Winter

Mein Lieblingsfoto aus Winter. Ich nenne es: Elspeth und der weiße Baum (2017, Feldberg, DE)

Ich bin in den Tropen aufgewachsen. Deswegen war der Winter für mich immer etwas Besonderes. Ich bin glücklich, in der Schweiz zu leben. Es ist nicht schwierig, in den Bergen beeindruckt zu sein. Man kann von verschiedene Aktivitäten draußen bei Wind und Wetter wählen. Aber würde es toll wenn die Sonne auch scheint.

Die häufigste Winter Sportart in der Schweiz ist das Skifahren (Abfahrt). Leider habe ich Höhenangst und Angst vor Geschwindigkeit. Aus diesem Grund war ich mich nie für Abfahrt Skifahren interessiert. Es gibt auch der Schlitten, wo man schnell herunterrutschen auf einem Berg oder einem Hügel kann. Ich finde das sehr gefährlich und dafür habe ich Angst zu meinem Tod rutschen. In der Schweiz gibt es genug Todesstreifen zu finden.

Basel hat einen kalte Winter aber ohne Schnee wie in den Bergen. Ich finde das gut. Wenn es schneit (< 5cm), kann man auf dem Asphalt auf der Straße zur Bäckerei oder zum Botschaft ausrutschen. Es könnte rutschig genug, dass man in einem Spaziergang durch die Stadt aufpassen muss. Es macht auch umfahren in einer kleinen Stadt ein bisschen schwieriger. Es macht auch umfahren in einer kleinen Stadt ein bisschen schwieriger. Winter bringt auch Krankheiten und Matsche.

Ab und zu Basel bekommt genug Schnee, die Baslerinnen sich in einer Märchen anzufühlen. Das ist nur zweilmal in den letzten zehn Wintern passiert. Schöne Künste von Natur auf Fenstern gezeichnen würden. Der Spielplatz erwacht plötzlich zum Leben. Kinder und Erwachsene würden Schneemänner bauen. Schreie von den Schenneballschlacten würden hören, obwohl es saukalt ist. Schneebälle würden werfen. Die imaginäre Mauer, die Kleinbaslerinnen und Großbaslerinnen zwischen sich gebaut haben, würden verschwinden. Alle wären freundlicher miteinander.

Meine Beziehung mit der Winter in den Bergen begann in 2016. Ich habe mit Schneeschuhwanderungen und Winterwanderungen angefangen. Zweimal habe ich mit ein paar Freunden ein Iglu gebaut und dort übernachtet. Während der Pandemie habe ich die nächste Wintersportart gelernt – Langlauf.

Die Droge, die mich voll fühlen jedes mal. Wenn ich Langlauf fahre, denke ich nicht daran, ob ich erfrieren könnte. Ich bin schon bei -17 Grad Celsius gefahren und man muss mich nicht aus dem Bett ziehen.

Normalerweise finden meine Wochenendausflüge zwischen Dezember und Februar statt. Die Routine ist immer gleich: Wir stehen früh auf und fahren in der zweiten Klasse mit dem Zug aus Basel in eine Ecke der Berge. Wir machen Langlauf-Skating für zwei Stunden. Danach genießen wir in der Sauna und später ein Abendessen. Übrigens haben selten Hotels eine Liegewiese.

Das Frühstück in der Schweiz ist vorhersehbar. Es gibt immer Brötchen, Käse, Schinken, Kaffee, Saft, ein paar Gemüse und Tee zum Trinken. Das Frühstuck ist nicht besonderes lecker, aber ausreichend. Ich mag es, wenn die Gäste des Hotels sagen “Guten Appetit” miteinander. Das passiert nie auf den Philippinen.

Wir packen unser Gepäck und machen noch einmal Langlauf-Skating. Wir nehmen immer Wasser und Kleinigkeiten zu mampfen in einer Gürteltasche mit. Der Höhenpunkt meines Wochenendes ist der Kuchen und die Wärme, die ich im Restaurant genießen könnte, während Mittagspause.

