Here are some of my mementos from my trip. I love foreign coins and banknotes, and foreign stamps as well.
Friday/ Copenhagen mementos
Thursday/ arrival in Seattle
I’m home! The travelers from Frankfurt arrived into Seattle shortly after noon Pacific Time. I sat next to the window, and looked out at just the right time to see a beautiful view of the Columbia river as we crossed it in Canada, right after the British Columbia border.
Thursday/ arrival at Frankfurt airport
I made it to Frankfurt .. Next stop Seattle.
Wednesday/ Hamburg
[From Wikipedia] 
Hamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. It’s crossed by hundreds of canals, and also contains large areas of parkland. Its central Jungfernstieg boulevard connects the Altstadt (old town) and the Neustadt, passing Binnenalster lake, dotted with boats and surrounded by cafes and restaurants. Oysters and traditional Aalsuppe (soup) are local specialties.
I did the best I could with the day-and-a-half and rain/ freezing rain at times in Hamburg! I will have to try to come back in summer some time, when the weather is warmer. The HafenCity* area’s development continues, even after 15 years since it had started, and I would love to spend more time there when it had been completed.
*HafenCity is an urban center with many shops, restaurants, hotels and cultural venues as well as rising visitor numbers. More than 2,000 people now live in HafenCity as a whole; there are more than 5,000 students at the various academic institutions; upwards of 10,000 employees work in more than 500 businesses. It aspires to generate and use clean energy and be a model for the new cities that will have to be built around the world this century.
Tuesday/ train to Hamburg
I learned on Monday night that Wednesday – the day of my scheduled departure from Frankfurt to Seattle – is going to be an ugly day at Frankfurt airport. A massive service workers’ union strike forced Lufthansa to cancel 350 flights at Frankfurt, including the one I had to get there for the Frankfurt to Seattle flight. So I pushed out my return by a day .. and thought to squeeze in one more train trip : one from Copenhagen to Hamburg. (I plan to fly early Thursday from Hamburg to Frankfurt). The train ride was quite something. When Deutsche Bahn engineers design and build tracks for their trains, they stop at almost nothing. The train track runs across bridges to cross rivers and narrow channels, and into tunnels to go through hills, or underground. And for a ferry crossing, such as the one between Denmark and Germany that crosses the Fehmarn Belt Strait, they built a train track right on the ferry’s deck, to ferry the whole freaking train across the strait. Or at least half the train. At our final station in Denmark (Roedby), the front four cars were disconnected from the rest of the train. As we reached the ferry, the train cars were run onto the ferry, passengers and all. Then we were shooed off the train (the train is locked for the ferry crossing) to go onto the ferry itself during the crossing, and we boarded the train again before the ferry docked. And the train ran off the ferry onto the track and into Puttgarden station. ‘Welcome to Germany’ announced the conductor.
Monday/ train to Malmö
I could see a bridge far away from my hotel room and discovered that it is the Øresund Bridge to Malmö in Sweden : a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm in the middle of the strait. So! I have to go, I thought, and besides, my feet and legs needed a break from walking all over the city of Copenhagen in between bus rides and train rides. I literally just had time to make the ride out there, look around the Central Station for 15 minutes, and then catch the train back again.
Sunday/ Copenhagen sights
Here are some of my favorite pictures from Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Yes, the Danes are very friendly and laid-back, and they speak good English. Watch out for bicycles : they go fast, so do not step into the bike lane or cross it before looking both ways! The public transport is top notch. Even the buses have display screens for the routes, and the connections at the next stop.
Saturday/ arrival in Copenhagen
I am spending a few days in Copenhagen* before heading west, home. The flight from Frankfurt to Copenhagen this morning was just an hour, but it took a while to get here : there was trouble with the on-board computer of the incoming plane, and another one had to be found.
*I thought I would check up on ‘The World’s Happiest Country’ .. as Denmark is frequently referred to when ‘happiness indexes’ are compiled.
Friday/ in Frankfurt
I made it into Frankfurt. We left Cape Town more than an hour late, after midnight.
We arrived into Paris some 11 hours later, shortly after noon on Friday. From there, the Hop! Embraer 190 commuter jet took us to Frankfurt.
Thursday/ long way back
It is time to 
pack my bags to start traveling north. I will travel back to Paris and Frankfurt tonight, and will stay in Europe a few days before flying west to Seattle. I try to keep my souvenir purchases to a minimum these days (my study and my house are full of items already!) – but I could not resist this t-shirt, and the little colorful beaded giraffe.
