Episode 1 – The Phantom Terrace

Now is the winter of my discontent (not really, actually, I just like the quote) reigning over my new host city which seems to be coping surprisingly well. Arriving back to Milano I was greeted by some 5-10 cm of snow on the ground and light snowfall that would not cease over night. But: no major traffic chaos that I could notice and the metro was not more congested than usual. Fine with me then, and I have to say I do like the wintery appearance with a bit of white “paint” on the cityscape.

The only pity is that it makes me feel like the first day of actually using my terrace is painfully far away, seeing it covered in snow like this… but I will try to await my glorious summer with some patience. 🙂 But proudly presenting anyway: the phantom terrace (click to enlarge).

The Milano Episodes – a prologue

I am making another attempt at blogging. It’s crazy, during the MBA I was so busy (or so it seemed at times at least) but now back in working life I can not seem to find the peace to write some coherent thoughts or post some pics.
Well maybe my new circumstances can remedy this. As a new role is demanding more time in Milano my wonderful firm has decided to give me an apartment there instead of paying hotel rooms, thus ending my aspiring career on TripAdvisor (I think I made it to “Senior Reviewer”, fantastic! Some thousand people have read one of my 12 or so reviews buy I only got two “useful” votes. Vote for me, my nick there is vela71! God bless!).
So here we go – in the fantastic modern world of mobile devices I downloaded the WordPress app and am blogging from seat 12A of an Air Dolomiti (the swype dictionary of my Android suggested “slutty”, because it hadn’t heard of the beautiful Dolomiti) Embraer (Android: “rubbery”) plane from Munich to Milan.

The app even has a built in “make a picture” function (Android: “suction”, but ok, I screwed up the swiping a bit) which is kind of cool. So instead of a travel blog reporting about my attempts to find beauty in this world I am giving myself the new mission to write the Milano episodes while business travelling. Or to write about the beauty of business travel while in Milano. Well, who fucking (Android: “ducking” -what the hell is that supposed to mean?) knows what tomorrow will bring anyway?

Another week another peak

This time I was headed for Krumbachstein, a 1.600m peak in the “Viennese Alps”. A nice trip altogether, but an expensive one. I ended up sacrificing my camera to make a short movie of the heaviest rain I have ever experienced being outside – let aside some crazy rains when sailing.

Before you ask: I was not hiking in a creek, the rain simply flooded the hiking trail. But see for yourself.

Fortunately this happened only during the last hour on the way down… it started out as quite a pretty day, see album below.

Krumbachstein – Album

For the records:
Kaiserbrunn – F. Haller Haus (burnt down!) – Wassersteig – Krumbachsattel – Krumbachstein – Lackaboden – “Eng” – Reichenau
7hrs, 1.100 m altitude

Hochturm hike

Weird.

I just re-read some of the things written last year and earlier. How things fade, importance and focus changes, life goes on. But too late for philosophy tonight. Will try to do some of that on another occasion.
Somehow Due Torri has lost a bit of its purpose, commenting on this exceptional year of my life and (almost) everything (important) that happened in it. Though it was fun to find out that the 2nd edition class of the world’s best Retail Banking MBA found out about it and read it, confirming a lot of my experiences on the MBA.

But I guess it still has the potential for an acceptable travel blog or something of that kind.

So to try and get back in tune with blogging here is a short report about a mountain trip in this summer-to-be. Last weekend I spent with friends close to Graz, celebrating common sailing experiences and two birthdays. And to burn some calories between those two parties my friends Hans and Robert and me went up Hochturm, a peak in the Alps near Eisenerz, the former center or iron mining in Austria (see HERE, quite interesting story btw).

As nice as it is having a whole mountain to yourself, the price to pay for that privilege was freezing our … off! The wind was blowing and the temperature was between 5 and 10°C.! On July 30th!! ‘Nuff said.

You can get a little impression here:

Catching Up (IV/IV) – Surf’s up!

