For those of you who haven't heard and are still diligent enough to be checking this blog... we thought that you might like to know that we are having a baby. Due date is around New Year, so plenty of time to book you all in for baby sitting duties!
xxxr
I know it is a little overdue, but out of regard to those of you who have been diligently following the blog, I have decided to add an entry about our time in Boston….
So, the last leg of our trip away was a stopover in Boston on the way home. Marty had been to Boston some years ago and really liked it and, well, I love Boston Legal… so it all made sense :)
We managed to book ourselves into a very average (actually, probably below average) hostel. We think it is probably a student hostel during the academic year. On the plus side, however, it was very central and we were able to walk most places we wanted to go.
It was very warm in Boston (being mid-summer and all) and we really enjoyed wandering around the city, and particularly enjoyed being near the sea again… hooray! We did the obligatory ‘Freedom Trail’ tour and heard a bit about Boston’s colonial history. Unfortunately, our American history is pretty rubbish and so we had some trouble filling in the gaps for ourselves. Much to Marty’s joy, Boston has an aquarium, so we were able to fill in a morning ogling fish. The aquarium is a seriously popular attraction- there were about 200 people lined up for tickets the first time we tried to go- and there is advertising for it all over town. Despite this, we still think that the Berlin aquarium is far superior. Our friends Josh and Angelika live in Boston so we went for a visit and were treated to Josh’s excellent burgers. One of the real highlights of this trip has been catching up with various friends around the world and it has been really cool to see people who we haven’t seen for some time.
Overall, we had a really great time in Boston. It’s a very accessible city and it’s compact enough to be able to walk around the central city. It’s also a very attractive city- a gorgeous mixture of old and new buildings and history mixed in with development. It’s also by the sea. Did I mention that? There’s just something so fab about cities by the sea…
17 different beds
12 cities / towns (13 for Marty)
3 continents
10 train trips
8 plane flights (10 for Marty)
6 airlines
300km cycling
60kg of luggage (darn laptops and assorted electronic equipment)
69 blog entries
100000000 embarrassing-idiot-I’m-a-tourist-in-a-foreign-country moments
Priceless.
Well, the moment has finally come and we are about to depart Germany. It's hard to believe that we have been here for almost 4 months... So, tomorrow we head off to Boston where we have 4 days to seek out Denny Crane and James Spader and then HOME! Those of you who took my virtual apartment tour may appreciate that we are REALLY looking forward to getting back to our own bed... our beds here have been little more than stretchers and the distance between the beds (when rolled out) and the desk is about 1m.
Thanks so much to those of you who have emailed / written / called /visited etc- it has been great to keep in touch with home a bit. I look forward to catching up on all the goss when we get back,
xxxr
We have been lucky enough to have Mum and her husband Roger with us for the last few days and have taken the opportunity to see some more of the tourist sites around Dresden. We’ve had a very busy weekend, so I’ll just give you the edited highlights:
ElbHangFest
Every year a festival is held along the Elbe River. It stretches for a number of kilometres and runs from Pillnitz Castle to the local icon, the Blue Wonder bridge. In many ways, the festival was like festivals everywhere- food, music, bric-a-brac etc… however, one of the really interesting things about Germany is the way in which Germany culture is embraced. People still wear traditional German attire and local food and traditions are very much celebrated. We did manage to sample some of the local fare and Roger was very happy to test the beer and sausages.
Grosse Garten
A large public park runs right through the middle of Dresden and, to our shame, we had not managed to organise ourselves to visit the park. So we made a special point to visit with Mum and Roger. The park is lovely and, like everywhere in Germany, has beer gardens conveniently located throughout. A highlight of our visit to the garden was the model train which runs a loop through the park. I think there is about 15km of track and it takes around half and hour to do the loop. A really cool aspect of the train is that it is predominately staffed by a volunteer crew, made up largely of boys aged between about 9-16. There must have been a couple of dozen of them stationed around the park and they performed the roles of conductor and station master etc… The all wore uniforms and seemed to take their positions very seriously…
SemperOper
One of the most famous buildings around Dresden is the Opera House. Like most of the AltStadt (Old Town), it has been completely rebuilt since WWII and is astonishing, both inside and out. Anyway, it is quite difficult to get tickets as the shows get booked out months in advance, so we were quite excited when we managed to get tickets to the Wagner opera “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (“The Master Singer from Nuremburg”). Now, the opera-knowledgeable amongst you will already have warning bells ringing in your heads, but we were slightly ignorant when we booked tickets and did not realise that this particular opera runs for around 5 hours!! Yikes! There were two intermissions, but it was still a whole lot of opera! The opera itself was, of course in German and using the subtitles we managed to make out some of the finer points in the first act. However, a change to the lighting rig in the second act meant that the subtitles were obscured and were left to our own devices to try and figure out what was going on.
