My father sent this photo from Kastl, a village in Bavaria, not far from where I grew up.
It’s actually one of the nicer villages in the area, with an old monastery in Romanesque style, and with ample opportunity for beautiful hikes in basically any direction. The only sad thing is that it’s no longer served by the railroad.
The Happy Hermit 
Thanks for sharing the sunset scene Andreas, and may you have a healthy and interesting new year.
The link to the article, the title of which translates roughly as “Aerial Strike on Orthography” on the bombing of the railroad was very thought-provoking. Unfortunately my trick of deleting (or inserting) the hyphen in “andreas-moser.blog” in the web address swap between the German and English versions didn’t work on this one! Having read a number of your posts in both languages, I find your command of English impressive.
Thank you very much!
That’s a clever trick indeed (which I sometimes apply myself when I look for something on my blogs), but too often doesn’t work because the articles/tags/categories have different names in different languages.
Unfortunately, many of my German articles are not translated, and I am afraid will remain untranslated.
Sometimes, it’s because I think the topic is only interesting to German speakers. More often it is because the article is really less focused on content and more on language, and all the creativity would get lost if I forced it into a translation.
Lastly, and this is something I regret, after having spent a few days on a long article (in German), I am kind of “done” with the subject and don’t have the energy of writing a second version in English. My curiosity and creativity are already drawn to new topics and ideas.
I feel like my English is deteriorating (if even just slightly), because it has been many years since I have lived in an English-speaking environment. Really not anymore since 2018/19 when I was house/cat-sitting in Canada and in Cornwall.
I still read a lot in English, watch movies in English and listen to radio/podcasts in English. I also have mostly English-speaking clients, now that I have returned to work as a lawyer. But the constant switching between three languages (I also speak Spanish with some friends/clients) means that I keep them all at a conversational level, but I feel like I don’t improve in any of them.
But, thinking back at the sunset, I don’t want to complain. For a boy who grew up in a small village in the Bavarian countryside, I’ve come far enough, at least linguistically.
If I will ever have time to take on another language, I would really like to learn Romanian.
At times like this, one has to be even more thankful for such things
Indeed, it reminds me that I should turn off the computer/phone/news and step outside more often.
That’s the one big resolution for 2026.
Beautiful nature pic 👍
Thank you!
I think I will be posting more photos again.
Far too many of them have been gathering dust on the hard drive, waiting for me to connect them with some elaborate and deeply researched story. But in the end, I hardly ever find the time for that. (And most people don’t have time for my long articles anyway.)