Lech

Greetings from Ober lech. The weather is gorgeous...warm days and thunder storms at night. I cannot explain how thrilled the three of us are by these storms. Our first night we watch good ol Deutschland win third place in the world cup....it seems they almost always do pretty well...third in the last two world cups, and second in the European championship. Apparently organization and deep knee bends get you at least half way.
Anyway, we watched a great game and then were treated to a storm the likes of which none of us had ever seen. There was so much lightening that the sky was almost constantly lit up, but it was a storm so high up that there was almost no sound. Incredible. We stared in awe for a long time, until I said what we were all thinking: God clearly is a fan of Uruguay.
Today Thomas and I walked uphill a really long way, just to the edge when I was thinking I really hate hills and come to think of it..hate everything....until we got to the top and put on the ipods and just ran...I know..bizarre..but it is along a flat, flower filled mountain train with all of lech beneath you and the legs are so happy to be in fast motion that it is the best feeling...thomas cannot get over it...it is euphoria. That is what it is.
The funny part is you pass people who think you are some sort of crazed athletes...one old guy even mumbled "People are in such a hurry-no one has any time any more!
Then we went to lunch and dashing Gerold turned up in black on a vintage motorcycle. Katia is working unpaid for a few weeks at a restaurant in Copenhagen that was just rated the best restaurant in the world. They went for dinner I guess and were so impressed that they asked if people could hang around the kitchen and chop things..this is something people like Katia think is fun. So she and the head chef at the Schneider hotel are there picking herbs or washing herbs..who knows...but it is 12 hour days and we wont see her until August. Bad. But good is when we see her, she will sure as hell know her herbs.
tomorrow we will lay low, then go for dinner at the Schneiders where Gerold intends to cook for us. This I gotta see.

Ok where was I? We have left Sardinia, which was surprisingly sad this year, and visited Margaret and Gianluca and kiddies in Andora, then to Switzerland to hang with the Wehlens and swim in the lake. It is kind of paradise over there..the lake, the public swimming pool with: 2, 25 meter pools, and one Olympic sizes one, a diving pool with 1 meter, three meter and five meter boards, many many indoor and outdoor pools for swimming with really small children, and slightly bigger ones, ping pong, air hockey and foosball tables, the list goes on. Little town of Baar where the wehlens live is debt free and perhaps the richest canton in the country..money is piling up and they don't want to cut taxes any more than they have, so they invest wildly..it is like something out of a children's book: roads are constantly being improved, trains runs on time, new ice hockey rinks that Palin could only dream of...Zurich is a cesspool of debt and crime compared to Baar.
I must say a word about cake here. As many faithful readers know, the wehlens eat cake and coffee (like all Germans) in the afternoon, but because they also adopted the South African tradition of tea immediately upon waking, while one is gathering strength to get to breakfast (eva literally sets an alarm every morning to have enough time to drink all this-wakes at 6, breakfast at 9) the entire schedule is pushed back, so cake and coffee are at 6 p.m., dinner at 9. Well hard as I try I cannot squeeze it all in, breakfast at 9, lunch at 1 or 2, cake at 6, dinner at 9. Somehow, it just doesn't seem like the right time. Eva says I must force myself. Make an effort. (don't you love her?)
Anyway, for a few days in a row, my cake eating had been lazy, unfocused if you will. And it had not gone unnoticed. Little things with strawberries were left uneaten..and then when the best thing came..a local specialty called the Zuger-kirsch torte..a cake with kirsch in it..even though i usually hate booze in my sweets..I love this. The first few days it is in the house it is so strong it can get a small woman tipsy as eva discovered when she sawed off a big piece and then went to the airport to pick up a friend only to discover she was slightly hammered.
So she asks me one afternoon if I want cake and I say no thank you, i want to go for a run in the woods and one after the other is not possible. this seemed to depress her, so when I came back and announced it had been a bad jog-no pep, way too hot, blah, she made the calculus that enough was enough and i was clearly weak from lack of cake (that was the word she used) and needed nourishment. And she hands me a huge piece of cake with milky coffee at now 6 45 p.m. She is quite wonderfully mad that woman.