Gee… now I was highly motivated to blog on after the summer, but still it took me another 5 weeks to complete my quadrilogy of catching up, with more things happening in the meantime that deserve further up-catching… another indication that time does go by much too fast in general.

But ok, here goes: the last big summer episode was a fantastic six day trip to stunning Portugal, the south-western corner of which to be more precise. As it is never to late to try some of your childhood dream fascinations I had decided to learn to surf – the wave riding thing, no sail, no kite, just a board, the ocean and me! When checking with Verena, a good friend of mine who is as close to a surfing pro as anyone I know she sent me to the village of Carrapateira where I arrived on what italians would call the “Ferragosto”-weekend in the mid of the month. As I had not been able to secure some accomodation beforehand I tried my luck knocking on doors around the village, getting a bit desperate already when I happened to find the bio-farm of an Austrian-gone-Portuguese who offered me a spare camper parked on the side of the field.

The Magic Bus

I nicknamed it “The Magic Bus” (see it on Whotube) as I was already thinking that a small miracle needed to happen in order for me not having to sleep in my car and as a reference to “Into the wild”, one of my favorite movies of the last years. Anyway: I very much do recommend Klaus’ hospitality and to advertise also his “real accomodation business” here is the link to his apartments!!

So all is well that ends well and after two days I was supplied with a room in the house of a lady in the village where I stayed for the rest of this short holiday. But a very special thanks and mention here goes to the supplier of this room: Edoardo, owner and fantastic host of Pensao das Dunas (Link!!)

Seriously, I have travelled a fair bit in my life so far but the hospitality encountered here stands out very distinctively! Edoardo goes out of his way to help his guests and even people he can not accommodate for lack of space in his cozy pension which is not too big. So whoever gets a chance to go to this area, don’t miss to go there. And book well in advance!!! The link is up there, Edoardo speaks around 5 languages, his wife even 10 more, so no worries that you might not be understood!

To finish up I want to say that meeting people with open hearts has made this trip so memorable. Maybe that area attracts such people in particular. To be mentioned – besides Edoardo, his congenial partner Victor and Klaus from the bio farm – are the surf camp students from all parts of Europe, the Danish family who have a house at Bordeira beach (can you imagine!?), the accountant-goes-rock-musician and his family from Lombardia, the teacher ladies from Barcelona and a very special note: thanks to Malgorzata from Poland for your company during my last breakfast on this holiday and even more for inspiring me to get back to writing this blog. 🙂

Portugal impressions

Catching Up (Episode III/IV) – Mountains, cheese and chocolates

With summer reaching its peak and the offices of the Italy-based company emptying up due to August retreats of its inhabitants, time had come also for me to leave Vienna and go see some of the world, to relax, to meet old friends and new acquaintances.

The first week of doing so I spent in Austria’s neighboring country Switzerland, to pay long overdue visits to friends who had moved to work there – to be more precise in Bern and Neuchâtel. The first thing you can notice about Switzerland when you travel from Vienna is that supposedly no one travels there, at least not for leisure. This can be derived from the fact that in the airport bookshop you can find travel guidebooks for some very exotic destinations, but none for Switzerland. The second thing you might notice is how organized that country is. Getting a half-fare card for the swiss train system plus a ticket from Zurich Airport to Bern took me roughly two minutes (!), including a brief wait in line, filling in a form (done by the SBB official) and the payment. And the trains themselves have a no-nonsense approach to punctuality: if it says 18.27 then it is 18.27, and not 18.26 and definitely not 18.28… scary, kind of! 🙂

