Germany

So I finally made it to Germany in January 2010. Now I am out here for a second trip already in February-March. Overall life has been busy, both at home and abroad, so I haven't had a lot of time for picture taking/site seeing, but I though I would post what I have and make a few comments in case anyone is interested.



This is me standing on a castle wall, overlooking the town of Heidelberg. This is an "Americanized" German town, but I can't tell from where I am. To me it just looks German.



This is pretty much the same picture, just better because I am not in the way.


More from the same vantage point, but looking straight across the valley.



If I turned around from where I took those pictures of the valley, this is main building? Wall? of the "castle". The term castle refers to a lot of things, and while it felt like a castle as I climbed the ancient narrow trail that wound up the side of the mountain, I didn't expect for there to be so many windows... Granted, this still isn't an easily accessed/conquered vantage point, but still. That is a lot of windows.



It seems that the castle is in a constant state of being rebuilt to keep it in showing condition, however, some parts had been damaged beyond fixing by time, bombs and lightning. This picture (horrible lighting, sorry) was meant to show the thickness of the walls. They are incredibly thick in some place,like 12 feet thick. And it still broke... Interesting.



This was part of an interpretive sign that explained about how the castle used to look. It seems that most castles weren't just built, they were large buildings that kept getting addons and remodels until the took the shape of what we consider a castle. Perhaps some of the more Gothic structures are a little different, so I should find some of those. If/when I go to France, I think that a few French castles fit my particular perception of a castle a little better.



This tower was broken almost clean down the middle, and the massive piece of the tower remained intact and just slid to a new resting place. A German professor, trying to make a political point of some kind back in the day, spread the story that this was the work of WWII bombing by the Allies, but Wikipedia confirms that the real culprit here was lightning in the 19th century. Still, it is amazing to see this massive, old, man-made hunk of tower just leaning there like a tinker toy. My picture doesn't do this justice...

Old vs. New. As I said, the castle was more like a bunch of add-ons. Here you can see a date carved in the stone (1545) and right next to it are the more modern pipes bringing in utilities of some kind (water maybe?) Very interesting.




This is from inside the Courtyard of the castle. That big building in front of me is the other side of the wall I was looking up at a few pictures ago. The courtyard does match my perception of castle life a little better... They have converted the East side of the castle (to right, around the corner) to an Apothecary (Pharmacy) museum. It was very interesting too, but I wasn't able to get pictures of anything in there. In the foreground of this picture on the right, you see the corner with pillars. That was where the well for the castle was. That alone is amazing to me, that they could dig that deep by hand on a mountainside and hit water... ok, so I was raised in a desert.

This is a horrible picture for a number of reasons, the biggest being that you don't get the scale of it at all. This is a humongous Wine cask. It was built in the castle, and is 20 ft. tall I would guess? Standing on the ground next to it I have to look up to see the center of the thing. It was huge. Some idiot with more money than brains had it built, only to find that within a year it started leaking. It was only in use for a year or two, at the end of which it was constantly leaking like a sieve. At least the guy did set his sights high.... There was a staircase so you could walk up and over it, or stand on top. It was cool.



This is a town square in below the castle (you can see one of the ruined walls behind the statue. The statue was of Mary and Baby Jesus, but the picture didn't turn out too well.

So those are some of my pictures from my first trip in January. I only had one half day (luck) to do anything but work, since I was only there a week, so I am glad to have been able to see what I did.

I was home for about three weeks, and then I went back to Germany for what was going to be 2 weeks, but is stretching into almost 4 weeks (I am still here...) I hope to be home soon. The upside is that I had a few more days--weekends--to see a few things, so here is a sampling of those sights.

The day started at the Hauptbahnhof (train station) in Frankfurt. We had to take a coworker to the airport, so we parked the car at the train station. There was a tourism office where we got a day pass for Frankfurt, which allowed us to ride any of the trains and get discounts at any of the museums in town (there are a lot of museums) for about 9 euros. That is about $14.


An overall shot of the train station. I am not a big fan of cities, or city life, but I am a big fan of trains. Too bad they seem to go together.


So after getting our day passes and maps we took a few minutes at an American icon to plan out our day. It was extremely cold, and snowing off an on, so a cup of hot chocolate was perfect. Did I mention it was freezing cold? Ok, good. Didn't want to leave that out. (BTW: Can you pick me out of the crowd? Ok, that was too easy.)


