Monthly Archives: November 2017

My travels

Freiburg im Breisgau, a wonderful city

Last Friday, I had to go to a business meeting with an important potential partner to Freibrug im Breisgau. It is quite close to Basel, Switzerland, but sadly not very close to Munich, so it was a 4 something hour drive.

Starting off in Perlach

To sum things up – it was very well worth the drive. Business wise and to experience this wonderful city. My colleague Anselm is from here and I was invited to stay as a guest in his parents house, which I appreciated as it was much more comfortable than a hotel room or driving back in the night.

The drive already offered some nice sights. Due to traffic conditions and good experience we decided not to take the road through Stuttgart, but went on the southern route instead, through Lindau and then along the Bodensee lake. This is wine country with some amazing sights, sadly we did not have time to stop.

Wine country along the Bodensee lake

So upon arriving to Freiburg, you see the standards are set high as well, even dogs have their own Porsche cars, something you have to get used to in Germany 🙂

Dog in a Porsche
He did not really feel like taking a picture and was a bit shocked 🙂

After getting gas on the petrol station, we hurried to catch the meeting. So the city itself has some 200k+ inhabitants and is spread out through several valleys and is bordering on the Dark forest (Schwarzwald) which is a wonderful green part of Germany with some mountains and hilltops including ski slopes. You might also have heard of the cake that is named after the forest. I did have my ski gear in the car with me, since I knew I could use up Saturday, but in the end I visited another country, but that is already material for another blog post.

So Freibrug – I got the opportunity to check out the city centre, which is beautiful, has a great atmosphere and there are many young people as well as Freiburg is a university city. It has a fairly similar standard to Munich, so housing is expensive so is the food if you eat out, but I am already used to prices in some German cities, so I was not surprised at all.

There is also a small hill in the city from which you can see almost the entire city and reminded me of Roznik and Cankarjev vrh in Ljubljana. That is a small big thing missing in Munich, the city itself is completely flat except for a small artificial hill in Olympiapark and that sometimes really makes me miss Ljubljana and Slovenia. Freiburg I could adapt to much easier as there are a lot of hills and climbs to choose from in the vicinity.

So being in another state I can see that language is a bit different than in Bavaria and I did have some problems catching up to everything that was being said in the meeting but luckily my German is already good enough that I can fill in the gaps of the dialect words that are sometimes used by people I meet.

Freiburg has a great vibe to offer, very nice city centre and I would gladly spend an extended weekend there to get to know the city better. Here are some photographs captured by my professional Samsung phone camera. If they don´t convince you, still go and visit, you will not be sorry.

What also got me thinking was a memorial to a synagogue that was destroyed in 1938 by the SS. I do want to explore that part of Germany more as well, I have been to Dachau, but I would like to understand the politics and the times better and there are many places in Germany someone can do so.

Freiburg today is a bit atypical, as people tend to try to find work in Basel, Switzerland, since salaries are much higher there and continue to live in Freiburg. It is about 1 hour drive between the cities. French people tend to try to work in Freiburg, as I guess salaries in Germany top the ones in the nearby parts of France. An interesting mix.

As far as first impressions, after spending some hours wandering in the city, go, I can really say without a doubt that Freiburg is a place worth visiting. Also the region has much to offer. My first plans were to visit Switzerland and then Lichtenstein on the way back towards Munich and try to get some skiing done somewhere in between, but when I woke up on Saturday and saw that rain was pouring (even though Freiburg should have the highest number of sunny days in Germany), I decided to go to France and visit Strasbourg as the Christmas fair was being opened on that day, but as I said, Strasbourg is well worth another blog post on its own.

What I also noticed in Freiburg and it was the first time I saw that (but was frankly never very specific in examining churches) on the walls of the main church in Freiburg there were engravings used by the market traders as measuring units. So for example how big should a loaf of bread be, a “underarm” length unit, called Elle in German. What was interesting the bread sizes differed and different models should be used based on how fruitful the year was. I found that quite interesting and ingenious. So the prices stayed the same, but the unit size was changed based on the general community welfare and stocks.

So enough about Freiburg, for a first visit it was short but sweet. I do hope I will get an opportunity to know the city better and if I spoke Germany well enough maybe even be there on business more often, as the company we met might just be the right partner for the banking sector in Germany and Switzerland. I will be happy to dedicate more posts to Freiburg in the future either way.

