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!

yesterday, we visited three kittens for the second time. this time, i had my camera with me. they grew older, and start to play around and to explore their surroundings. their mother was not around this time, and they were a bit sleepy, but we still had a lot of fun. kittens are so cute!

yesterday we went on an excursion. first, we visited an old ehgraben in züri niederdorf, which is a small trench between rows of houses which was used to dispose of feces during the middle ages. nowadays one can visit it and read the provided information panels. afterwards, we proceeded to the lindenhofkeller, containing celtic, roman and medieval remains.

afterwards, we continued to the sewage treatment center in werdhölzli, zürich. we had a guided tour through the process of treating waste water from the zürich region and its conversion into “clean” water. certainly very interesting! it is also interesting to see what kind of stuff the mechanic filtering finds. among toys, dentures and mobile phones one can find base stations for mobile phones, credit cards, cash, id cards, remotes, pocket calculators, etc. quite amazing.

finally, in the evening, we had a barbecue.

on saturday, we visited bern. we visited the sapperlot! exhibition on swiss dialects, walked around town, had icecream at the gelateria di berna, saw the bärengraben, walked along the aar. the weather was great, almost too hot. here are some impressions:

less clouds. less zoom. still red. still beautiful.

the following are panoramas from a thunderstorm happening almost two weeks ago. the first two panoramas were taken around three minutes apart, and the third one half an our later. the last one was taken on the late evening.