There are basically 4 types of trains: underground (U-bahn), Regional surface trains (R-bahn), local trams (buses on tracks;)--(S-bahn) and then the long distance, super fast Inter City Express trains (ICE trains). This is the tram stop (S-bahn) outside of the train Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). We decided to ride the tram down to the old city center along the river, where it would be a short walk to a dozen different museums.

This is the old town in Frankfurt. Frankfurt is actually considered a new city, and has more skypscrapers than anywhere in Germany (or so I am told) but why would I take pictures of skyscrapers? That seemed dumb. So here is one angle on the old town square. This weekend was Carnival (a big drunken festival of unknown origin?) and they were setting up for the festivities as we wandered around.


Just another building in all its quaintness.


This statue was outside an "ancient statue" museum. They had big windows along the outside of the building, so we walked along and saw all kinds of Greek and Roman statues, at varying levels of modesty. We didn't pay to go in. The statue pictured is of the King (ok, so I don't remember exactly what he was king of) from around 760ish AD. That was a long time ago. And it looks just like him!! Amazing. I wonder if it was chiseled by a guy named Polaroid. Or maybe it was a guy named Bob using Polaroid chisels...


So being from Vegas, I see random stuff stuck on buildings all the time. I don't even see it anymore becuase I know it is all just a faked up attempt to make stucco (and the whole city) look like something more than it is. Well, I saw this on the side of an old German building and thought, I don't know if that is genuine or a reproduction for tourists. Just not knowing for sure somehow lent it some credibility. And even if it is just another cheap stucco reproduction, it does have more value because the street I was standing on probably had seen armored troops on horseback (among other conveyences.) Also, you can't tell from the picture so much, but this is not just a picture, but a flat sculpture on the wall (isn't that called a relief? I never took art history. I never thought I would use it ;) )




This is two attemps to get a shot of an old chapel across the river. Yes a new camera is on my Christmas list.


There was a foot bridge across the river... (Did I mention it was freezing cold?)


This is me on the foot bridge, freezing. (Thanks Mom for the stocking hat from Christmas like 10 years ago. See, it made it to Germany!) The sign above/behind me is in Greek. In the full sized picture I can't make out the characters I can't read. Yeah, you aren't missing much there.

This is a dog.

So we wandered around some more. Went to an Architecture museum and a Archeology museum (no pictures allowed in either.) We found a more modern, very European street to walk down that had a bunch of shops and pubs, so we stopped in one for lunch. That took two hours. That is where the dog picture came from. We noticed in multiple places, especially restaurants, that people would bring their dogs to work. Our waitress owned this little dog, and the table next to us had a few little kids, the youngest being a little blond haired girl who was 3 at most. They loved this dog, and the waitress came over and had it do tricks (rolling over and such). My little Taryn would have loved that dog. He was very patient with the kids, although they did finally get him to bark a few times. When the family left the dog went and sat by the glass door and watched them leave.

So a few more train rides and we were done for the day. I have a few more pictures from my trip, which as I mentioned isn't over yet, so I will do another post later for those who might be interested.

Sliding in Germany

So in the post with the more recent Germany pics, I showed you a 747 on stilts and mentioned that we got to slide down from it. Here is a video of a co-worker, Jason, who captured his slide down from the platform under the plane. Notice the excitement. It was like being a kid again. Cool.

More Pics from Germany

So several of you have told me that I need to update my blog. You are right, of course. So I decided to work on that this weekend, and when I logged in I found that I have several posts that I just never finished. I didn't realize that these had been left out, so this is what you get. Old stuff. Due to the catching up I am doing, I plan on putting relatively little effort in these posts, to they are disorganized and don't honor chronology or comprehensivity. (I did just use two awesome words though...)

These pictures (and this post) are from my second trip to Germany, earlier this year. I was there for a month, and although it was a lot of work, I did get out for a weekend visit to the Teknic Museum in Speyer. I am pretty sure I slaughtered the spelling there...




So this was a massive museum of technology, born from the collection of a single investor, I believe. One of the cool things was that they had a bunch of planes/aircraft on display up in the air. Some of them had stairs so you could go up in them and see the inside. The cooler ones had big stainless steel slides to get back to the ground. More on that later...

