My St. Patrick's Day weekend

My St. Patrick's Day weekend was awash with self-pity rather than beer this year. Jeremi's aunt Jeanne had just died that week, and he had flown to Moncton for the funeral. This also meant that he could go to our good friend Rishad's birthday party on the Saturday night, where many of our other good friends from Halifax would be as well. I so desperately wanted to fly back for this. Jeremi was going to be nearly half way to Germany and spending time with his family and our closest friends, and I was going to be stuck in Jena. Add to that the fact that St. Paddy's isn't really a big deal here, and my only real drinking buddies (since Corene and Alex left) were in Denmark for the weekend. So I was feeling sorry for myself.

To counteract this, I decided to go for a walk on Sunday. Not just a walk, a four hour hike from town to town. Just me, my mp3 player, and my camera, to record some of the sights. Sights such as these furry little ponies in the nearby town of Ammerbach,
or these even fuzzier little spring flowers by the side of the path. (For those who want to know, I think they're anemone patens, or Pasque flower. I only know this because if you type "looks like furry crocus" into Google, it will tell you. I love search engines.)
And then there were these ridiculously furry cattle, with huge horns.
And, in answer to my brother's questions about the landscape here and the different types of trees, here's a view that sort of shows the exposed limestone hillsides around these parts.
Living by the river it's easy to think that you're surrounded by hills, but I've walked to the crest of enough of these hills now to realize that they just open up into plateaus of farmland and windmills. It's not that they're hills, it's that Jena's at the base of a big valley carved out of otherwise fairly flat terrain at a higher elevation. And because I was trying to explain to my brother how Europeans for some reason like to make beautiful trees incredibly ugly by cutting them and letting new young branches grow from the elevated stump, I'm including a representative picture of this as well. I'm still not clear on why they do this - I was thinking it was to preserve peoples' views, so the trees don't get so high, but a friend here said that it was a particular kind of tree that will break if it's not cut like this. I can't say for sure, but I really do think it makes the trees look diseased.

You can also see a little thing painted on the bark of the tree in the foreground, two white stripes with a green one in the middle. This is how they mark the official trails (Wanderweg) around here, and at least a few different colours are used to avoid confusion around junctions.

Some other random sights from my walk, at least two of which are quite typical: a hunting blind. These little wooden towers are everywhere. In the woods, by the side of the highway, along walking and cycling paths, in the middle of farmers' fields. Often they're only about 100 m apart, so that you can sometimes see three or four at a time. Now safety officer Julia was a bit concerned about this, since I don't think it's a good idea to hunt directly next to a path or a road, but it seems that in Germany this is completely okay. The explanation that I've been given is that it's necessary to keep down the deer and roe deer populations, as there are no natural predators such as wolves. And of course the blinds are near roads and trails because it's not so easy in Germany to find places that aren't. There also seems to be a difference in hunting culture here. Rather than going with friends to a cabin or going camping and hunting for a few days or over a weekend , people will just go after work to one of these towers and try their luck around sunset. At least this is what I've been told.
Another thing that is visible all over the place right now are trees that are decorated for Easter, by having coloured eggs hung from the leafless branches. I think it's quite pretty, and a nice bright bit of decoration for the early spring. And this particular garden in Coppanz even has a gnome!
And finally, one other thing that I've seen twice now, and with no explanation at all, are these mysterious circles in the grass. You might have to look carefully, but there really are different coloured rings of grass in this picture. Is it some sort of really lame crop circle? I'm not sure. Someone suggested that maybe there was something sitting there that deflected water in a circle, like the top of a silo or something like that, but I'm not sure with all of the different sizes. Any theories would be appreciated...