August 2015 – Willem's Planet

August 31, 2015

Monday/ DHL Worldwide Express delivers

I just thought today of a special shipment I had sent from South Africa, and wondered when it will arrive here in the States, when the doorbell rang. There it was, with the DHL Worldwide Express courier : three bubble-wrapped paintings bundled together with FRAGILE stickers all over it. The air freight cost was not cheap at US$400 (actually it was, a previous quote had ran well over $1,000) – but the paintings had been done by my mom a very long time ago, had been in my parents’ house in Stellenbosch for many years, and so have a high sentimental value. I promise I will show the paintings once I open up the wrapping ! I am shipping myself out to San Francisco in the morning and still have to pack!

August 30, 2015August 31, 2015

Sunday/ arrival in Seattle

IMG_9704 sm — The departure lobby at Frankfurt Airport has big shiny pillars! (And I have too much luggage! But I like to take two bags for long trips, that’s just how I travel).

I had to hustle a little this morning to get to gate Z69 for Seattle at Terminal Z at Frankfurt airport on time. Several little travel time breaks went against me, and at the airport the automated baggage check machine would not let me check two bags (grrr) and I had to flag an attendant down. The extra bag fee is €75 ($84), said she – and yikes! no, I’m not paying that, I said. We got that squared away when I remembered I had a card up my sleeve : a Gold Star Alliance card. They waive the fee for a second bag. The passport check and security check was still ahead, but I made it to the gate in good time. The flight headed out northwest, across Greenland, Canada and some 9 hours later, made its descent in the Pacific Northwest.

IMG_9694 sm — Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof (main station). It’s a short ride on an S-bahn (regional train) from here to Frankfurt Flughafen (airport), just 10 mins or so.

IMG_4770 sm — Here’s the 747-400 that took us to Seattle, parked at gate Z69. I sat in the back of the bus. Check out the cool maintenance hangar in the background. There were several other US-bound flights from the Z gates that I walked by, leaving at almost the same time as mine : to Miami, to Houston, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles.

August 29, 2015August 30, 2015

Saturday/ leaving Berlin

IMG_9633 sm — My angry Tyrannosaurs Rex, that I had just purchased at the toy dept of Galleria Kaufhof, refused to be stuffed into the suitcase .. and ended up being hand-carried onto the airplane.

I am staying overnight in Frankfurt before my trip back to Seattle. I packed in one last walk and a shopping spree at the Galleria Kaufhof (nothing too expensive, just a few items), and squashed everything into my carry-on bag. Marriott allows me to check out late, and so I did, at 1.59 pm (I was to check-out by 2 pm). It’s not so easy to get from the hotel to Tegel Airport with public transportation, but I did it anyway. It’s ride a U-bahn ride on the U2, step over the the U12, and get out at Zoologischer Garten. From there, there is an express bus to the airport – except it was a little late today (so even in Germany buses run late sometimes). I had plenty of time at the airport, though.

IMG_9641 sm — The scene at Tegel Airport today.

IMG_4720 sm — This building is the Berliner Philharmonie .. I see from on-line pictures I should have walked all around it, to the main entrance – but hey, it looks very interesting from all sides.

IMG_4719 sm — The building at another angle.

IMG_4749 sm — As I looked down Hardenbergstrasse, I immediately recognized the damaged church building of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, never rebuilt after WWII, as a reminder of the war. I will have to go look at it closely next time !

05053 sm — Here is the damaged church building after World War II.

August 28, 2015August 18, 2018

Friday/ more of Berlin

Here are some of my favorite pictures from all the places I checked into and checked out around the center of Berlin.

IMG_4514 sm — The Sony Center with its spectacular inside-outside partial roof is close to Potsdamer Platz. I read that the whole business of rebuilding Potsdamer Platz and awarding projects has been the subject of much controversy from the beginning, and still not everyone applauds how the district was commercialised and replanned.

