in april, we visited the beatushöhlen near interlaken, a stalactite cave where you can walk through.

it finally started snowing. well, already two days ago. but today, for the first time, it was sunny again! (and we started moving the snow away from the balcony and the pathways so the cats won’t take a dump there…)

this is how it looks like from out of a cat tree:

once during the last days of december, a great fog panorama presented itself to us. the fog was close, but didn’t reach us yet:

in the last 30 days, a lot of things happened. the worst thing happening was that one of our cats, töffel, lost more and more strength and started looking really miserable. since in the weeks before we already had to give him infusions as he was drinking way too little, and he hated that pretty much, we decided not to start more medicine experiments and instead to stop his suffering by putting him to sleep. he’s probably better off now.

rest in peace, töffel!

after more than two years, we returned to the beautiful val bregaglia for vacation. again, we were staying in hotel helvetia in vicosoprano on the swiss side of the valley.

we stayed during the first of the two “chestnut weeks”, dedicated to edible chestnuts which are growing all over the valley. except on the day we arrived on and the first half day, the weather was really good!

we visited sils and chiavenna:

we again visited the chestnut forest in castasegna:

and we walked another part of the via panoramica, this time from soglio, and then descending to stampa:

also, again, we enjoyed some great culinary specialities. in particular, we enjoyed several meals (again) at hotel corona, where we also had the opportunity to meet the goats producing the milk for the wonderful goat cheese, which is part of our favorite tomato goat cheese salad. also the different pasta and meat dishes we had were fantastic. yeah well. if it wouldn’t be so far from here (5-6 hours by public transport, depending on how often you want to change trains), i’d guess we’d go there more often ;-)

it’s more than eight years ago that i started spielwiese.

so far, spielwiese was mostly a black and white, lowercase english experience. until now. using nikola‘s multilingual capabilities, i decided to try translating parts of spielwiese to züritüütsch, a swiss german dialect spoken in the canton of zürich, in which i’ve now spent more than eight years of my life.

since züritüütsch isn’t my native language and i’m still far from understanding and speaking it perfectly (though understanding is much better than speaking), i’ll surely make mistakes, though i hope most will be caught by my wife before setting them live :)

this is yet another experiment, and i’ll hope some of you will like it.