Pictures from the top of Germany

I spent a few days now skiing on a glacier on the highest peak in Germany, Zugspitze at 2962 m above sea level. The glacier barely exists anymore, all you can see is lateral and terminal moraines (piles of crushed rock left by the glacier) deposited throughout a U shaped valley carved out smoothly by the formerly active glacier. All over the Alps and the world glaciers have been speedily retreating in the past 100 years.

What Deutsche Bahn does when the PA is broken

This morning I arrived at the underground S bahn station (fast city train) close to my house as usual. When I arrived I was surprised to hear a young man standing by the tracks shouting out what is normally announced over the Public Announcement speakers. I guess they were broken. This guy's job I guess is to travel around to stations where the speakers are broken and shout out the same information. "Caution. The next train travelling to Giesing is arriving..." What I found really funny and weird was this guy was using the exact voice that the computer usually generates. I guess it was a cue to let us know that he is now in the place of the computer. There seems to be hope for people who have lost their jobs to automation. When the computer breaks down someone gets a job, well, being a computer for the day. Look out computers, the humans are coming back! And we can do your job just as good as you!

Hiking around Innsbruck, Austria

This weekend was a long weekend in Germany, with November 1 being "All Saints Day" in the Catholic church. I took a 2 hour train ride through some high mountain passes to Innsbruck, the capital of Tirol province of Austria. It is surprisingly easy to reach this mountain town from Munich. Trains leave every hour almost and it didn't cost too much. I stayed in a youth hostel and met an interesting Canadian guy who was biking and taking trains across Eurasia from Japan to France. He also has a blog (www.iloveoil.blogspot.com) where he records his travels. You meet the most interesting people in youth hostels!



This is the river "Inn" which flows all through this valley.



This is some castle in the center of Innsbruck which used to be the royal power center for the Tirolian Alps. Innsbruck has a nice center around this castle, but much of the rest of the city is ugly! Lots of grey and brown apartment buildings and some very run down parts. Maybe it's a town full of ski bums who don't have any money. But if I got to wake up every morning and see snow capped peaks in every direction I wouldn't complain.



I took a Funicular and then a Tram 1600 m up from the valley floor near some peaks on the northern side of the broad valley through which the river Inn winds. This is a ski area which will be opening soon.



This looks like I hiked up from the top of the funicular (Nordkette bahn) but I didn't. I did meet some people in their fifties who took my picture, who had made it up from the valley by 11 am. This is about 1100 m vertical in 3 hours or so. Not bad for senior citizens!



As I was hiking up steep switch backs which went back and forth across an avalanche slide, from the Tram station to the peak I was passed by a woman who also was in her fifties or late forties. She had climbed up from the valley floor and kept gaining on me. This always happens in the Alps. Nevertheless I couldn't help saying "inconceivable" over and over again. By the time I reached the top the wind had picked up to feel like a hurricane and she was no where to be found. I think she was wearing crampons on her boots.



I need new boots. My current hiking boots leak in the snow.



For keeping avalanches from starting high up.



I was really worried when I reached the top. The winds were so strong I could barely stand up and they were picking up too.



This is looking north from the peak. I was being sheltered from the wind by a cabin on the edge of this cliff looking north towards Germany.




The trail that follows this ridge looks treacherous even without wind or snow. It would be great to do in the summer!



I love mountains and snow!



Looking down the valley at the river Inn again.

The glow of a firefly's butt

In the butts of fireflies there is an enzyme (big macromolecule like a protein) called Luciferase. When luciferase is exposed to the common energy currency among life forms, ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) it glows. The more ATP the brighter the glow. A PhD student in our lab uses this firefly butt enzyme to measure the concentration of ATP in a groundwater samples. Why would she do that? She does it to measure the activity level of bacteria in the water. The more ATP, the more active they are. It strickes me as amazing how useful a bugs butt can be. Who knows what other insect appendages will become useful next?

Leipzig and Ulm in October

The glass structure is a university building they are rebuilding on the site of a church that the communists destroyed.



St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Johann Sebastian Bach was the choir master for 20 years.



Downtown Leipzig.



This is the Leipzig Main train station. The biggest in Germany!



Biking from Ulm to Blaubeuren in the Swabian Alb, a limestone karst landscape filled with caves, underground rivers, canyons and vampires (I made the last one up).




Blautopf which means Blue Pot. An underground river that runs through a long cave system exits the ground here and makes a river which is really clear and bluish. The flow rate is pretty good and when there is a rainstorm it bubbles up like a hot tub and gushes water out very quickly. The river flows into the Danube River 20 Km downstream.