IMG_4501 sm — Artwork on the manhole cover. I have to confess I cannot name all the structures on it .. just the Berlin TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate and the Bundestag.

IMG_9256 sm — A subtle advertising poster showing the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin TV Tower from the you-know-who beverage company !

IMG_9522 sm — I went through Gleisdreieck U-bahn station many times the last few days. I love the metalwork on the gate.

IMG_9349 sm — This plaque is of the House of Representatives building on ZImmerstrasse.

IMG_4526 sm — This picture is a propagandistic wall painting at the entrance of the Bundesministerium der Finanzen on Wilhelmstrasse, promoting socialism in the DDR. I took a series of pictures to capture the whole thing

IMG_4530 sm — .. and the final part of the picture.

IMG_4506 sm — Here’s my Reichstag building picture. As one can tell, it has been around a long time,(since 1894 actually), but was badly damaged in WWII and only fully restored with a new dome and all in 1999, so that it once again became the meeting place of the German parliament as the modern Bundestag.

IMG_4555 sm — Yes, yes, I know the Brandenburg Gate has been photographed a million times, but here is my fresh picture from Thursday night! The gate is an 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch, and one of the best-known landmarks of Germany. Having suffered considerable damage in World War II, the Brandenburg Gate was fully restored from 2000 to 2002 [Wikipedia].

IMG_9502 sm — Let’s see .. four hazelnuts on top of six pillars .. what could that be? Billboard from chocolate maker Ritter Sport in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. ‘**Da kiekste, wa?’** is a local Berlin phrase. Translated into ‘authentic German’/ English it is: ‘Da guckst du, was?’/ ‘You’re looking, huh?’- as a reaction of the amazed/surprised expression on the face of someone else.

IMG_4603 sm — I love the pointy roof on this building close to Alexander Platz .. not sure what’s going on inside, though.

IMG_9472 sm — Here’ the U-bahn platforms at Alexander Platz. It also has an S-bahn (regional train) platform.

IMG_4587 sm — I was fascinated by the clean-up crew sucking up the trash out of all the spherical trash cans around Alexander Platz.

IMG_4597 sm — Here’s the outside of Alexander Platz. Formerly part of East Berlin, this town square certainly has not seen the money and effort poured into it that Potsdam Platz has, but this is being remedied right now to some extent.

IMG_4644 sm — Here’s the Berliner Dom, the Berlin Dome Church in the center of the city near Alexander Platz.

IMG_4641 sm — This is the Humboldt Box, a temporary ‘info pavilion’ (it looks so very German-engineered), to provide to public with information and updates about extensive construction and expansion in the Berlin city center around Alexander Platz, the Berlin Dome and the Rathaus.

IMG_4611 sm — The entire area around the stately old dame of the Berlin Rathaus building (town hall, completed in 1869) is under construction. They even have tunnel boring machine in place similar to Seattle’s Bertha boring machine, to extend the U-bahn network.

IMG_4665 sm — The modern building for the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station) opened in 2006, all glass and steel.

IMG_4662 sm — Artwork at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. See the man in the horse? And then there’s even another horse motif in the cover of the cylinder in the center.

IMG_9510 sm — I love this clock inside the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station). I want one for my kitchen (maybe just a little smaller!).

IMG_9498 sm — Here is an ‘ampelmann’ (traffic light man) decorative lamp, invoking East Germany/ DDR nostalgia (is there such a thing?). This little man with the hat figure was widely used in traffic lights in the old DDR. After unification the DDR ampelmann figure proved so popular it was put into traffic lights all over the city.

IMG_4691 sm — This is the new building of the Deutsches Technikmuseum that opened in 2005. The old part of the museum is in a historic brick building. The two hours I spent there was much too short ! (I like the street sweeper machine cleaning the street ! .. can the city of Seattle buy a few, please?).

