In the pictures below it kind of looks like we have two coffees each but the second cup is actually just Chocolate Mousse. And the randomness came in where Sandi got some tiramisu-like dessert and I got an apple pie but it was actually pear I think but I said apple pie first cause then you'd have a better idea of what it was. The first picture below is Victor Hugo and you can just almost see the Bastille in the background on the Chartreuse mountain.

This is quite the long post, eh? If you've made it this far I'm quite impressed. So after that we made our way back home for a siesta which was followed by (and is currently still being followed by) posting some of these pictures with some rambling commentary. On the way home (our last weekend in Adagio!) we walked a little bit in the park that will be right across from our new place that we move into on Wednesday! In this park there is a big tower -- the significance of which I'm not sure. But it looks like (as you can see in the bottom-left of the picture) they also have the cauldron or whatever you call it where they probably had the Olympic Flame back when Grenoble had the Olympics in the 60's. Anyways, it's a pretty sweet park and for this picture (as with the café gourmand pictures) I didn't use Instagram -- just the regular iPhone camera -- and you can therefore see how I'm totally telling the truth when I say it's full-on blue sky with no clouds. Also, I just looked at the weather page and the past two days Grenoble has hit the record highs! I looked this morning and I think before it was like 19.7 degrees in the 1970's or something and now I looked again and it says 20 in 2012 (obviously today). Cool I'd say. But it's supposed to start getting a little cooler next week and there's a 30% chance of rain on Monday! For our moving day (not that we have that much to move) it's supposed to be nice and sunny again though...

1. Naturally.