last weekend, we were in brand, austria. the weather was great, despite the mixed forecast.

lünersee.

on the first day, we visited the lünersee, a water reservoir for the lünerseewerk power plant. it is a beautiful mountain lake which can be accessed by a cable car. here are some photos:

dorfbahn/panoramabahn.

during summer, there are two cable cars in brand itself, namely the dorfbahn and the panoramabahn. the dorfbahn starts directly in the town, while the panoramabahn starts at the end of the dorfbahn and crosses a valley. the view is really magnificent! there is a nice and easy walking trail from the top of the panoramabahn back to the top of the dorfbahn, which we took. here are some impressions:

today, while being in bauma, we saw a steam locomotive from the dampfbahn-verein zürcher oberland. they usually operate on sundays from may through october between hinwil and bauma. (and yes, it’s on our to-do list!)
here are two snapshots of the train:

it’s almost a week ago that i posted photos from our cats, and in particular from miukumauku. well, i took some photos during this time. here’s a selection of some of them.

the black cat is coming back home more often. (right now he’s even sleeping on the couch next to me.) miukumauku is more and more copying behaviours from the other cats, in particular food behaviour (“meow! feed me!”) from the tiger cat (while preparing breakfast, suddenly tiger and miukumauku showed up on the stairs, looking at me – “are you preparing food for us?”). miukumauku is coming quite close to the other cats – sometimes too close –, and is climbing around in the cat trees. especially the big red cat and the black cat are not too amused about that. miukumauku can now leave the house whenever she wants. most of the time she stays on the inside, which is fine for me. i guess she’s copying the other cats as well (except the black one).

while watching miukumauku exploring the balcony today, i also saw some bees, and took some macro photos:

on sunday afternoon, miukumauku met her two sisters the first time since they were separated from their mother. it is interesting to see how different the kittens already behave. the two sisters play and live together, while miukumauku has to survive on her own, together with three adult cats who are not the most social ones. the two play a lot, while miukumauku first watched them a lot, tries to play along, but doesn’t really dare to jump on the others, to really play with them. on the other hand, miukumauku also stays closer to her home, knows where she lives, returns from time to time, while the other kittens run around, and just explore every door they can find.
another interesting thing is that apparently, miukumauku doesn’t want to be left alone. when in the evening we were sitting outside, eating, with the kittens back inside, miukumauku was making a huge noise and tried to get outside. when we’re inside, she’s quite different, watching open doors and windows with interest, looking through, but usually staying inside or close to the opening, only walking a few meters, exploring a bit, usually with me standing nearby.

i’d like to introduce my first cat: miukumauku. a beautiful fourteen weeks old red european short-haired kitten. the name miukumauku is borrowed from the finnish language, where it is an onomatopoetic version of “miaow meow”, the typical cat sound, and is used to denote the “@” sign. (another finnish name for “@” is “kissanhäntä”, which means “cat’s tail” – it seems that the finnish people are the only ones who identify “@” with a cat, and not with a monkey, elephant, or other animals… see the list here.) enjoy some photos!

miukumauku moved in on wednesday evening. the other cats here didn’t become friends with her yet, which is not very surprising. for the last addition, three years ago, it took around a month until the cats liked each others. a typical reaction is the following:

the hissing and growling got less frequent during the last days, and the cats get a lot closer to each other before starting to hiss and growl at each other. but it will take some more time until they will start to fully accept each others.

this week, we visited the kittens another time. after almost three weeks, they grew quite a bit, and when we came they were brought outside for us. it was so nice to watch them play outside, explore their surroundings, allowing us sometimes to lift them up, pet them, sometimes they stayed and enjoyed, sometimes they tried to escape again. kittens are just wonderful!

last week, i was in castro urdiales, a small costal town in northern spain. there, two conferences were held, namely the third workshop on mathematical cryptology and the third international conference on symbolic computation and cryptography. i attended both conferences and stayed a little longer over the weekend. after the first impressions i’ve uploaded last weekend, after arriving in castro, i gathered some more photos during this weekend. these were all taken in the city boundaries of castro urdiales, most of them close to the coast. castro is a really beautiful place, mainly crowded by spanish and french tourists and people living there (well, and conference attendants). the weather is pretty neat, especially for someone who doesn’t like heat too much as i do. also, swimming in the atlantic ocean is just great. it’s definitely a nice place to visit!