Today, my wife and I asked a good friend of mine and his family over for lunch. He is teaching at Cal State Sacramento, and I arranged for him to spend his Sabbatical with us here at ETH.

We went for a small trip of the surroundings. After a relatively warm December, we had a relatively cold (but not excessively cold) January ... cold enough, in any case, for the lake of Einsiedeln to freeze up again.



This morning, our thermometer showed a temperature of -12C, the high was around -4C, and when we got back just after dark, the temperature was back at -8C already.

We didn't get too much snow this winter. We got very little precipitation in January,



but it's pretty anyway. Here a view of the large Mythen mountain to the South of us shortly before sunset.

Ooh, that looks nice. All our snow's gone now.

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Reminds me of the Southern Alps in New Zealand, but here right now we get summer stuff:

Winter finally arrived with full force. We got about 2ft of fresh snow tonight. Here two pictures out of our windows this morning:





It's still snowing, and they predict more snow for the coming days.

Good thing that isn't England - it looks like the wrong type of snow.

It's white and fluffy. The temperature is slightly below freezing, i.e., the snow is quite good and powdery.

On one of the pictures, you see snow hanging from the railing of the balcony, but that is only, because there is some older snow below.

Part of my day was spent at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, which is showing the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Take Your Time.

Photography, sculpture, installation art, amazing (are we allowed to use old-fashioned words like "amazing" here or do we have to say that it's simultaneously "ultra-cool" and "white-hot"?)

A few images from here:


This is a tunnel


Wall of live, growing reindeer moss. The Sydney wall is longer than it is wide and apparently complicated negotiations were required to get the moss through quarantine into Australia.


This room is lit by monochromatic yellow light. Imagine taking a monochrome image in Photoshop and making it yellow and black rather than white and black. Eerie indeed.


Slowly changing pattern of rectangles and perspectives.

The exhibition has travelled widely and it looks like each location only gets a sample of a very much larger body of work. Eliasson was born in Sweden but considers himself Icelandic and spends a month each year in Iceland photographing the landscape and seeking inspiration. He originally trained as an architect and in his Berlin workshop he and his assistants use a computer software package for designing his three dimensional stuff. I speculate that he uses the same stuff as Frank Gehry, which is the same stuff as Airbus used to design the A380, and Boeing for the B787.

I tried to watch TV. It didn't work. I saw only snow on my TV set. Thus, I had to check outside what the problem was.

As ours is the top-level apartment in the house, we also have a terrace above our apartment. That is where the satellite dish is located.

Here a view of one of our windows from the outside on my way up to the terrace:



I wasn't sure whether I would be able to open the hatch to the terrace with so much snow lying on it, but luckily, the electrical motor operating the hatch was strong enough.

Aha! Here is the culprit:



There is now about 1m (a bit over 3 ft) of snow on the terrace. As I opened the hatch, I set off a sizable avalanche.

Here is the hatch from the outside:



Since I was up there, I took two more pictures of our surroundings:





The church that you see on the picture, the monastery of Einsiedeln, is the most important baroque church and the center of Catolicism here in Switzerland. One of these days, I'll try to take some pictures of the inside of the church. It is lovely.

I actually had a picture of the outside that I took on another day on my notebook:



and I found a few pictures of the inside on the Internet:







Enjoy!

The real key to getting your hatch open wasn't the electric motor, but the hydraulic pusher rigged to it. THAT could have been hand-pumped and still done the job nicely (if a bit more tediously).

That is, that looks like a hydraulic ram to me, though I'm not quite sure....

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"Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821 - 1881
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