Winterspaß

I'm going to try something different today. My previous posts focused on comparing the cultures of Germany and the United States. Since this is by no means a simple topic, the posts got pretty long and were extremely time-consuming to write. Also, I realize they say little about what I'm actually doing to get the most out of this experience as possible. So, for those of you who actually are interested in what I'm up to, I'll answer that question right now in lieu of the usual compare/contrast essay: Besides blogging, I have been spending most of my time with my classes here (I could go on and on about why my classes are taking up most of my time; suffice it to say that I'm trying to double major, which is uncommon in Germany, and read the Educational Systems post for more details). But before I say how I spend my free time, I'll first have to make something clear:

It's winter in Germany.

This may not be earth-shattering news to you, but to me it means I get to participate in my favorite activities outside of using the Linux command line and solving second-degree partial differential equations in space and time. Downhill skiing is one of those activities; I've been skiing pretty much since I was old enough to stand. Even though I've done a lot of ski racing (Slalom and GS) I still like free-skiing in the mountains, especially when you're rewarded with sights like this:

These photos are from a ski area in Austria called Hochfügen im Zillertal, which I visited earlier this month.

Of course, just plain playing in the snow is fun, too. Last weekend I built a snowman:

That ball of snow to my right must have been at least as heavy as I am.

I was lucky that it was almost exactly zero degrees (Celsius; you may have noticed I've already converted to the Metric System) when that day's snow fell. The snow stuck together like glue. Locals amusingly referred to it as a "sick" snow.

I soon learned why:

That photo was taken less than 24 hours after the previous one. During the preceding night, a hot wind decapitated and dismembered the unfortunate snowman and a persistent rain reduced the remaining pieces to this -- I'm sorry, that sounded incredibly depressing. Go ahead and look at cute cat pictures or something for a few minutes.

To a person who has spent most of his life in Minnesota and is used to having winters with extreme cold and lots of snow, winter rains feel like a direct insult from Mother Nature. I don't think I could ever live in a place where it rains instead of snows in the winter (to be fair, I'm told that this is unusual weather for this part of Germany). Actually, I did live in Hamburg when I was younger, but thankfully I don't remember too much about the weather.

At least it still snows in the mountains. That's a good thing, because this upcoming weekend I'll be skiing with a group of other students in one of the largest ski areas in the Austrian Zillertal. I'm really excited, even more so because this place has the steepest ski run in Austria, at a 78% grade. Assuming I manage to survive that run, I'll write a post about the experience.

Oh, and for those of you who found my comparison/contrast essays interesting, I've got a few more ideas planned. Specifically, I'm going to write about how I translate my posts into German and the fundamental language differences I notice in the process. First, however, I need to catch up on said German translations so that this blog stays bilingual. You can probably expect the next English comparison/contrast post around the second or third week of February.