Health&keeping it

Something that got me thinking about why quitting smoking is good

This blog post I will dedicate to quitting smoking. I have smoked cigarettes since I was 14. It started off in the 1st year of gymnasium and I kind of kept on going from there. Today I am 35 years old and have been smoking most of that time. I have had periods when I have quit, sometimes just for a few weeks, a longer period was at about 25 years old, when I quit for about 3 months and at 29 years, when I quit for 6 months. The moment I heard the term “chain smoker” in English class I knew that I fall into that category without a doubt. I have an on/off switch so I either smoke 1-2 packets / day or I don´t smoke at all. There is no in-between for me and my smoking habits. In the past my main motivation for quitting was better performance at half-marathons and sports in general, but I would quit 2-3 weeks before a run a few years ago when I was running on sports events quite often. I also quit smoking for 4 months this year, on 2 January, since I simply did not feel comfortable smoking as it really started to affect my lungs and coughing.

I always remember a medical checkup I had at 30 years old, which was a routine examination paid for by the state for people. Part of this examination is also a lung capacity test. At that time my lungs were perfectly fine and being a chain smoker I had no problems running 21 kilometers run with my 100+ kilograms of weight even due to smoking. But I remember the nurse telling me that the time to quit is really now at that age, as the future with smoking does not look bright – especially because of the disease called the  Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) . you can read more about it here on this Wiki page.

So cancer is just on of the things that you risk when smoking, but COPD is a widely spread deterioration of the lungs. That means that at older age as your lungs become practically dead, you have problems catching your breath even when walking. This later on puts more strain on the heart as it needs to work harder to pump oxygen in the body and of course heart failure is often an outcome of that burden. So, definitely not a good thing.

So I started smoking again around the beginning of May this year and have been a really good chain smoker until recently. Since in Germany you can get the big packet with 27 or sometimes 29 cigarettes, I was able to off 1 – 1,5 packets a day, that being cca. 40 cigarettes daily on average. Mostly in the morning and evening hours before I would go to or return from the office.

I have quit again now, due to not feeling well and I really knew I overdid it again with the smoking. A cold finally got me and I had to lay in bed for two days, not being able to smoke (even though I wanted to as a true junkie), I took the chance to quit again. I felt much better after the first two days (as always) and I managed to push through the first week, which is usually the hardest to keep away from cigarettes. What always motivates me are the WHO (World Health Organisation) data on what happens with your body when you quit – I am always driven by small goals towards the big one – if that´s your thing as well, check the WHO statistics out here.

Ok, so far, for me, nothing new. But what really got me thinking was this. In my former company I received the FitBit Charge 2 bracelet as a parting gift from my colleagues and it measures your sleep, heart rates, etc. I keep it on me most of the time and it gets me thinking a lot – how much I move, what my heart rates are, about my exercise and calorie consumption. So changing my life broke my sports routines and I am really not living as healthy as I would like to. What really sobered me up on smoking, was the heart rate at rest that the FitBit measured. This chart told me everything and it is giving me true perspective on why I really should not start again. I am posting it below, so that you may understand what I am talking about.

So to keep it simple. My resting heart rate dropped (I quit smoking 14 days ago) from about 65/66 to 55, which is a decrease of about 15%! 15% is a lot if you look at it long term. Taking into account that I really don´t do as much sports as I would like to (but have started running and workouts again in Ljubljana and Munich) it is a huge difference. Also of course after about 10 days I usually start sneezing and coughing out all the junk that got stuck in my body from the smoking and I must say having that sense of smell and taste again is wonderful. Not to mention the feeling of taking a really deep breath without that burning feeling in the lungs or inducing a cough.

So, yes, I really hope that this was the last time I quit and even if I slip up again that I will be able to refrain myself from becoming a chain smoker once more, as I clearly am affected by smoking.

Wishing you all the best if you are on the path to quitting this expensive and senseless addiction. Keep it up, you know it´s worth it.

Life & stuff

My first ever blog post!

So here we are… my first blog post. Thankfully I do have some experience with WordPress from work, so I am able to start off writing. Maybe the first entry should be boring so that I do not set the standard too high. So I will start by sharing when and how I will most probably write future blog posts – so, here we are, evening hours in Munich, when I am home from the office, sitting at my computer and eating vegetable soup… 🙂 The entries should be more interesting than that though. Hopefully 🙂

Today was a very specific day not to the facts that I lost some money in the Forex market, had a very good (and long) day in the office and am getting ready for an important meeting for our position in Germany tomorrow. No, this day will be remembered as the day that I finally acted on my idea to start a blog. Hopefully I will at some point look back and remember this day with a smile of nostalgia on my face.

Of course as it is appropriate for a blog, here is a photograph so that you may relate to the environment in which this post is being written.

The soup is an interesting addition and will be a big topic in the future, as being healthy was one of the first things I stopped caring about when I went abroad. The sports routine from home falls apart and you end up eating junk food most of the time due to super long hours in the office. So my main challenge now is to get my health and fitness level back on track and to a level that I deem acceptable for my age (which means I need to be able to run a half marathon again). I guess I have a topic for the next post…

Sóup
End the day with some healthy food