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November 24th, 2009
09:26 pm - London 2009 Day 4: City of London and Tower Bridge.
As you may remember, one of the reasons why I went to London was because I wanted to meet the Queen. So I had called her the night before and asked her where and when we could meet. She said St Paul's Cathedral. I asked, really?, since I had a something smaller venue in mind. I don't remember the details, but I think she answered something along the lines "This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts". So I thought, why not.
It was mostly sunny when I looked out the window that morning so I grabbed my backpack and took the Tube towards St Pauls's. The view approaching the cathedral was promising.
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November 19th, 2009
07:55 pm - London 2009 Day 3: Tower of London, East Along Thames.
On the third day it was time to visit Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, better known as the Tower of London. When I left the hotel in the morning I saw something I hadn't seen so far in London, blue sky and the sun. It was a beautiful day. By now I almost felt like a local on the tube and reached the Tower shortly after opening which is nice since you have the whole area almost to yourself.
The "Tower" isn't just one building but more a collection of towers and assorted buildings that grew over the centuries. This is the Middle Tower that's also the main entrance to the Tower complex. The picture was taken around noon when I left and not in the morning. By then it was more crowded but probably still not as much as during the summer or on weekends.
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November 15th, 2009
01:59 pm - London 2009 Day 2: West Along Thames, British Museum.
After a good night's sleep after a very exhausting first day I felt surprisingly well rested the next morning. My feet hurt a bit from the walking and my shoulders from my backpack, but that had to be expected. So after breakfast I headed towards the south-western part of the city centre.
A newly built, maybe not entirely finished apartment complex close to Vauxhall Bridge. Not sure if I want to live there, but it sure looks interesting. I wonder if they sold all units before the London real estate market began to collapse.
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November 8th, 2009
09:46 pm - London 2009 Day 1: West End.
I've finally made a start sorting through the many pictures I took in London. While I tried my best to narrow them down, there were still a lot of them left. And since I want to document a lot of the things I saw, I'm afraid the posts will be more extensive than I first thought. But I hope that for those of you who like to see the pictures it won't make too much of a difference how many pictures there will be. Even at the risk of death by boredom. If I find the time I will be making about one post a week for the foreseeable future, not all of them will be this big. Those of you who don't like looking at entries with so many pictures can alternatively use the gallery. But there will be less text and no additional links. You can click on every picture for a larger version. But now, I hope you're sitting comfortable, without further ado, the recap of the first day.
View from the plane early in the morning, waiting for permission to start. Flight was on time, first Tube ride to the city without a problem, as was the check-in at the hotel. At about nine in the morning (thanks to the one hour time difference) I was ready to start exploring London. Weather was as predicted, alternating between dark clouds, drizzle and rain.
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January 23rd, 2008
12:55 pm - Stuttgart 2007
Our last trip brought us to Stuttgart, the capitol of the state I live in, Baden-Württemberg. It wasn't so much the attraction of the city itself that lead us there but first of all the fact that Heather wanted to find out if ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) _cereza, another so far virtual LJ friend, exists in the real world.
While waiting for our train, another small one stood at the opposite platform. It was headed to Bad Wildbad. As you can imagine, a really bad and wild place. And that's just the PG name. Legend has it that truly unspeakable things are happening there and often people don't return.
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January 3rd, 2008
01:29 pm - Berlin 2007 Day 4
During the holidays it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to finally finish the picture posts related to the trips to various German cities last year before I'm unable to remember anything. So here are the pictures from the last (half-)day in Berlin.
We were able to see everything we wanted to in the inner city in the previous days so that gave us some extra time on our final day to again leave the centre to the west and visit the Berlin Olympic Stadium and thereby visiting all German Olympic stadiums within a week. When we left the hotel I took a picture of the sign that marked the entry to the hotel area. Pretty kinky, isn't it? But it just means that the hotel is affiliated with the church and is part of the "Stadtmission" ("City Mission"). Though in a way that only reinforces the kinkiness.
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September 25th, 2007
12:57 pm - Berlin 2007 Day 3
After having spent the whole previous day in the inner city we took the train to Potsdam, a village about 40 kilometres south-west of the centre of Berlin to visit Park Sanssouci with its castles. The city is known as the former residence of the Prussian kings until 1918.
We were entering the park shortly after nine o'clock in the morning but because it was once again clouded and still very quiet it felt like it was shortly after sunrise.
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August 15th, 2007
12:03 pm - Berlin 2007 Day 2
We spent the entire second day walking around the inner city. There were so many things to see which means this will be the post with the most pictures.