IMG_4698 sm — This is a 1942 Lufthansa airplane model (so must have been just after WWII) .. complete with the the frame that could hoist the engine up and out for maintenance,

IMG_4694 sm — I’m on the 4th floor looking down all the way to a wooden ship that was unearthed and rebuilt (I did not take notes of its age! Sorry ! and then almost at eye-level there is an old single man-copter.

IMG_9571 sm — This ‘cyclops’ automobile is a 1923 design. It had 6 cylinders and could do 95 km/h (60 mph).

IMG_9546 sm — How about this really retro desk telephone? Built by L.M. Ericsson & Co in Sweden in 1895 !

IMG_9543 sm — And of course I want one of these spherical TVs .. only a small number were made, and sold in Sloane Square, London, in 1970.

IMG_9530 sm — And this fantastic archetypical mechanical computing machine is a Z1 was built in 1938. It has an arithmetic unit, a memory unit and input and output units. The program that drove it was coded on punched tape.

August 27, 2015

Thursday/ the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie

It looks to me from all the tourist buses and hubbub around Checkpoint Charlie* that it is Berlin’s top tourist destination, beating out even the very popular Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building. I did not make it into the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (the line was too long), but there was a series of chronological, annotated pictures on display outdoors which I found very moving.

*Charlie is the ‘C’ in the NATO phonetic alphabet, not a person’s name. For more information that I could possibly document here, check out the excellent Wikipedia entries for Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.

IMG_9369 sm — Here is West Germany and East Germany after World War II. West Berlin was a free city and political enclave surrounded by East Berlin and East Germany that existed between 1949 and 1990. It was located some 100 miles east of the East/West German border and was accessible by land from West Germany only by a narrow rail and highway corridor (from Wikipedia). [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].

IMG_9372 sm — And here is greater Berlin with its four sectors : American, British, French, USSR [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].

IMG_9371 sm — Families were separated by the very closing of the East-West sector boundary. The wall was built to stop an on-going and massive migration of people from the East to the West. [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].

IMG_9279 sm — The next few pictures are from an outdoor display at Checkpoint Charlie. This one taken in 1961, so shortly after construction and completion of the wall.

IMG_9273 sm — This picture shows that the Wall really is not a single ‘wall’ but several walls that create no-man’s land death strip areas that were patrolled by armed guards. Look for the ‘you are here’ caption in the middle of the picture, the location of the Checkpoint Charlie gate. Developers demolished the East German checkpoint watchtower in 2000, but a substitute symbolic guard house is still there.

IMG_9288 sm — Protesters in 1988 with the names of their family and friends that have been jailed, presumably for attempting to cross the wall.

IMG_9291 sm — The fall of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November 1989.

IMG_9339 sm — This is an outdoor museum two blocks from the Checkpoint, called Topography des Terrors. It is dedicated to the history of the Wall and its victims. Alongside the edge is a remaining section of the Wall.

IMG_9297 sm — The Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

IMG_9304 sm — Another picture of the Museum Building (is it my imagination, or do I see ominous dictator-Communist rule edges in the architecture?).

IMG_9292 sm — Here is the little guardhouse model complete with sandbags and ‘guards’. (They are resumably working for the museum. They accept payments from any tourists that want to pose with them for a picture).

IMG_4523 sm — This is a section of the wall in its original place (in a park nearby Potsdamer Platz), but now with artwork painted on it.

August 26, 2015August 22, 2017

Wednesday/ arrival in Berlin

I made it into Berlin’s Tegel airport in the afternoon. I dawdled a little getting out of the airport, taking my time to take the scenery in. Berlin’s new Brandenburg airport is under construction (years late and billions of euros over budget. So little Tegel airport with its hexagonal main building around an open square that Berliners have become very fond of, will be closed, but probably not before 2018. Walking distances are extremely short at the airport. Our baggage claim was RIGHT THERE at the entrance into the terminal as we stepped off the plane. And another 30 meters puts you outside the terminal where the taxis and buses are (no S-bahn or U-bahn train to take directly from the airport).

