Back in Austria and London

The past two weeks have been pretty busy ones. Two weekends ago was our office ski trip, titled Sneeuwwitje (Snow White), in Fiss, Austria, rather close to where I skied last December. I think there were about 70 people from the office there, so quite a crowd. We started off after work on Friday by making the ~8 hour drive to Ulm, Germany and then continued on another ~2 hours to Fiss in the morning. When we got there it was snowing and foggy, so visibility was about 20 feet - trying to ski down the mountain was kind of surreal, basically just skiing into white nothing-ness. After an afternoon of that, we continued on to the apres ski, which was unlike anything I'd ever seen in the states. I know there's plenty of bars on the slopes where I've been before, but in Fiss, there is a full-blown club right on top of the ski rental place at the bottom of the mountain, and it's absolutely packed every day. The place was called Hexenalm, which I think means "witch" or something in German, and featured a DJ in a booth above the dance floor who would occasionally swing out over the crowd on a rope, jump up and start dancing on the railing, or hoist a beer up from the bar with a pulley system - quite interesting. People are in there dancing the night away in their ski boots. Ridiculous.

Apres ski #1

Actually, dancing the night away is a bit of an exaggeration because the place actually closes at 7pm and immediately turns into a quiet restaurant, kinda weird. Once that happened our group would go back to one of the large chalets for dinner together and then proceed on to another bar/club for the night called Hexen Keller (something like cursed basement - not sure what's up with the witchcraft theme...). This was pretty much how every day and night went - very fun but very tiring as well.

Apres ski #2

Luckily, after the first day, the weather was absolutely perfect for skiing - clear skies, temperature above freezing by a few degrees and some nice snow (higher on the mountain at least). It was awesome to see the great scenery, get some fresh air, get in some good skiing and see all of my coworkers out in a different setting on the mountain. Couldn't have asked for a better couple days in the snow.

awesome.

The one bad part of the weekend was the huge drive to and from Fiss. After the very tiring weekend we had what ended up being a 13 hour ride back on Tuesday. About 9 hours of driving (including a stop and 120 euro fine in Austria for not having a driving vignette), plus 2 hours of being stuck in standstill traffic in Germany and another hour train ride since we had to return a colleague's car and take a train back to the city. Other than that though, really awesome.

Then, after another busy week at work, this last weekend was spent in London. Venkat, a friend and coworker from the Atlanta office who's starting a 4 month stint in Rome, was there, so me, him, Becky, Katie (another former BCG ATLer) and two of Venkat's friends all made it to dinner one night. We also managed to catch almost all of the March Madness games with a bunch of other Americans, which was great since I had to miss a lot of them the week before. Gotta love March Madness. Since that wasn't very London-y, we went to some good London restaurants and also went to The Boat Race - the annual rowing race on the Thames between Oxford and Cambridge. It was actually pretty crazy as hundreds of thousands of people show up to drink, socialize and watch the race. Pretty cool event.

As you can see not the greatest weather, but hey, it's London. It actually was really nice on Sunday though, which was a good way to cap off the weekend. Now it's been a new week starting to ramp up on a new case. It seems to be really cool content and there's a chance that I'll get to go to Hong Kong over the course of the next 7 weeks, so I'm pretty excited. Other than that I'm just enjoying the weather as it gets a little warmer, enjoying the sunlight as it's now bright much later, and trying to get some more travel plans finalized.

Til next time...