Wednesday/ Stellenbosch
A visit to the Cape Town area is not quite complete for me without checking up on my old alma mater, the University of Stellenbosch, and the town itself. It was very late on Tuesday afternoon when I got there, though – and so the shadows were too long for taking fully lit pictures of the beautiful buildings. But here they are anyway.
Tuesday/ lunch at the Westin
I met my brother and nephew for lunch on Tuesday. We picked the swank Westin Hotel restaurant in the city’s Foreshore district. My nephew ordered a chocolate milkshake (not on the menu) to go with his lunch – and to their credit, they were up to it. ‘It will just take a little time’, said our server.
Monday/ proteas for mom
Protea is both the botanical name and common name for a large group of flowers found in the Cape Town area and on the slopes of Table Mountain. They are named after the Greek god Proteus (who could change his form at will), because they have such a wide variety of forms.
Sunday/ Camps Bay
After I had dropped my friend Marlien at the airport on Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Camps Bay. There are two ways to get there from Cape Town : across the ‘neck’ of Table Mountain called Kloofnek (a kloof is a ravine), or along the Atlantic coastline through Greenpoint and Seapoint. I picked the Kloofnek road out there, and wanted to drive back along the coast, but found the late Sunday afternoon traffic too much, so I went back the same way I had come.
Saturday/ the V&A Waterfront
My friend Marlien and I ran out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, the way we normally do when she visits me here. We did not stay too long, though : a blustery wind came up and made it unpleasant, and so we left early. I see my picture of the Enigma XK does not quite do it justice. Checking into it again later, I found out that it used to be a fisheries patrol vessel, but has been turned into a luxury expedition yacht ! I think that some of the spectacular pictures on the link were taken in Antarctica.
Friday/ coffee time
There is no shortage of coffee shops in South Africa .. but even so, Starbucks is about to open its first store in Johannesburg (in a suburb called Rosebank). In the mean time, there is the ‘Seattle Coffee Company’ that provides excellent coffees. Curiously though, no filtered coffee was on the menu, so I had to order an Americano (a shot of espresso with hot water added).
Thursday/ holy mackerel !
Check out this amazing picture from the front page of Thursday’s newspaper here – of a 20 ton Bryde’s whale and a school of mackerel. The beast came from below and breached the surface right next to a snorkeling diver that was checking out a school of mackerel near the coast in the Port Elizabeth area. (Bryde’s whale eat fish and not plankton). It disappeared immediately after that, leaving the snorkeler and photographer wondering : whoah! whathappened? did that really happen?
Wednesday/ the ears of the hippopotamus
I mentioned in a post last year that there had been plans on the drawing board for South Africa to build a large number of new nuclear power stations (8 to 12). Well, it turns out a lot of events had transpired behind the scenes. So much has happened, that veteran journalist Allister Sparks writes in this article (in Afrikaans, unfortunately) that what we know now is likely still ‘the ears of the hippopotamus’ only. A whole hippopotamus is still out there. It all seems to be connected : the proposal of adding 9 600 MW of extra electrical capacity to the electrical power grid, by building the nuclear power stations, the approval of the proposal made possible by the unconditional support of Zuma’s allies in government, and Zuma’s sacking of two consecutive South Africa’s Finance Ministers (Pravin Gordhan en Nhlanhla Nene) over their objections to find funding for the proposal. Rough estimates came in at one trillion* South African Rand/ approx.US$ 66 billion. *One followed by twelve zeros.
And then there is the Gupta family and Zuma’s son Duduzane that have purchased an outsize number of shares in the Shiva Uranium mine, and discussions that Zuma personally had with then-Russian Prime Minister Russian Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, and current Russian President Vladimir Putin Rosatom for awarding the deal to the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation. Where will this all end? Zuma still has a lot of support from his African National Congress Party, but the ANC leadership from Gauteng Province has broken ranks and is now calling for Zuma’s resignation.
Tuesday night/ arrival in Cape Town
We made our 1 hr 20 min ‘hop’ from Frankfurt to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport this morning, and then took the long south-bound flight (11 h 20 mins) to Cape Town. It was 10 pm local time at our arrival. As I got into my rental car and started driving, I kept telling myself to keep left ! keep left ! (Driving in South Africa is on the left hand side, same as in the UK). There’s a much larger risk that one would drive in the wrong direction late at night when the streets are deserted.
Tuesday/ at the airport
It’s 6.00 am on Tuesday morning here in Frankfurt and I am back at the airport, checked in for my trip to Cape Town with a stop in Paris. There is stepped up security in place, or at least for Paris. My hand luggage was searched thoroughly. (I’m all those chargers and cables for my gadgets make for an ugly image on the baggage scanner).