IMG_9196 sm — Here’s the Tegel airport’s control tower and part of the main building. The airport started operating in November 1974 and now handles more than 20 million passengers per year.

IMG_4482 sm — Here’s a look at the inside of the airport.

IMG_9195 sm — And the chalkboard at the Starbucks gives a nod to the Berlin bear (the city’s coat of arms and flag has a bear on). Buy some coffee from Kenia and you will get your favorite Starbucks drink for free, says the bear.

IMG_9203 sm — Here’s Potsdamer Platz as one comes out of the underground. The Marriott hotel where I stay is in the distance. The Berlin Wall ran right through this area. The Marriott is literally 100 ft on the west side of where the Wall used to be.

IMG_9205 sm — And another friendly bear to welcome me at the hotel.

August 25, 2015

Tuesday/ back to Frankfurt

My time in South Africa was up on Tuesday, and I headed out to Cape Town International airport by noon to return my rental car. I was on South African Airways, a code share with Lufthansa. We stopped in Johannesburg, and then on Tuesday night went on to Frankfurt. I will stay over a few days in Germany before heading home to Seattle, and plan to go to Berlin for a day or two.

IMG_9163 sm — Here’s the quad-jet Airbus A340-600 that brought us to Johannesburg. We are waiting on the tarmac for our shuttle bus to take us to the terminal. (Yes, it looks like the gangways go to a terminal but they dont!).

IMG_9170 sm — Here’s the flight tracker en route to Frankfurt with 2 hours of the 10 hours of flight time left.

August 24, 2015September 5, 2015

Monday/ Strand & Somerset West

IMG_9128 sm — Check out this children’s book from a book store in Somerset West with my name on : Speurhond (Sleuth Hound) Willem in New York.

I drove out to Somerset West today to meet up with old friends there. I had some time to spare beforehand, and stopped at the beach at Strand. (Check out the pink area in the map from Saturday’s post to see where these are). A few dozen people were out for a walk on the beach, and two hardy souls even braved the cold water. (The Strand’s water is rarely on the warmer side, since the cold sea current from the West Coast usually prevails. But once in a while the water temperature would be very pleasant).

IMG_9150 sm — The surf shop is closed ! .. but I like the artwork.

IMG_9148 sm — The beach at Strand, and some of the many holiday apartments that line Beach Road on the beach front. (The guy in the picture is flying a tiny drone with his iPhone. Look for the black spec just to the left of the sand-colored building).

August 23, 2015August 24, 2015

Sunday/ Stellenbosch

Stellenbosch is South Africa’s second oldest European settlement (after Cape Town), founded in 1679 by then-Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel. Stellenbosch means ‘(Van der) Stel’s Forest. Stellenbosch University was founded in 1866. Its logo has a little oak leaf in it, a nod to the nickname for Stellenbosch, ‘City of Oaks’.

IMG_4477 sm — The main building of the Faculty of Engineering (with some construction going on downstairs). Freshman engineering students attend lectures in the main building and then graduate to the buildings dedicated to Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering behind the main building.

IMG_4456 sm — The JH Neethling Building houses the Faculty of Agrisciences.

IMG_4467 sm — This Jewish synagogue is on Van Rynveveld Street, and is almost 100 years old.

IMG_4464 sm — This building used to be a girls’ school, but is now a museum (containing exhibits of earlier days and peoples from Africa). It is also on Van Ryneveld Street.

IMG_4460 sm — These giant ficus trees are at the back of the main administration building on Victoria Street.

IMG_4468 sm — A building in Plein Street displaying the typical Cape Dutch architecture that prevailed in the 17th and 18th century in the Cape Province.

August 22, 2015

Saturday/ the V&A Waterfront

My friend Marlien and I drove out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront today. The enormous V&A Waterfront shopping mall has too many shops to even count – clothing stores, book stores, home and kitchen gadgets, music, African artwork – anything under the sun. Outside one can take a helicopter ‘flip’ (short ride of 10-15 mins, about US$300 per person), take a harbor tour, or go out to a Robben Island excursion. We just took it easy and took in the sights, and bought a little souvenir here and there.

