CRIScom travel experience flow – The personal website of Christoph Potzinger

Schoeckl is considered the landmark mountain of the city of Graz. With an altitude of 1.435 m, its vicinity to Graz and a ski lift at its top, it is a popular resort for families to give their kids a first skiing experience – of course, only if the winters are cold enough for snow. In summer it is a popular escape from the hot city streets and from St. Radegund offers a steady, sometimes steep path up to its top . The hike takes between one to two hours depending on your fitness and speed. For the well trained, there is the Schöckl trail which leads straight up the mountain right beneath the cable car. Susi, Jean-Pierre and their kids, Julian and Stefan, come to Austria every summer for their holidays. They live in Auburn, a city close to Boston in Massachusetts. Susi is from Leibnitz and Susi and Christoph, as kids, have spent a few summers in Grabovac on the island of Hvar in Croatia and a lot of winter holidays in their long-time skiing resort in Bad Gastein. Susi and Jean-Pierre met in France as students and married in 1998 . (more…)

The idea of buying new uniforms for the Ex-Socs was introduced more than a year ago, when our team flourished with an abundance of new Ex-socs followers and a series of great matches on a high level; such a team deserved its own uniform. After the uniforms of Gabersdorf’s first team were stolen in Amsterdam, the time has come to get things moving and within a fortnight we managed not only to order our new uniforms but also finance them out of the pool of Ex-Socs players. A big thank your here goes out to Hans Holler, Wolfgang Huss, Toni Klapsch, Franz Lang (Fa . Graupp), Josef Lappi, Gernot Payer, Stefan Potzinger and Dietmar Pucher for making this wonderful red uniform a reality. (more…)

It was a difficult match we had just finished. We had lost 4-6 after a fiery match and, even worse, three of our players had been injured. Franz, our goalkeeper, had broken his finger, Sepp torn his muscle badly, and Horst, worst of all, had broken his colarbone. It was hot when I entered the changing rooms and the over-blown emotion was still there. You could feel it on your skin. Heated discussions were going on and the atmosphere was aggressive. After having shed my boots, I headed for the shower to cool myself off and get a little distance between myself and the heat of the previous match. It is like shifting a gear: when I enter the pitch, I am in soccer-mode. I cannot escape it; it has been installed over so many years of ambition, competition and struggle on the pitch. Sometimes it scares me. Still I see my games with the Ex-socs as a way of coming to terms with this over-the-tops soccer-mode. It is getting better gradually. What helps a lot is that we do not play for points any more, that we do not participate in a league with other teams. It’s just friendlys we play and most of all it is about meeting each other, playing a game and enjoying a few beers afterwards. Since at that time our team had seen a development towards a more agressive and ambitious stance, which, as it were, took its toll, I felt that it was time to introduce, yet again, a more social and laid-back approach. I hadn’t planned it, it was just following an instinct. “What about going to Amsterdam for a friendly there?“ I shouted into the room. No reaction. “Hey, listen, I know two guys there who play in a team the strength of ours. I could arrange a match. And Amsterdam is a superb city.“ Some began to cock their ears and started to ask question. (more…)

Looking back at our trip to Vietnam in December 2005, browsing through the photos, I realise that our journey through this diverse, history-packed and sturdy country encapsulated some exceptionally beautiful moments. For me, Sylvia managed to capture in her photos the very essence of this country, and I have added her best shots here . Especially, the motives from Ha Long bay are striking, almost bizarre, like paintings. On the whole, the colours are thick and rich with an earthy quality as much as are the people – deeply rooted and connected to their land. If we call Vietnam a basic country, we do so only with regards to our western standards of technology. On closer observation, Vietnam turns out to be a complex and complicated land and society, enmeshed in situations of conflict and struggling to compromise their culture with religious demands and economic growth. Still they manage to retain an attitude of humanity, which our western societies are more and more alienated from. This attitude, for me, is oddly reflected in the Vietnamese traffic. Throngs of vehicles, from rickshaw to truck, way to many for the narrow and badly maintained Vietnamese streets, go hither and thither like busy ants. On our first attempt to cross a street in the old town of Hanoi, Sylvia and I were almost dumbstruck: in no possible way could we see any chance to cross the street, even at a crosswalk. (more…)

Although Albert Einstein’s ideas served to pave the way for a new branch in physics, called quantum mechanics, he struggled all through his life to counter its validity and implications . His critique was centred upon the fundamental quality of probability that rules the world of quantum mechanics. When faced with the fact that in the subatomic realm nothing can be extrapolated and relies, at best, on statistics, he exclaimed: “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos. – Gott würfelt nicht.” As a matter of fact, however, he had to admit that the ‘old’ physics as developed by Sir Isaac Newton can neither predict nor explain what happens in the microcosmos
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