In the morning we headed to the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament, hoping that despite being the weekend that not too many people would be standing in line to get on top to the dome. We were lucky and only had to wait for about half an hour. And that was the longest we ever stood in line during our excursions.
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August 8th, 2007
11:29 am - Berlin 2007 Day 1
I finally started sifting through the pictures from my recent trip to Berlin. So here's the first batch from the first day. As always, you can click on the pictures to get larger versions.
In general we were able to get decent priced tickets for all our rides, in part by getting discounts for agreeing early which trains to take. The one expense that caught me off-guard was the reservation fee for our long ride to Berlin. But I paid the fee because it was recommended to reserve seats because of expected strong bookings though I was somewhat sceptical how accurate that estimate would be. As soon as we entered our long-distance train it turned out to be very accurate and the fee quickly turned from one of the most questionable expenses into one of the most reasonable.
After another pleasant ride with the German Railways (no, they don't pay me but I really can't say anything bad about them right now) we arrived at Berlin early afternoon, reached our hotel quickly, had something to eat and were ready to go at before 3pm which meant we had almost a half a day left to explore Berlin, just as we were hoping. With the help of a friendly young Berlin woman we were heading out west by street car.
Our first stop was the Berlin Zoo. One of the biggest in Germany and the one with the most species worldwide (14,000 animals from 1500 species). And I suppose most of you are familiar its most famous resident: Knut.
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July 2nd, 2007
04:20 pm - Munich 2007
It was raining the whole day in Pforzheim the day before we went to Munich and we've been checking the weather forecast incessantly. It said the best we could hope for was maybe some sunshine during late afternoon but it seemed the rain would be inescapable and we already made back-up plans to spent much of the day at the Deutsche Museum in case it would be raining all day long.
After an uneventful three hour train ride we arrived at Munich Central Station. When we tried to figure out what kind of ticket would be best for public transportation for the day, an elder man approached us and assisted us making he right choices at the vending machine. But that wasn't all, he also handed us an annotated map of the city and explained to us in very detailed fashion how to get to the subway. I still don't know if he did that on his own or if he was employed by the city to help people find their way around. Either way, thanks to him we were quickly on our way to the Olympic Park which is located north of the city centre.
Much to our surprise, when we left the subway station we could see some blue sky and had some sunny spots now and then. While the weather wasn't that good the whole day it was still a pleasant surprise. Thank goodness for unreliable weather forecasts!
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June 26th, 2007
11:41 am - Heidelberg 2007
I finally have started to sift through all the pictures I took during my recent trips. So here's the first travelogue about Heidelberg. You can click on all pictures for larger versions of the photos if you want to have a closer look.
The week before Heather's arrival we had some very hot weather so I was thinking that it probably wouldn't be a lot of fun wandering around various German cities in the scorching heat. Before her flight to Germany she spent a couple of days with friends in London and she generously brought me a couple of DVDs from the UK. However, it seemed as if she accidentally put some of the famous London weather in her bag. Soon after her arrival the weather changed, it started to rain and it became unseasonably cold.
But the rain didn't keep us from heading towards Heidelberg in the morning by train. The first noteworthy event was the ticket controller. Even though she probably didn't make as big an impression on Heather as she did on me, I still felt obliged to point out that not all German ticket controllers look like they were at least runner-up on Germany's Next Supermodel (which, sadly, turned out to be very true during our later train rides).
When we arrived in Heidelberg it was still raining so we decided to wait a little at the station to see if the weather gets any better. While we where wandering around the station we saw this large number of bikes parked outside the station which we found quite remarkable.
As you will see later, much of Old Town Heidelberg is a pedestrian area and even the streets around that area are very narrow and often one direction only, so it's close to impossible to drive around Heidelberg with a car and even more difficult to find a parking spot. The fact that the city has a famous university with lots of students certainly plays a role too.
When a man started pointing out to his wife that we were taking pictures of the bikes I hastily started saying something in English so that he didn't think I'm a weird German tourist.
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April 13th, 2007
01:00 pm - Day Trip to Wiesbaden and Mainz.
Last week I made another trip to Wiesbaden to meet up with Vladimir from Croatia who once again was attending the goEast Film Festival for Eastern European movies. And since I had some spare time I decided to play tourist and take some snapshots.
Wiesbaden itself has close to 300.000 inhabitants and is the capital of the state of Hessen (and not the much larger Frankfurt). From what I could see during my short stay I have to say that I like the city. There are a lot of old houses that look quite nice like the one in the picture above. I don't recall seeing any big factories, but admittedly I spend most of the time in and around the pedestrian area.
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