So what is there to do beyond the obvious sightseeing

Downtown Bern

(e.g. the city of Bern, nice!): Certainly enjoying the nature in its different aspects – the most fun one being a boat ride in a rubber boat down the Aare river from Thun to Bern, in Captain Jörg’s very own river yacht. This turned out to be a favorite day out for quite many people, as we arrived on the departing point there were already a lot of other boat crews getting ready for the ride. And as pointed out previously also there organization Swiss style prevailed as there was a guy offering “inflate your boat with my compressor for a couple of Swiss francs”. The only obstacle on the otherwise quite relaxing float are the rapids near Uttigen, called the “Uttiger Schnelle” or “Uttiger Welle” by locals. Maybe the same locals who suggested us to pass it on the very right part, which we ultimately decided to ignore as the waters where really white there (right) but not on the left… the reason for this being – as we were soon to find out – the fact that on the left where we tried to pass there is an upstream current. Which took us around in circles, until we managed to row clear of it and went straight through the middle of the fun – wet, but ultimately happy! (I am giving this detailed recount as I was not in a position to shoot pictures or movies during the action, sfortunatamente. 🙂 ) Get an impression on some other guy’s video below:

The second part of my visit then brought me to the French speaking part of Switzerland, namely the quaint city of Neuchâtel where I was very nicely hosted by Judith and Magali, who took me on the first day up a little natural marvel in the Swiss Jura mountains: the Creux Du Van,

Creux Du Van

a massive cliff in an otherwise gently hilled landscape. Other than that experiences featured my first cheese fondue (yum!), a bike tour of the three lake country (beautiful!) a hike on the foot of Eiger, Moench & Jungfrau glaciers (fantastic!)

Glacier Views

and swimming in the Aare river (17.5 °C, by free will, not by boat accident!) as well as Lakes Neuchâtel (refreshing) and Morat (summerly bathing temperature). And to fill train and plane traveling times I read Dan Brown’s latest “The Lost Symbol” and got quite disappointed by the ending. But anyway. OK, and if you have been patient enough to read to here than you may also want to take a look at the picture gallery for sake of completeness.

A trip to Switzerland – August 2010

Catching Up (Episode II/IV) – The Sister City

Now for technical reasons too boring to detail I was almost leaving out another very nice trip done this (early) summer: under the guidance of the local Usual Suspect a small but dedicated expedition team explored the other really beautiful capital city on the Danube (any Slovakian reading this: sorry guys, I did not mean yours)!

Budapest from above

So what was there to do for the excursion team: eat (well, a lot), sweat and soak the night away in the fantastic historical Rudas Spa (take a look here), explore the city profoundly (and look good wearing John Ford glasses while doing that) and finally get ourselves surprised, a little drunk and quite happy during a wine tasting session sampling very nice Hungarian wines. Even a business idea was born! We would just need someone to actually DO SOMETHING. But doesn’t that always seem to be the problem? (See: MBA teamworks, inter-human relationships, etc.) Well, I may be getting to philosophical here. Better look at some pictures – feel free to send your feedback regarding the beauty of the glasses and consecutively of those wearing them to Mr.Ford directly! Alternatively drop me a line and I will pass it on!

Budapest Visit June 2010

Catching Up (Episode I/IV) – The Romanian Wedding

Now the most remarkable event of this spring for me certainly was the wedding of Oana and Ciprian in Romania, at the Black Sea. Now I consider myself an experienced wedding-goer, but my non-Austrian experiences so far were limited to Italy (Veneto) and kind of Italy (South Tyrol, the german speaking Italians who like Italy mostly when it comes to sports or to their fantastic tax deal with the Italian state, but that’s entirely another story).

Wedding At Mamaia Beach

So Romania promised to be interesting and this promise was kept. There were friendly and open people on all sides, families and friends of the couple, fun and drink-hard sailors and there was a romano-hungaro-austrian reunion.

And being already there, Andras and me did a quick sidestep into the Danube river delta, to get just a glimpse of one of Europe’s last remaining natural treasures.

Pelicans in the delta

Just get more impressions for yourself! Here is a picture gallery and here is the Romanian half-cousin of Angus Young playing “Thunderstruck” on his harmonica!!

