on sunday, we had a quite long and pretty intense thunderstorm. flashes firing off every few seconds, and finally, when it reached us, a constant rumble of thunder. while it didn’t got here, i tried to take some pictures – which is quite non-trivial, since flashes and pressing the trigger in precisely the right moment in advance don’t correlate very well. out of the few hundred shots, some were quite beautiful. below you can find three of them, with contrast intensified a bit.

two weeks ago, we tried out the bernina express panoramic train from chur to tirano, and afterwards the bernina express bus to lugano.

the beginning of the trip, from chur to st. moritz, is similar to the last part of the glacier express train ride (starting in zermatt), following the albula line, and then follows the bernina line via the bernina pass to italy, peaking at 2253 meters above sea level.

we were lucky and the weather was (once again) quite good – which was quite some luck: on the day before, where we originally wanted to go but didn’t got a reservation, it was raining like crazy. the panorama carriages were once again nice, though taking photos is still quite a challenge thanks to the reflections which are almost always there. but hey, we were there to enjoy the views, and not to make great photos. (that’s for some other time. there’s a lot of beauty out there, for example the morteratsch glacier which we could watch while driving by.)

anyway. the second main part of the trip, the express bus from tirano to lugano, wasn’t as good as we hoped – i always feel kind of squeezed in a bus and am looking forward to leave it :-). the views were nice, but the next time i’d still skip that part.

a couple of weeks ago, we visited oslo. yet another time. the weather was suprisingly good, we had a lot of sun but it wasn’t too hot.

we spend some time in the city…

… did some island hopping, walking on both lindøya and hovedøya, and inspecting in particular hovedøya abbey, …

… visisted the norwegian maritime museum on bygdøy, …

… lake sognsvann, …

… and the botanical garden tøyenhagen.

last night, it snowed again. so today, after shoveling more snow, we built a snowman. our cats had some fun, too:

the last snow is long gone. but a week ago, it started snowing again. last sunday, we went on a nice walk from hadlikon to hinwil. the weather was really beautiful!

as soon as we arrived home, it changed a bit, though: the sky turned grey. so after cleaning the stairs from the snow, we went back inside to join our cats in the warmth:

somewhen after christmas, it suddenly started snowing in switzerland. so when we returned from lappland, we could enjoy quite a lot of snow!

we weren’t the only ones enjoying it: the cats also like it. well, at least the young ones. some even jump into deep snow to catch a snowball! (sorry, no photos of that…)

too bad most of the snow has already melted again…