See it's really blue! I saw a big fish in there too!



Here is a Closter that was built around this mystical site in the middle ages. Science has since disposed of all such mysticism. Too bad. Legends are fun.



I'm up on a cliff looking into the valley. It was a nice warm place for a Sunday afternoon nap in the sun.



Tallest cathedral in the world in Ulm. Built over the course of 400 years in competition with a very similar looking cathedral in Cologne. It is 512 feet tall and you can climb to the top along narrow spiral staircases.





This is part of the old city wall and watch tower along the Danube River. Ulm is a very nice medium sized city with a well preserved old city. It also has only three letters in its name which is impressive! If only all German words could have so few letters. They tend to have very long words in German. English speakers would consider some German words sentences like Schwarzwalderkirshetorten (Black Forest Cherry Cake).







This house is 500 years old, like most of the houses in the fisherman's quarter of Ulm. It is an example of subsidence with one end of the house's foundation in a stream bed. The wood has slowly bent to accommodate the settling and the hotel guests all have levels attached to their beds to ensure no settling is occurring during their stay.



Here we go up the cathedral!

A little city which reminds one of eastern Germany's past

I road the train through this city on the way back to Munich after a weekend visiting some old friends who lead a small church in Leipzig, eastern Germany. The city is called Goeschwitz (pronounced Go-sh-vits) and has some very ugly communist buildings that likely each hold several thousand people in tiny apartments. I learned from living in a similar area of Leipzig (2001-2002) that privacy was discouraged and often families would share apartments and bathrooms were often in the stairwell for everyone to use instead of having a private bathroom.

For some reason I am fascinated as I look at this fading picture of the second world. That other part of the world where individual achievement was discouraged through a range of economic and domestic spying tactics. I like the hills in the background with outcropping sandstone covered with snow. The rocks never cared who was in power. They have been there far longer than us humans and will be there after we leave most likely. Nature resists alignment with a given political or religious view it seems. It just exists, sometimes inadvertently against, sometimes supporting humans, but usually just very quiet and neutral.

The mountains and rivers seem timeless. One can stare at the Urals and resonate with Tolstoy or stare at the Mediterranean and feel with Homer. Our views of earth and the solar system change from century to century, but they remain what they always were before we came. Perhaps this is a good reminder of who God is, unchanging, but the rocks don't give that answer away. If they know the answer, they are hiding it from us.

Trips in Southern Germany

The famous "Neuschwanstein" castle, built by crazy King Ludwig II in a time when there was no longer a strategic advantage to building castles that could be destroyed by modern artillery. Ludwig was one of the last of the Wittelsbach family to reign over Bavaria, the longest dynasty in Europe lasting almost one thousand years! I think he built it 1) for the future economy of Bavaria since it takes in tens of millions of Euros every summer from tourists who line up for hours to pay 9 Euros for a short tour or 2) to get women. Girls love castles. The more beautiful the castle the more girls are into them. Ludwig never married though. He might have been too busy building his castle and he also wasn't deemed fit to rule, so his uncle ruled the Kingdom in his stead while Ludwig spent the family fortune building several ridiculously expensive vacation castles around southern Bavaria. Around 40 he was found dead in Lake Starnberg near Munich, drowned under suspicious circumstances.



Looking out of Neuschwanstein towards Hohenschwangau, the family's more modest castle who Ludwig's father had built after discovering the ruins of a previous castle upon a hill. This castle was very nice as well. We especially liked the Turkish bedroom of the King with a secret passage to his wife's chambers. It seems back then husbands and wives of nobility didn't sleep in the same bed.



This lake is near the base of Zugspitze, the highest peak in Germany. It is great fun driving along the winding switch back roads through the Alps!



This is Karlsruhe, which means "Karl's rest". The city was built by orders of King Karl, after he fell asleep in the woods here on a hunting trip and decided it was so nice that he should build a city. The city is extremely well organized with 36 or so streets radiating from the central palace. This picture is looking west towards France across the Rhine river and the Rhine Graben (= grave in German). A graben is where the earth is being pulled apart and infilled with sediment, in this case the sediment is coming from the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps. France is slowly drifting away from Germany. Depending on which German you talk to, this may be good thing ;-)

The Rhine Graben is part of the large European Cenozoic Rift System, along which one finds extinct volcanoes with plains of basalts and historical earthquakes such as the 1356 Basel earthquake which flattened buildings 250 km away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Rhine_Plain).