Actually, the most exciting part of the night was when several members of the audience began booing very loudly at the end of the second act!!! The opera was quite a modern interpretation of the original and was set in the 1930s-40s, rather than the original 16th Century. It also took a very modern approach to the staging and set design and, we gather, some of the music. Anyway, it was clear that some of the audience were less than impressed and by the beginning of the third act (which ran for a bit over 2 hours…) at least a third of the people on our level (who’d presumably paid around $130nz to see the show) had left, never to return. Interestingly, when the performance did finally finish at around 11pm, those left seemed to love the show. There was lots of ‘Bravo’, plenty of cheering and clapping, and not a ‘boo’ to be heard.
We managed to time our walk home from the Opera House with Germany’s loss in the European Cup soccer. Needless to say, it was not a happy crowd as Germans seem to take soccer almost as seriously as Kiwis take rugby! Whilst it was not an angry crowd, as such, we did make haste when a smoke bomb was thrown in our general direction.
Königstein Castle
In an earlier post, I wrote about our visit to Bad Schandau in the Sächsische Schweiz. Along the same route, is a fortress castle called Königstein. By now you all know that Marty has quite a penchant for castles, so we decided to take a trip with Mum and Roger to see it. And Marty was not disappointed. Königstein is all a good castle should be, complete with turrets, walls, dungeons and armouries. It also has the most magnificent views right across the region. I'm sure he will write his own description of the castle in due course.
We took the train up to Königstein, but decided to take one of the paddle steams back to Dresden and it turned out to be an extremely pleasant experience. The boat takes about 3 hours (as opposed to the train which takes 1) and really just meanders down the river. It was lovely to be able to see all the villages from the water and Mum and Roger really enjoyed seeing the different types of buildings.
Phew! So we have had a very busy time of things and have really enjoyed doing some of the things we keep saying we will do while we are here. It’s been great to have Mum and Roger here and it has given us a wonderful opportunity to play tour guide for a change.
Just when you thought I was over traffic lights.... Kate has informed me that the mysterious Danish headings of the traffic light articles read: 'New imaginative traffic lights are illegal' and the other one says 'traffic lights change sex'. Cheers Kate!!
Yesterday I went to BASt, in Cologne. Within pavement* circles it's very famous so it was amazing to get to go there. I got to see their test track, which was similar in some ways to CAPTIF in Canterbury but, rather than having a circular test track that can be loaded with a large number of vehicle passes, they drive real trucks across the pavement. The experimental pavement is highly instrumented and so they can record the stresses and strains as the trucks pass. They'd also just completed some interesting experiments but for the sake of the younger viewers, I'll spare you the details. You might however be interested to know that they did experiments with using expanded polystyrene as a foundation for a pavement –conclusion, it's not so flash. BASt also do crash tests there but unfortunately there were no tests being performed the day I was there. The building itself was also amazing; built onto a hill, and nowhere more than 2 stories high, it's essentially four very long corridors connected by walkways. The design intent was to allow everyone to have their own office, access to natural light and a view of the gardens.
As I said the other day, these people are fußball (soccer) mad. This guy (photo) was in the entrance to the BASt building. I arrived at BASt the day after Germany secured their place in the Euro final. The previous night the screams and celebrations went for hours after Germany won. The streets were filled with cars honking continuously and one of the BASt people said that his trip home after the game, normally a 20 minute drive, took one and a half hours (he was honking his horn with the rest of them).
*one person I know thought that I worked at research on foot paths. This is not correct: my work involves looking at how roads are built and how to build roads better so they last and perform better.
**note from Rochelle:... but for some reason, those involved persist in calling them pavements- a reasonable misunderstanding, I think (btw- the person wasn't me :) )