Endlich betrachte ich mich als zerbrechlich. Deswegen bin ich so stolz darauf, dass ich Langlauf-Skating gelernt habe. Ich versuche jedes Jahr meine Teknik zu verbessern. Mein Ziel ist es, Langlauf-Skating zu hinkriegen, ähnlich mit einer Person, die seit Kindheit Winter erlebt. Winter ist fast schon vorbei, aber ich kann es kaum erwarten zum nächsten.

Ein paar Bildern von Schneeschunwanderungen und Winterwanderungen in der Schweiz:

Ein paar Bildern von Langlaufausflüge in der Schweiz:

As before, I took the vocabulary from Seedlang prepared by the Easy German team and wrote the article above. It was difficult, but as always, so much fun. I very much enjoyed picking up the pictures over the years to share.

Instead of posting the corrected version by ChatGPT, I decided to share only my raw version including spelling corrections that Word would anyway pick up. I reminded myself that my goal is not to tell some stories in perfect German, but mainly to learn new vocabulary and practice them through writing. It took me 5 hours in a span of 3 days to complete this post, hence me writing this explanation in English because I have a slight headache now 🙂

“In der Kürze liegt die Würze” – my German teacher reminded me last week. In preparation for the B1 exam, she asked that instead of writing incorrect and too complicated sentences, that I should from now on try to iron out the mistakes I make here and there and start with shorter ones instead. Afterwards, I could try to connect them with the connectors I already know.

We built an igloo, and these happened.

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Once in a while, we take trips that become part of the story of our lives. It’s the trip we tell others over and over again during lunches, dinners, and coffee breaks. Punch lines and embarrassing moments from them doesn’t become less funny over time. We recall memories from pictures of these travels when we are sick or couldn’t sleep at night.

I have been blessed to have visited many beautiful places in 2016, but the trip I talked about the most is the one I made with three other friends for a weekend to hike up in the alps, build an igloo, sleep in it, and hike again the next day. From fear of memories fading away, and to revive the life out of my own small cabin on the internet, I’ve decided to write about one special weekend when we built an igloo and these happened..

Brother : “But you are going to an Igloo Fest, right? So there will be lots of people there?”

Me: “Errr… no not really. It will be just be four of us.”

We met at 7:00 in the morning in front of the office. Packed with 2 days worth of food, clothes, water, sleeping bag, mat, duct tape, and a myriad of other hiking equipments, Girl A, Boy 1, Boy 2 and I drove to Melchsee-Frutt – a small village near Kerns, Switzerland. We took a quick gondola up a certain altitude and from there snowshoed our way to where we built an igloo.

Part I – Snowshoes

The first time I saw snowshoes was the day before the Igloo trip while renting them from the shop near the office. They are a pair of over-sized plastic (normally) with some metal spikes one wears under one’s hiking boots to be able to walk on soft snow without basically sinking. They are really cool, although as of writing, I’ve never snowshoed without a backpack behind my back and fully within hiking trails, so I could so far only associate snowshoeing with exhaustion and sledging. Why sledging, you wonder. I will get there in a sec.

Anyway, speaking of trails, Boy 1 is not much a fan of them. So instead of taking a normal hiking trail to reach our location, we snowshoed our way up and down to what felt like an eternity until they realized I probably wasn’t going to make it. Up to this day, I still don’t understand how we managed to get to our chosen igloo location without looking at a map.

Rescue number one – my loud breathing gave me away. As a first time hiker, I underestimated how much I would have to carry on my back for 2 days / 1 night of staying outdoors, considering I brought only things for myself. The relatively adventurous snowshoeing took its toll on my small Asian body and finally I couldn’t hide the fact that I wasn’t fit enough to carry everything on my own and walk at the same time. My hiking mates, whom I’ve known only for 3 months or so, decided to take everything that is not cotton or fleece from my bag and split my luggage among the three of them. For someone who has been living alone since 17, this was really embarrassing. But it is still less embarrassing than giving up and going home so I sucked it up and continue.

