I blame the heat.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany8 Comments

This week, I made a pretty big mistake.  On Monday, I bought this:

It had been a very warm pair of weeks- at one point, the temperature hit 35 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, which for you Americans is about 95 degrees Fahrenheit.  Since my apartment and my office are both entirely bereft of air conditioning, I was wholly unprepared for this.    One evening last week, it was so warm and sticky that I couldn’t sleep until 2:30 in the morning when a thunderstorm kicked up and started to cool things down slightly.

The portable air conditioner was something that I’d been thinking about on and off for months.  At  just under three hundred Euros, it seemed like a reasonable sacrifice.  I have a fan in the apartment which does great things for making it seem cooler, but it does little to actually cool down the ambient temperature of the apartment.  Plus when you hit the power button, those little shark gill looking flaps in the front open automatically, which is really neat.  I’m a big sucker for “neat!”

Enlisting the help of Jenny and her car, I got the thing on Monday after work.  It took both of us to muscle the thing up into my apartment-  it’s big and awkward so even though I could lift it, carrying it for more than a few feet becomes a logistical impossibility.  Once it’s out of the box, it has nice little wheels to move it from room to room, though.   Once it was unboxed, I set it up in the bedroom, closed the window and the door, and turned it on.  And waited.  Then I waited some more.

After it had been running for about forty minutes, I went into the bedroom to check on it, and I found that two feet directly in front of it were nice and cool, but the rest of the room was pretty much the same temperature.

The reason for this, as anyone who knows air conditioners will tell you, is because I hadn’t put on the exhaust hose and routed the displaced warm air somewhere else.  The exhaust hose that came with this device (not pictured) is wide enough to roll a small honeydew melon through, and this made it difficult to vent the thing properly.  If tried running the exhaust hose out of a doorway first, then a window.  The hose is so wide that in order to vent the hot air, I have to keep the window open so much that it entirely negates the point of having an air conditioner in the first place.   Jenny’s boyfriend Robert suggested duct taping the hose into the window, but that would make it impossible to ever open the window again.

Yesterday, Jenny helped me return the AC to the store. (She’s a very patient friend who is regularly amused by the inability of someone from Florida to cope with the heat.)  I had the thing for less than five days, and by the fourth day, the average temperature had dropped about twenty degrees anyway.   The weather here just isn’t usually all that hot.  I think that’s why this image is so funny:

I think when we hit our hottest days next summer, I’m just going to try putting ice cubes in my underwear or something.

A Weekend In Köln

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany7 Comments

Continuing on my longstanding trend of seeing new cities because there’s a concert there that I want to see, I went to Köln (Cologne) to see Owl City.  I’d seen them once before, in Orlando, and the previous show was bigger- more people on stage, real stringed instruments for the violin and cello bits, and so forth. This time around, it was in a smaller club with a smaller lineup.  Still a great show, though.

There’s more to Cologne than a happening concert venue, though.  While I didn’t see the entire city by any stretch of the imagination, I did see some nifty parts of the city.  Here are some interesting things about Cologne.

The Beer Is Tiny:

The local beer, called Kölsch, is a pale and tasty drink which is usually served cold in very small cylindrical .2 liter glasses.  The picture below is an abnormally big one.

In pubs in Cologne, the common practice is to immediately bring you a new one every time your glass is empty without any prompting.  To make the beer stop flowing, you have to leave your glass half full or put your coaster on top of it.

It Has A Pretty Neat Bridge:

If you arrive to Cologne via train as I did, you come in on the Hohenzollern bridge, which crosses the Rhine river.  This is the most heavily used rail bridge in Germany, with around 1200 trains passing through it every day.

The bridge also has a pedestrian walkway alongside the tracks, and since 2008, the fence between the footpath and the train tracks has been covered in love locks much like the bridge here in Regensburg.  While I was taking these pictures, a couple got married a few meters away from me, and then placed their own padlock on the bridge.

Their Cathedral Looks Just Like Ours*, Except Way Bigger:

You can’t miss the Kölner Dom when you come out of the train station.   The cathedral is enormous and it was constructed in Gothic style, just like Regensburg’s Dom*.  As a result, the look and feel of the place is very similar.  It’s just much, much larger.   It’s huge.

No, really, it’s enormous.  Here’s a closer shot to give you a sense of scale.

Climbing the spire is a pretty popular tourist attraction.  It’s 509 spiralling stone steps to a viewing platform just over 322 feet above the ground.  They’ve put in fencing to keep people from dropping stuff, but even with the fencing, the view is pretty spectacular.

Tour Groups Everywhere:

Look, a Segway tour group!  I swear, I’m gonna ride one of those things some day.

They Have A Cable Car:

The Kölner Seilbahn has been crossing the Rhine river since the late 1950s.  With my previously established love of tall places, it’s a given that I had to ride it across.

They Have A Chocolate Museum:

Of all the museums I’ve been to, the Schokoladen Museum is my current favorite.  The actual history of chocolate wasn’t all that interesting to me, but the place has functioning chocolate manufacturing processes which can be seen at various steps.  One part is an entire automated line which made the small chocolates that are given to each visitor as they enter the museum. The machine below is constantly turning molded chocolates in various shapes as they dry and harden.

