You probably weren't ...

... but just in case you were wondering if I took any other pictures of the Splügen Pass, on my way to northern Italy -
I did!
Here is the finished composite of the picture you saw below:


Click!
It is made up of 36 shots, stitched together.
Here are the middle twelve!

At the moment we are experiencing a marvellous Spring.

How do I know?
Easy - it is warm, every tree, flower and plant is trying to outdo its neighbour - flowers and young green everywhere.
The birds are singing in the trees and there is a bloody cuckoo out there with them, cuckooing its head off !!

This morning it started at 06:00. Obviously I wasn't in bed for very long after it started cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, every five seconds.
When I got up, I decided to shoot it (with the camera, of course) but it was just out of range to make a decent picture.
I was rather surprised at the size of the thing - about the size of a crow.
Whoever has to raise one of those chicks is in for a problem.

I wonder if I can somehow convince my cats to devour the thing chase the bird off, before it starts again tomorrow morning?

It rained all the way from St.Gallen to Freiburg in the Black Forest.
From there I took the motorway to Strasbourg, where the sun was shining.

Strasbourg is a bustling city of 650'000 inhabitants (Metropolitan area) sitting between the rivers Rhine and Île directly opposite the German town of Kehl.
It swapped hands between Germany and France numerous times in the past few centuries - at the moment it is French!
The locals speak Alsatian, a wonderful singsong concoction which mixes both French and German.

The seventh largest city in France, Strasbourg is the capital of the Alsace/Elsass region and houses, amongst other things, the European Parliment, the European Council and the European Court of Human Rights. Yet amongst the hectic there is a quarter that - even when full of tourists - always seems to be idyllically quiet.
It is called Petite France.



You can see some of the Pictures I took by clicking the image above.
While looking at them, please consider the fact, that they were taken on a Saturday afternoon - the rest of the city, just two streets away, was jammed full of people.

I strolled around town for an hour or so and then met up with friends at a local restaurant. We had decided it had been just too long, since we last ate Tarte Flambée!
Tarte is a wonderful experience. A wooden board with a sliver of pastry, not unlike that of Pizza but much, much thinner, topped with cream, Onions and bacon - fresh from the oven. Just large enough to serve six people. When it has been devoured, another appears, as if by magic, in its place.
Cut it into six, eat it, wash it down with Pinot Noir - the local red wine, and ...
... another appears.
If you are fast enough you might catch the waiter as he places another board on those already emptied. If you do, you may order a variation ...
... Forestier - with mushrooms, Munster - with Munster cheese or variations with goats cheese and, when you feel you just couldn't eat another slice, with Apples!

This is the signal for the waiter to stop. Along comes the tarte covered in slices of apples and cinnamon. The waiter has a bottle of Calvados (apple brandy) in his hand. he pours a generous portion over the tarte and ignites it - a wonder the place doesn't go up in flames!

After the tarte flambée aux pommes it is just impossible to move.
I recommend a Marc du Gewurztraminer (The alsatian version of grappa). Afterwards you may try standing up and taking a very gentle stroll to the car.

But not before the waiter has counted the empty boards and bottles ...

One of the nice things about living here in Appenzell, is the fact that it is so central.

A drive of twenty minutes will get me to Austria, Thirty minutes and I'm in Germany and - depending which direction I set off in - two hours will see me in France or Italy.

Last weekend I drove south, crossed the Splügen pass and had a plate of Spaghetti with mussels and a glass of red wine in a village on the shores of Comer lake. The weather was marvellous, just like the sunburn afterwards!

The Splügen pass is a narrow road just wide enough to let two cars pass. It is closed in winter because it is just too expensive to move the two to three meters of snow - especially as someone was kind enough to drill a hole through the mountains. The hole is now called the St.Bernhard Tunnel.

The pass winds its way up one side of the mountain in numerous extremely tight bends and down the other side in a similar fashion. It is an adventurous drive because the Italian drivers think nothing at all of taking the bends as wide (read 'fast') as possible, forcing oncoming traffic to brake hard and sometimes even, to reverse!

The spectacular thing about the drive this time, was the fact that the dam on the Italian side was still frozen in places. With temperatures around 24° Centigrade, there were still stretches of water with 30 cm of ice on them!



So what do you do, when you encounter a sight like this?
You buy italian ice cream, pretend to be on holiday and take photographs just like any other tourists.

I'm off to France today (Elsass, to be more precise) for Tarte Flambée and Pinot Noir.
I hope the weather bucks up - it's raining right now!