IMG_9020 sm — Here are the main areas around the Cape Peninsula. I stay out in the Northern Suburbs (Durbanville). The Waterfront is in the City Centre (where it says Green Point, actually). Robben Island is where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner.

IMG_4432 sm — The Clock Tower at the V&A Waterfront was completed in 1882, and restored in 1997. I’m happy to see it painted red once more (it was painted yellow in 2013 as part of an advertising campaign).

IMG_4423 sm — ‘Each Man To Do His Duty’ says the inscription on the ribbon of this sailor mast head.

IMG_4437 sm — I suppose I should have cropped the yellow picture frame from the photo, but then the longitude and latitude information would be lost.

IMG_4446 sm — This is the train station building at Muizenberg. It opened in 1913 and is another one of the Cape Town area’s national historic buildings.

August 22, 2015August 22, 2015

Friday/ rusks from Woolies

IMG_9009 sm — Woolworth’s rusks are top-drawer : made from Ayrshire* buttermilk and with free-range eggs! (They are delicious). *Ayrshire are dairy cattle originally from southwest Scotland.

A rusk is a hard, dry biscuit or a twice-baked bread, and Woolies is the nickname of Woolworths in South Africa, chain of retail stores modeled on Marks & Spencer in the United Kingdom. (The first store in South Africa opened in Cape Town in 1931).

August 20, 2015

Thursday/ a totter of giraffes

IMG_8992 sm — The rhinoceros has a golden horn (maybe because the artist wanted to indicate its value to poachers?), but I like the bicycle best.

IMG_4411 sm — Some (or any one) of these giraffes are going to be difficult to carry onto an airplane! And a collection of giraffes is .. what? A ‘totter’ of giraffes sounds good to me (I found the term on line). ‘Totter’ means a feeble or unsteady gait.

I drove my mom out to Stellenbosch today and as usual we checked out the art shops that line Plein Street. It was a beautiful and mild late winter day, but there are not a lot of tourists to be seen this time of year.

August 19, 2015August 19, 2015

Wednesday/ the Seattle Coffee Co

IMG_8973 sm — This ‘Seattle Coffee Co’ is next to a big bookstore in the Tygervalley Mall nearby in Durbanville. There are 90 of these coffee shops around the country.

There are no Starbuckses in South Africa, but the first one is slated to open in Johannesburg in 2016, with others to follow. South Africans do love their coffee : it is not referred to as boeretroos* for nothing in Afrikaans.

*Troos translates to ‘comfort’. Boer is much harder to translate. It could simply be taken to mean ‘farmer’, but it also stands for the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier .. and to this day is used for Afrikaans-speaking South Africans that are aware of that heritage.

August 18, 2015August 18, 2015

Tuesday/ the Hungry Lion

Hungry Lion is a fast food franchise found in South Africa, Botswana, Angola and Swaziland. It was started in 1997 by Shoprite grocery stores. The outlets sell fried chicken and chicken burgers only. Does a hungry lion eat chicken? I guess SO!
In Afrikaans we would say ‘Ek is so honger soos ‘n wolf’ (as hungry as a wolf).
The Germans also say hungry as a wolf, or ‘Ich habe einen Bärenhunger’ (I have the hunger of a bear).

IMG_8959 sm — This Hungry Lion fast food outlet is in the EIkestad Mall in Stellenbosch.

August 17, 2015

Monday/ arrival in Cape Town

IMG_8914 sm — The sign at the security check point in Frankfurt.

I made the long journey south (10 hours) from Frankfurt to Johannesburg on Sunday night in a big A380-800*, and then took a 2-hour flight on South African Airways to Cape Town from Johannesburg. At our arrival in Jo’burg we were all heat scanned by a camera, for fever/ Ebola symptoms, said the sign.