One Last Thing About Köln:

The city is adjacent to another nearby town, Brühl, which is the home of the  PhantasiaLand theme park.  That’s another post, though.

Nobody can do it like a Dampf Lok!

On By StevenIn International Travel - Inside Germany3 Comments

It would be fair to say that a great deal of my musical taste was formed in the 1980s.  Brian, my best friend at the time, was constantly sharing music with me, and I absorbed it and ran with it.   He introduced me to diverse artists such as Kraftwerk and Mannheim Steamroller, both of which I still love to this day.  Then there were the musicals.   I’m an unabashed and admitted musical theater geek, but I wouldn’t be if Brian hadn’t had musicals in the collection.

In 1984, he got the soundtrack to a new Andrew Lloyd Webber show that had just hit Broadway called Starlight Express.  The show is about toy trains come to life in the mind of a small boy, and it’s a spectacle-  the actors portraying the trains perform on roller skates.  I wanted to see it badly.

The original Broadway run was only a few years, but the UK show was on the West End in London for years- over 7400 performances.   In the early 1990s, I found out that another friend of mine, Chris, had been to see it in London.  He told me that he fell asleep during the show because he was jet-lagged, and I never quite forgave him for that blasphemy.

In 1992, the London show was heavily revised as “The New Starlight Express,” and a new cast recording was released.  I didn’t care much for the revisions-  they removed a villain character who I always felt was vital to making the plot interesting.  They also dropped a few songs that I was particularly fond of, and added a bunch of new songs that I didn’t think were as good.  I still wanted to see it though.

(Editor’s Note:  If you’re interested in a  detailed breakdown of the changes made in the 1992 version, the Starlight Express Wikipedia article contains more information than anyone will ever need.)

About two months ago, I was perusing a list of live music scattered around Germany.  Concerts, musicals, and the like were all represented, and I saw that Starlight Express was in Bochum.   A quick map check showed me that Bochum is easily reachable by train,  and I put it on my list of “I’d like to do that sometime” jaunts.  It’s a pretty big list.

Continue reading “Nobody can do it like a Dampf Lok!” →

One Week In The UK, Part Two: Edinburgh

On By StevenIn International Travel - The United Kingdom2 Comments

From King’s Cross Station, it took roughly four and a half hours to get to Waverley Station in Edinburgh.  The train ride was pleasant enough.  I had splurged a tiny bit on a first class ticket for this ride, so I got a nice window seat and my choice of sandwich and chips during the journey.   Some of the coastal views along the way were pretty spectacular.  At one point, I even saw a bright yellow helicopter hovering over the ocean just off the coast.  Alas, I have no telephoto lens.

On my arrival into Scotland, I checked into the hotel and then wandered around a bit.  I didn’t really have any plans for that first night, and I wound up going to the movie theatre and catching the Dark Knight Rises, which had been released that very day in the UK.

That night, I had a conversation with my partner-in-crime Jenny via text message.

Jenny: How is Edinburgh?
Me: Edinburgh is… under construction.

It wasn’t all of Edinburgh that was under construction, it just seemed like it.  The platform at the train station was under renovation, and the street my hotel was located on was also under significant construction.  It turns out that Edinburgh is undergoing significant work to put in a tram system.  Tracks are being laid down, traffic is being redirected in different places, and construction barriers are everywhere.

Edinburgh had a large set of Olympic rings set up in a park near Royal Mile, the stretch of road that leads to the Edinburgh castle.  Plus there were bagpipers all over.

Imagine my surprise to discover that they still have Police Information Boxes in Edinburgh!  I kept my eyes peeled for Timey Wimey things, but I didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary.

This gruesome looking tower is the Scott Monument, for Sir Walter Scott.  If you climb the 287 steps to the top, you get a spectacular view of Edinburgh.  Also, if you’re tall-ish like me, you get a pretty good whack to the noggin-  the archways are somewhat low.

From the top of the Scott Monument, you can see Arthur’s Seat in one direction. A lot of people make the hike up to the top, as it’s not all that far away.

…and in the other direction, you can see Edinburgh Castle and the buildings along Royal Mile.  As a side note, this is one of the single best photographs I have ever taken.

I was only in Edinburgh from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning.  My entire focus for going to Edinburgh was to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide Live show, which was pretty keen.  This edition of the live show included Neil Gaiman as The Book, and had a special guest appearance by John Hodgman as the meat of the day in Milliways.

After the show, I went to a pub next to the theatre for a drink,  where I bumped into John Hodgman in the men’s room.  This led to a brief and hilariously awkward conversation during which Hodgman was thoroughly polite despite the ridiculousness of the setting.

The next morning, before I headed to the airport, I went in search of a famous statue of Sherlock Holmes, only to discover after wandering around the place it was supposed to be that the statue was moved to storage in 2009 because of the tramworks.  It was supposed to have been replaced in 2011, but the tramworks are very, very, very behind schedule.