19.11.03 - Unihockey Tournament in Fislisbach

Every autumn a tournament in "Unihockey" is organised by the sports clubs and the schools in the region where we are living. This year Amanda got really interested and was the first to sign up in the school. As a consequence she was selected the captain of the Fislisbach 2nd year class team. Their team name was "Der silberne Blitz".
The category where they paricipated was 1st to 4th class. 16 teams participated in this category.
The tournament started with a 4 groups times 4 teams preselection, where the winners of each group got to play for the positions 1 to 4, and the seconds in each group for positions 5 to 8, etc.
Der silberne Blitz won their group and got in the top category playing for gold. Unfortunately the other teams were older and tougher and therefore der silberne Blitz became 4th in the tournament. However, this was a phantastic performance from a team that had never trained before and that was from the younger side.
Amanda is here playing as goalkeeper. She also played a lot on the field, but this happened to be the easiest place to take a picture...

Here's a team picture of "Der silberne Blitz". From the left...
Michelle, Eugenia, Dominique, Amanda, Manuel, Askin

18.10.03 Glaubenberg

This is one of the best parts of living in Switzerland - the possibility of totally changing surroundings by driving a couple of hours.

Here we are on the Glaubenberg - 1.800 meters high after walking roughly an hour uphill from where we parked our car. Below you can see a carpet of grey - the carpet of low hanging clouds is called "Hochnebel" or high-fog. This friggin' fog blocks all the sun from the people living below (inlcuding us).

Please observe the snow the kids are playing with.

11.10.03 Heitersberg

Here you see Mike posing like Elvis in one of the best autumn days of 2003.

During weekends we sometimes visit Heitersberg (splits the rivers Limmat and Reuss from another with an altitude of ~700 meters) to get some fresh air.

27.9 - 4.10 - Castellina in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy with family Ervast

Greve
in
Chianti

We spent a phantastic week together with the family Ervast (Minna, Jouni and their 4-year old daughter Maria) in Tuscany. We rented a 5-room appartment with 150sqm for 1 week in a small village named Lilliano, which is a part of Castellina in Chianti, which lies roughly 20 km north of Siena

In this picuture you see us having our first dinner in the appartment

The appartment had a pool as well...

During the week we visited lots of more and less famous sites. This here undoubtedly belongs to one of the famous ones. Fortunately we arrived just in time, otherwise the tower of Pisa could have fallen :-)

Here you see the towers of San Gimignano taken from the city walls.

Here you have the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) of Florence.

Here we all are having a quick lunch at the square of Palazzo Vecchio (old palace) in Florence

20.09 - Sour-Ryebread baking in Szinznach Dorf

You could call the sour rye-bread the Finnish national bread... so popular it is in Finland, and so unknown everywhere else. To collect money for the Finnish School of Argovia, Ursula Teinilä and I spent this Saturday baking 100 sour rye-breads. All the earings were donated to the School. We charged 7 CHF per loaf

23.8 - Tell Spiele in Interlaken

This was one of the rare moments in a year where Anne and I were able to get out together - inlcuding an overnight stay, this time in Interlaken. We visited the Tell Spiele, an annual summer theatre played in Interlaken. This was part of an event sponsored by a Swiss IT consulting company named IMG.

The play told the story of Wilhelm Tell was truly enjoyable. To be recommended!!!

17.8 - Conny-Land

On this Sunday we went to Conny-Land, which is an amusement park in Switzerland close to lake Constance. This was a phantastic day. The weather was perfect, the action for the kids was truly great, and the area was not crowded whiche meant, that we didn't have to queue that much to any of the gears / events in the area.

In Conny-Land our favourites were:
- Dolphin show
- Lumber River
- Car Driving Park
- Parrot Show
- The Drop Zone (free fall in a wagon)

16.8 - "Walkabout" to the Fronalpstock (1.930 meters)

This was kind of a cool Saturday...
I left (alone :-) in the morning to climb the Fronalpstock, one of the mountains you tend to once in a while see in the weather forecasts, as it has a moving camera installed on the top. By the way, in a picture later you can see this mountain from another direction. I will mention it there...

Please observe a red circle in the picture. From this spot the next picture has been taken...

...And this is the next picture. Please observe the red circle in this picture as well. That marks the place where the previous picture was taken. 

Here you see a picture of how the track continued from the spot I took the previous picture.

All together it took me 2.5 hours to climb a vertical altitude of over 1 km. It felt darn good to park at the restaurant on the top (from the other direction you can reach the mountain with a cable cart) and enjoy a good meal with a cold drink.