Dent de Verreu, French Alps

Sometimes you like someone so much that you're willing to hike up 4,000 ft, sweating like a pig, staying on your feet for 10 hours, carrying a gallon of water on your back* – all for the sake of spending a day with them, doing what they love. And if you're lucky, they will like you enough to tolerate you complaining that you're starving, you're thirsty, you're tired, that you wish you could have slept later than 6 am, you wish you had never been talked into this, and who's great idea was it after all to eat lunch sitting on a rock surrounded by mud, with your fingers freezing to your sandwich.

It was the perfect time to see waterfalls cascading down the mountains.

Yep. I'm lucky. Very lucky!

Hike up Dent de Verreu, near Samoëns, France, on June 01, 2009. I'm proud to say that more such hikes ensued and the whole experience became less painful each time.

*Okay, I confess, I've actually been so lucky that I haven't even had to carry that much going up!

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau & Salzburg

Before I began studying in Weimar in the fall of 2005 I spent the summer in Munich. A friend had offered me a place in her apartment for two months so I could take a German course – I really knew no German at the time. I somehow learned about the Salzburg Festival and thought it would be a great opportunity to hear some great concerts at what seemed to be a honky-tonk local music festival. Right. Except no one told me that it was a highly renowned festival, mainly for German and Austria high-society and hardly a place for 10 euro student stand-by tickets. But Salzburg was only an hour and a half train ride from Munich and a place I was eager to visit, and with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose memoirs I had been reading, speaking along with a concert (don't ask, I have no idea what he was actually doing), I decided it was worth it to make a day trip. In retrospect, I have no idea how I could have been so utterly naive.

My plan was simple: go directly to the ticket office, get a ticket for later, and then explore the city a bit before the concert. So, I didn't really know where the ticket office was, but I found it eventually, and discovered a long line out the door. Man! So many people waiting in line to buy tickets for the DFD concert! But the line didn't move, and eventually I had to ask someone just why all these people were standing in line. And what couldn't be better: they were waiting to go hear a live interview with him in just a half an hour; the ticket office was inside. But here again, no one ever told me that the Salzburg Festival is one of the poshest of all music festivals. Tickets? What tickets? There were only 2 still available at 90 euros each. What about a student discount? Ha, ha, they don't have student discounts (I think I'm actually lying, they probably did have 10% off...no, maybe 5%). Student stand-by tickets? No. Well, in my complete and utter despair, I did discover I could get in line for the interview, the 7 euro tickets for which were given on a first-come-first-served basis. And since I was there ages before it was to begin, I would be one of the first to get in.

There is, unfortunately, one more tragic twist to this story. As I happily sat down in my first-row seat, something occurred to me: it was going to be in German. . . (Oh yeah, and the lady interviewing him sat on the same side of him that I was sitting on, and she somehow managed to sit with her elbow on the table, facing him, and alas, blocking my view of him....).

Ah! Bliss!

The day honestly wasn't so unsuccessful. :)