Oana’s wedding and Romania

Catching Up (Prologue)

About two weeks ago I was reminded of the fact that I had not blogged in a long time through a message sent to me by someone who stumbled upon a duetorri post I had written about a year ago, asking for some details on the hike up Schafberg. Of course I answered the questions, but when logging in here I realized that my last post lies already more than half a year back.

So the urge to decide if I will finally give up blogging completely or try to bring duetorri back to life became stronger. But still I could not get myself started, until today I met someone… but more about that in one of the next posts – so here we go with some News Of The World.

A skiing day out

By special request from southern India – an update on skiing activities! 🙂

This winter really deserves its name here in Austria. It has been a long time since we last had so much snow also down in the valleys and even in the city. So after fighting off a slight cold I had been struggling with two weeks ago it was time to get on the slopes another time, so far I have only managed to go skiing for two days between x-mas and new year’s which certainly is not enough for a winter like this one.

Last sunday I then went with two friends to Annaberg, a quaint little village on the way to Austria’s most important place of pilgrimage, Mariazell. Despite a forecast of some sun, we remained under cloud cover or even in slight fog for the whole day, but ok – most importantly there were lots of snow (Click on the pic for the link to a short photo album, only phone camera pictures)!

And what I am now really looking forward to is a 4-day extended skiing weekend early March in Obertauern, not one of the biggest but one of the most convenient skiing resorts, with many accomodations directly on the slopes. So after the aprés-ski fun one must just be fit enough to finish the  trip down the hill… 🙂

Silvester with strangers

Today it’s four days into the new year which has begun with a very nice new year’s eve or “Silvester” as we call it in German. However I spent it with a bunch of people I only met 10 hours before the clock struck midnight.

But from the beginning: around Christmas I made plans to spend new year’s eve with some friends and friends of theirs I had not known before. On Dec 30th I learned that one of the guys I knew got sick which triggered a chain reaction of all others (which I already knew) deciding that they would go somewhere else, for multiple reasons – one of them certainly being the fact that the location for the party was a mountain hut 2.150 mts above sea level in the mid of the tyrolean mountains.

But as I was already close, visiting friends in Innsbruck I decided to join anyway especially as our friendly organiser Matthias invited me to come and party with the international crew that would get together to celebrate the end of a decade and the beginning of a new year.

And the outcome: a great evening, a beautiful nature experience, not too much headache the next day despite some icelandic “black death” and the forming of a new promising German-Austrian sledging team, maybe just a little too late for this year’s winter olympics… 🙂

New year’s 2009 / 2010

Above the picture gallery, below a link to a youtube video. Maybe the one showing me playing the guitar and singing will also turn up at some later point in time… that’s the heritage of the Web 2.0 decade.

Christmas 2009

It’s Christmas day (Dec 25th) afternoon, a grey day here in Linz. Today the rain has washed away what little was left of the snow that had fallen about a week ago, covering Austria in white and causing chaos to some European regions less prepared for snow. I heard that Bologna had 30-40 cm. Che casino!

Yesterday afternoon I went for an hour long run around some places of my childhood. With temperatures well above zero, still some icy baked fields of snow on the ground and the sun shining through a silvery haze of thin clouds it was a very nice winter experience. Especially running along the danube river that is almost still at that place with no one else nearby made for a relaxing and mind clearing experience after days of “this-has-to-be-finished-before-christmas” at work.

And even though I do not want to bore the MBA class readers of this blog with too much looking back I can not resist but post the link to my December 2008  blog archive. It feels so far away already. I wonder what it will be like returning to Bologna AND to Alma in about two weeks – that will certainly be an occasion for more blogging. But for the next week I have other plans, I just found a great inspiration below:

(Pictures taken from the ever-fantastic “Big Picture”)

Some images of the last weeks

Some things I have done during late September / October. Photo albums only. Enjoy!

Sicily sailing

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Hiking in Styria (AT)

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Hiking in Friuli (IT)

Taking a look back

A week ago I entered into a new chapter: after the MBA year, newly employed with UCG. (Actually I am not really employed yet but that is another -less interesting even if somewhat bizarre- story.) So maybe this is a good a time to look back and of course look at the bottom line, if possible.