*I sat all the way back in row 96G, in a little coach section tucked upstairs into the tail of the A380. It made us forget we were flying in an enormous airplane, but the seats were not particularly comfortable, nor spacious, of course. The other problem was that my luggage took a long long time to come out in Johannesburg (the fault of the big airplane or slow baggage service? both?) : some 45 minutes. So I had to make a run for my connection to Cape Town.

IMG_8915 sm — I liked the set of cut-outs of German band members in their lederhosen in the duty-free store at Frankfurt, but they did not persuade me to buy any booze or chocolate. (I had too much to carry already).

IMG_8936 sm — Here’s the nose of the A380 at the gate in Johannesburg.

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015

Sunday/ the Experiminta Science Center

The Experiminta Science Center is just a block from the Marriott hotel as well, and it was great to see such unabashed enthusiasm for math and science on display. My pictures are of some items that interested me, but there are many other interactive displays geared toward school kids of all ages. Here is the link for Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum.

mirrors2 — Sorry! but I could not resist the mirrors. Inside the 3-sided mirror caleidoscope, ‘wide’ me, ‘skinny’ me, ‘upside down’ me in a giant spoon mirror, and ‘center of attention’ me in a ceiling mirror.

IMG_8876 sm — Here’s a tornado in a tube .. a six foot high display of what happens when hot air and cool air mixes and gets a twist.

3D math equations — These colorful (and playful) 3-D math representations all have names, which I suspect were assigned by the mathematician that had spare time to play around with Mathlab (a graphic modeller of mathematical equations) !

IMG_8891 sm — What do these emoji sentences convey? 1. (The message sender is blue). Will you come with me to the movies tonight? 2. (The message sender is green). I heard that your friend’s little sister said that I am coming to the (birthday) party.

Rottche pendumlum — Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum consists of a middle piece that can rotate around its center (the black segment in the middle) .. but then it has additional segments attached to its ends that can rotate through 360 degrees as well. The trace of the tip of one of the attached segments is quite unexpectedly ‘chaotic’.

August 16, 2015August 17, 2015

Saturday/ the Senckenberg Naturmuseum

I was surprised to learn, from looking at my Frankfurt map, that the Senckenberg Naturmuseum was barely a five-minute walk from my hotel. Well, you have to go then, I told myself, and hurry up ! The museum closed at 6, along with every other establishment in Germany*.

*Shopping malls close a little later, at 9 pm .. but there is not much open on Sunday (convenience stores at gas stations are). I think that’s a good thing .. even with the Saturday evening rush that I got caught in at a grocery store just trying to buy a yogurt and bananas.

IMG_4249 sm — Here is the entrance to the Senckenberg Naturmuseum (museum of natural history) here in Frankfurt.

IMG_4300 sm — This is the main exhibition hall. One the left is an Iguanodon, and on the right a complete Diplodocus skeleton, gifted from the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. Diplodocuses roamed around on earth 156-147 million years ago.

IMG_4260 sm — Ready for your close-up (encounter with a 5-ton iguanodon?) Lucky for humans the beasts died out 110 million years ago.

IMG_4287 sm — These are two woolly mammoth skeletons : on the left the ‘Mühldorfer mammoth’, a complete skeleton found east of Munich. On the right the American woolly mammoth, found in Little Britain in the New York State area. Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared between 14,000 to 10,000 years ago.

IMG_4286 sm — Saber-toothed cats lived for 42 million years until about 11,000 years ago. This specimen’s bones were found in California.

IMG_4282 sm — Open wide! Lucky for us this big fin whale does not eat humans! A close relative of the bigger blue whale, this skeleton lines the entire wall in the big exhibition room.

IMG_4301 sm — Here’s the Coelacanth, the famous ‘dino-fish’ with bones and all, and a lung. A live fish was caught in a net off the South African coast in 1938, a sensational find for the archaeologist community, and today methods have been put in place to try to prevent catching the rare fish in fish nets.