This is a German U-boat (submarine). I went inside (see below.)



This is me inside of a German U-Boat. It was crazy tight. When fully loaded it said that they had something like 40 guys in here. I think there was room for about 4. Midgets.



This is the back of the Russian space shuttle. It never actually made it into space (the Russians ran out of money...) but it was still cool to see a real space shuttle.

This was the inside of a humongo German cargo plane (military). They had a video showing them landing it on the little airstrip by the museum. Crazy. The overran the runway and bumped into a fence... and then stopped.

They had a bunch of sweet old cars. This was a fancy one.





They had a full-on 747 up on stilts for us to climb around on. Check out the slide twirling down out of the bottom of it. Also check out the fence on the wing. It comes up later.

I couldn't help myself.... You see a 747 laying around, you just can't help but pick it up.


So they let you walk out on the wing. That was pretty cool. And then Lennie and I started jumping. It moves. Then we got off of it.

I made it to the bottom of the slide. Very cool.




A piece of the Berlin wall. I have a vague memory of watching this wall come down on the news when I was little. It is interesting to start to see things I remember happening memorialized in museums. I am getting older.


They had a whole section of decked out model railroad tables.

When you enter this room you are distracted by all of the cool cars. Then you look up slightly and see a jet pointed at your head. Its a trip.


Another cool car.



This is a boat made by save-the-rain-forest-people and then sailed somewhere far away (across the Atlantic?) I'm a little sketchy on the details. All of the interpretive signs were in German.

It is hard to appreciate, but the back tire on this thing is about twice as wide as a normal motorcycle tire. The seat was so wide it would have been hard to straddle. Would make an interesting ride.



Hmm. Some pilot had a really bad day at some time in the past.



They had a lot of turbines on display, this one being the biggest. I think it went to a power generator (water??). Anyway it was cool. They also had a couple of jet engines opened up so you could see the inside. This place was the ultimate place to ask how something worked.




Another plane and slide. I didn't even go in this one.


The title of this picture is one word: HEAVENLY. This is chocolate milk that I got at the local grocery store. It is 3.5% milk fat and has real chocolate that settles to the bottom when it sits. You shake it up and oh man is it yummy. I went through like 5 or 6 bottles of this stuff. It seemed relatively cheap too-- 1.35 Euro? So a little less than $2 US.



Ha, so they have these awesome rolls that are cooked just enough to keep their shape, but are still doughy. You buy them for cheap and them pop them in the oven to finish cooking them. It is cool because they are so cheap, and because you get fresh baked bread with dealing with dough. I was unfortunate enough to learn, however, that if you forget to take them out of the oven for an hour or two, they turn to charcoal. I squeezed (spellcheck says squoze ins't a word) one of these bad boys over the trash can, just to see what would happen. It exploded into black dust, in case you were curious.



This is me by the river that ran by where we were staying. There was a quaint church across the river, and those European ducks right there, so I paused for a picture. It was frigid. I should point out my scarf. It is the first scarf I have ever owned, and I bought it in the mall (off the clearance rack--less than 5 euro if I remember correctly!!) It made me feel like I fit in better in Germany. I didn't fit in, of course, but the scarf helped me feel that way.

So the same river had a ferry. I'd never seen a ferry before that I could remember, and this seemed more interesting for being so modest in size, so we hung around and watched it go back and forth for a while.



The rustic cobble stones went right into the river... How did they get them there? How do they stay? Oh and there is a big river barge going up the river. The cargo is sandwiched into the floaty things up front, and then the boat in the back attaches to it and pushes it around. It is like a tractor-trailer in reverse. They pretty much hauled tail up and down the river, disrupting all the Euro-birds.






Hmm, I must have been fascinated by the cobblestone. I am sure there was a good reason to include this one. Maybe the chain that keep the ferry from floating down river?


And there was a bridge just around the bend in the river, but it was a train (and pedestrian) bridge. I don't know where the nearest car bridge was.




So right in the middle of a park next to the river there was this odd tower. I ended up seeing them all over the place. Not really sure what its function was...




So I think there may be other pictures, but this is what I have here, so I am posting this. I may get fancy later (which may equate to me putting a new date on this post (February 28. 2010) to get it in the right order), but in the meantime, enjoy!