First of all, as in my good old days of regular blogging activity I looked for some images to illustrate my blog post with and I found two excellent things the first of which being this one below:

And wondering how to go on about reviewing my MBA experience I soon realized that it could be a good thing to enlist the help of an expert in back-looking, and who could be better suited for this than good old Frankie-Boy who has written the inofficial anthem of all back-lookers some quotes of which I am using to guide myself on this sentimental journey. However, I hope I am not facing the final curtain on a short term so I’ll have to start somewhere in the middle of the song.

“…I’ve lived a life that’s full,
I’ve traveled each and ev’ry highway…”
Yes, this was a life lived in full by my standards. Could have done some more partying and some less studying I guess, but then I remember Friday nights when no one wanted to go out because everyone was so busy working for the MBA (That’s true, I even blogged about this misery, one can still read it). I have also done a number of things for the first time in my life, which becomes increasingly harder to do as one gets older.
And yes, I did my fair share of travelling and exploring Italy during this year as all enthhusiastic followers of this blog may confirm.

“…Regrets I’ve had a few,
but then again too few to mention…”
Again true. I stand by my choices. Yes of course, with the knowledge of now one could do things better facing the same questions, but then was then and now is now so WTF.

“…I did what I had to do,
And saw it through without exemption…”
In terms of the MBA that is a good way of putting it. I really do hope my way of “seeing it through without exemption” was acceptable and beneficial for those working with me and that they forgive me the moments in which it may not have been so.
Seeing it through to me also means in the context of this past year truly letting go of something old to have the opportunity for something new to begin. That can be hard to do at first, but becomes a bit easier when doing it repeatedly. There is a wonderful story describing and explaining this phenomenen I was introduced to only very recently called “The Parable of the Trapeze”, you can read it here. Strongly recommended!!!

“…I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried,
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing…”
Yes. Emotionally all of this has accompanied me through this year. And this is where I have to bow my head and say THANK YOU to each and everyone who has been present throughout this year -physically or just remotely- for being such an inspiration and a part of my life!!

“…For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself then he has naught…”
Hmm, would certainly be interesting to follow that train of thought but that might be taking it a bit too far for this humble “Bologna experience” blog, as it says on the headline. Further discussions must remain reserved to long evenings with good friends and maybe with a lot of decent red wine . And they must remain unprinted. OBBIVIOUSLY!

So in the end the first class of the world famous and best Retail Banking MBA programs have graduated, to find themselves amidst a league of other extraordinary thinkers and scholars, academically decorated with the very same three letter code. To prove that point I am using the second result of my image search which I have mentioned before.

And for those new-MBAs looking back in anger, I offer some consolation: true, a Harvard MBA might get you a good job, but does it prove you are smart? Does it prove you are a good person? I say no to both. And also for that my second picture shall serve as evidence.

 

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Heaven’s gate

August has been passing by slowly and nicely, I have to say. After a quite rainy start into the summer, the last weeks have brought quite beautiful weather also up here north of the alps. Reason enough to explore some more mountains – this time in my home region.

Himmelspforte (Heaven's gate)

Together with my friend Hans I hiked up to the peak of Schafberg via the route passing the Himmelspforte (Heaven’s gate). As we reached the top we realized somewhat surprised, that the hike that was signposted to take 4 hrs had only taken us 2.5 hrs. After an even faster way down we relaxed a little in the beuatiful lake (Mondsee) that you can also see on the picture. However, the result was that the following days I was walking like Robocop because it was not possible to move or even bend my legs without any substantial pain.

Below you find the link to the whole album, it also includes some impressions from Hans’ parents’ farm house and gardens in Baum… this is as typical upper austrian farmland as it gets.

Schafberg and Baum

And there is also a little video that gives an impression of the nice panoramic view from up there!