IMG_4333 sm — I like the pictures and the tailors’ tapes on this tailor shop and offices for the sharply dressed man (and woman)., on Bleichstraße.

IMG_4329 sm — The old and the new : in front Eschenheimer Tower (built in 1810) that guarded the old city’s Gothic walls, behind it the Jumeirah Frankfurt Hotel that opened in 2011.

IMG_4322 sm — This is the Alte Oper, the old opera house. The original building was badly damaged in a World War II night raid, and only the facade remained. It took several decades before the building was restored.

IMG_4344 sm — The early evening view from my hotel window. The little red aircraft warning lights are already lit up. The building with the pyramid is the Messeturm (offices); the silvery stepped building in the middle the West End Tower; the black building two more to the left of it is the Frankfurter Büro Center, home of my German namesake company, PwC.

August 15, 2015August 15, 2015

Friday/ Frankfurt Altstadt

Friday brought cooler temperatures and a little rain late in the afternoon as well. The Altstadt (old city) in the historic heart of Frankfurt is undergoing a lot of new construction here. At least the Römerberg square is now nicely cleaned up (it was not when I checked it out a few years ago).

IMG_8734 sm — Here’s a 1950s vintage engineering handbook that was for sale by a vintage art and bookstore. I love the crisp graphics (showing a lot of very ‘engineered’ ways to measure temperature, in this case).

IMG_4205 sm — Here are some of the buildings around the Römerberg square. I suppose there are people that live upstairs from the cafes and restaurants .. why wouldn’t there be?

IMG_4194 sm — Here is the Kaiserdom St. Bartholomäus cathedral, holding its own in the middle of all the construction. And why would it not? The current church was built from 1250-1514, the third building in the same place, and it survived World War II .. at a time when most of Frankfurt was destroyed.

IMG_8722 sm — This paving, lighting and wall tiles at the Domplatz (Cathedral Square) U-bahn station is new and very nicely done. (I waited for the silly humans in front of me to disappear so that they would not spoil the clean lines in picture!).

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015

Thursday/ arrival in Frankfurt

IMG_8672 sm — ‘I am a king’ .. why would anyone want to shoot me? asks the lion on the cover of Stern news magazine at the airport.

(Thursday night USA time, Friday morning Frankfurt time). Well, I made it in. I had fantasies of open seats remaining open next to mine as I checked in on-line and selected my seat for the flight, but none of those came true : the flight to Frankfurt was packed. Mostly German and Dutch peeps returning home, from what I could tell. A Flemish-speaking family near me (I inadvertently eavesdropped on them) was going home to Brussels. It was was warm today here in Frankfurt and I was sweating as I walked the short distance for the Festhalle/ Messe U-bahn stop to the Marriott hotel !

IMG_8670 sm — Here is a view of a row of Lufthansa tails from Frankfurt’s Terminal Z shortly after I stepped off the plane at 8.30 am.

IMG_8689 sm — Here is the main train station, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. We had just arrived from the Flughafen (airport). I stepped over from the S-bahn to the U-bahn here at Hauptbahnhof.

IMG_8700 sm — Here is a view of the ‘Messe Frankfurt’ from high up in the Marriott hotel. The ‘Messe’ is one of the world’s largest trade fair centers : anything from industrial tools, cars, household items, even books, are exhibited for buyers in these halls. The building top left with the colored roof sections is a large shopping mall.

August 12, 2015August 12, 2015

Wednesday/ my bags are packed

My bags are packed. I am leaving for Frankfurt in the morning. This is part of my trip to South Africa. I have checked in on-line; I have my Frankfurt Metro app on my iPhone, and I have some left-over Euros from previous trips. (Yes, I have my passport. Without Mr Passport in one’s pocket, the journey will not even start !). It’s a 747 we will be flying in, and the flight time is about 9 hrs.

8-12-2015 10-36-30 PM — Here’s a little graphic outline of the route, and below the technical flight details from flightaware.com.