Part II – Sledging

Somewhere along the snowshoeing up and down off-trail came a fence-like border of rocks which we had to step over and continue from the other side. The other side, however, was not exactly flat. And one needs to slide a little bit to the left while sitting down after the fence of rock in order to be able to walk on two feet again. In this very small “slide”, I manage to screw up and instead of sliding to the left where Boy 1 was waiting, I just slid straight, 50 – 100 meters down say a 30 – 45 degree slope. (These numbers might be exaggeration, forgive me). It’s tough to assess exactly how long it was for the only thing I could remember is that I tried not to scream and when my snowshoe has gathered enough snow to stop me from sledging “free” further, my heart was pounding and I couldn’t move or do anything. Not because I was hurt, but because the experience was completely new to my brain. 5 year olds would probably call it fun, but for me it was a life and death situation.

Rescue number two – thanks to my unreasonable fear (at that time) of the beautiful powdered snow around me, Boy 1 had to run towards me, take my backpack and walk me back to the path we chose to take that day.

Part III – Igloo Building

Shortly after lunch, we finally stopped at a location where we would build our “organic” accommodation for the night. We wasted no time and started our work immediately. I don’t recall any proper lunch break after the exhausting snowshoeing part of the day. Fortunately, as a woman, there’s not much really I could do building the igloo because 1) I do not have the power to saw blocks of ice from the ground 2) I do not have the strength to carry blocks of ice sewed from the ground 3) I do not have the engineering capacity to build an igloo from blocks of ice. What I could only do was assist Boy 1 / 2 in providing powdered snow as glue to connect the blocks of ice together or in polishing the igloo with powdered snow as soon as the blocks are in place. I also provided assistance in handing their water / food when necessary.

At the end of the day, we managed to build a sturdy igloo with a small cooking and dining area in front.

Part IV – Sleeping

We were very luck with the weather for the sun was always out and the sky was blue the whole day. As soon as the sun sets though, the temperature dropped too low to the point that it’s not safe to stand still anymore, rather better to move around in order to keep one’s blood circulation going. We cooked vermicelli noodles with chili con carne for dinner (not very good combination, never having it again), boiled water for some tea and decided to call it a day. Oh wait, we managed to do some star gazing but at some point got dizzy using an iPhone app to match which constellation we could see from our visible share of the night sky.

We retreated to our well made sleeping beds and tried to sleep. Yes  – it was cold. Very cold. Perhaps it was because on my left was Girl A, and on my right was big wall of ice. Above me was also a ceiling of ice. I tried the fetus position, wrapped myself with 3 layers of clothing (which I know now as also a big mistake), but still couldn’t sleep. It was cold, very cold, but I couldn’t complain because 1) It is not in my Asian nature to do so 2) No one forced me to be there. It was too cold, however, to believe that I could survive to see the sun the next day.

So I looked up at the ceiling and recall thinking “Boy 3 was right (He didn’t join after experiencing the 1st igloo fest) – I’m going to die tonight.” I wanted to say goodbye to my new friends so I turned to my left to see if anyone else was awake. Indeed. Boy 1 was already looking at my direction, waiting for me to send the signal of defeat for God knows how long already, and asked me the question “Are you cold?”.

Rescue number three – (continuing the draft after a year or so). Apparently, I should have changed my clothes before getting inside the sleeping bag in order not to sleep with all the sweat, which will be cold water if not ice, I accumulated during the day. I was too shy to do this given there was no proper toilet around. So instead of asking to have the igloo to myself for 5 minutes to change, I simply ditched the suggestion. I then had to change in the middle of the night with everyone in the igloo. My igloo mates provided me with extra socks, hand warmers which I had to use as feet warmer and fed me tea. We switched positions so I get to be in the middle of two warm persons. With all these help, I finally managed to sleep. Until..

After two hours, I woke up again. This time, the father instincts of Boy 1 and 2 kicked in immediately and asked me if I was still cold. “No.. I’m hungry”. I ate my trail mix as quietly as I could, had some tea, and all of us managed to fall back to sleep fast enough until..

At 4:30 A.M., in the middle of the Swiss alps, inside an igloo built with our bare hands, with no heating except for a candle, no electricity, and no WIFI, my alarm from the day before set off waking everyone – again.

The funny thing is, despite all the hassles I’ve caused to these three people during the trip, they ended up to be the best buddies I would have in this foreign land I called home for the past 2 years. We went on to have more winter, summer, and autumn hikes together. As a matter of fact next week, fingers-crossed, we will attempt to have Igloo Fest 2018 🙂