Tag: photo

Friends from Germany and I got my own snowboard (January 2024)

In January I had to do a border run to Armenia with Rosinante. Because of customs regulations.

It was actually super nice to spend some time in a mild climate and just hanging around outside. And it was super nice to experience Armenian hospitality again. After a couple of minutes at a nice spot at a river, some guys started a barbeque and invited me to join. We had a great time together.

After a night in Armenia, I went to Tbilisi, visited a nice bazaar with Whoopy and met Racki who went down from the mountain with a Minibus. Together we went to the airport to pick up a friend of her who came to visit us. We spent a nice time in Tbilisi sight seeing and in the evening we went for dinner and a cocktail bar.

In the cocktail bar we met friends who we had met in Gudauri. Our time in the bar was crazy. The waitress and bar keeper was absolutely drunk and maybe on some other drugs and we had weird but funny conversations. After some time a Russian girl joined us. She was drunk as well, very funny, had a rich husband and in the end she paid all our drinks.

And the friend of Racki brought my snowboard and equipment that I had bought in Germany via Kleinanzeigen. It was super awesome to finally have my own stuff. My snowboard was pure red and I called it Zäpfchen. The friend of Racki got late to the airport in Germany because of the public transport. He was so late that there was no time to check in the big bag with all my stuff properly and so the airline let him bring the big bag without paying.

After two days another friend of Racki joined us and together we had so much fun snowboarding, hanging around and spending time together.

Snowboarding all day!  (January 2024)

Racki was working a lot in the hotel and so I had a lot of time.

My main activities: snowboarding, making music and hanging around with Racki in the hotel.

After a couple of days my snowboarding improved rapidly and soon I was discovering the whole mountain and all the tracks and off track areas.

Especially riding in the fresh deep snow in the morning was awesome! It was so awesome to go up with the lift and see all the untouched snow and minutes later to ride on and through it.

After some more practice, I started to do little jumps and riding fakie which was a whole new world to me.

When Racki had nothing to do in the hotel, we rode together and it was absolutely awesome!

And the scenery! Just awesome!

Moving into the Pappartment (January 2024)

After a couple of days in her new job in a small hotel in Gudauri Racki’s bosses offered us to move from Rosinante in a special apartment. For free.

The apartment was used mainly as a storage room. The owner had started to renovate it, ran out of money and so it was only partly renovated. There was no proper floor and because there was a lot of concrete dust, I put cardboard walls on the whole floor. That’s the reason why we called it the Pappartment. “Pappe” is a German word for these cardboard walls. We cleaned and reorganized a lot and then the place got our living space.

In a separate room with glass walls Racki and I established our small living space and after some work on the electric wires etc. we had light and electricity.

And after some installations in the bathroom we had a shower, a toilet with manual bucket-flush, and a shelf.

It was a very different way to live like that but it was very warm and for free. And we had a balcony pointing directly to all the lifts. So we could always check how the weather was and which lifts were running.

Directly under our Pappartment was a rock bar: Old Monkey. We had a lot of fun there but at some point we got a bit crazy about the loud music they were playing mostly every night. And the craziest thing about that was that the same songs got repeated over and over again. I guess for the ordinary guests that was no issue because most of them stay just a couple of days, but we stayed for months and so we developed a serious aversion to Queen songs.