A Pang Of Homesickness

Saw this one on B's Facebook page today (no, I do not have that infernal thing myself, everybody please stop asking me), and it really makes me love my old hometown that much more. But for anyone who wants to move there-- it rains all the time. Trust me. Stay away.

A Photo From A Warmer, Drier Time

Well, it's official: With 2 days left in the month, it was announced yesterday that August 2010 was the rainiest on record in Germany, with a whopping 20% more rainfall than normal. When my folks were here last August I recall the need to get fans for the house, it was so hot and muggy. Here I'm sitting in jeans and a fleece pullover with the rain dumping down outside as I type this, and August isn't over yet.

Photo taken of an interesting garden, outdoor furniture and bric-a-brac store on (I think) Winklerstraße in early Spring-- before the rain. St. Sebaldus Church in the background.

Free Range Gopher

European zoos are something else. While some of the best memories of my formative years entailed yearly trips to the Bronx Zoo, I still make it a point to check out my local wildlife conservation sanctuaries to this day. This shot was taken on the grounds of the Nuremberg Zoo, and yes, they really do let some of the more relatively harmless animals walk the grounds, reasoning that smart individuals won't mess with them-- not a lot of trial lawyers here apparently. The Nuremberg Zoo also has a bit of a different take on how animals are presented-- unless absolutely necessary for safety reasons, most animal's pens are little more than a post fence surround. Which was pretty cool when that elk stuck his head outside the fence and waited for B to pet his antlers last year. Euro zoos are a bit different in the scope and variety of animals as well-- more Asian and European flora and fauna; less North American. Anyway, this hefty gopher seemed quite content to wander around, oblivious to the passerby. Neato.

Local Vino

Hanging outside a downtown wine bar that never seems to be open (an odd but regular occurrence with a number of businesses here) are bocksteubel, a very distinct flask-shaped bottle used primarily for higher quality Franconian wine. Franconia is the region here in the northern portion of the German state of Bavaria, and is the only wine producing area in Bavaria. I'm far from being a wine expert (though attempting to educate oneself can be a helluva lot of fun), but drinking German wein has made me appreciate the local beer much more if that's any indication. German white wines are notoriously sweeter than their European counterparts (to their credit, Franconian whites are less sweet and more dry, a definite plus), and I have yet to find a reliably decent bottle of German red table ("everyday") wine.

Street Shot

Obere Wörthstraße, Altstadt

Rabbits!

Here's an unlikely sculpture of a couple of rabbits (or hares, whichever) adorning the sky bridge at local power company N-Ergie's buildings. It took a while to puzzle this one out, but it likely has to do with one of Nuremberg's most famous citizens and one of his most famous works. Artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was a true undisputed "Renaissance Man" in every respect of the word, and one of his most famous works was the drawing A Young Hare. The rabbit/hare motif has manifested itself in a few places around town, not the least of which this frankly grotesque bronze sculpture in Albrecht Dürer-platz, the plaza around Dürer's house (now preserved and a not-bad museum). If you look hard enough, you can even find plastic versions of the hare drawing sold in local stores, and this was fully brought to bear in this photo of an art installation, taken apparently some years ago in the Hauptmarkt town square. Silly rabbits.

Computer Problems; Please Stand By

Wait long enough, and everybody has a computer problem. Long story short, this system (I won't name the brand; they are trying their best to fix it) has had the notorious Blue Screen of Death-- e.g., it seizes up and crashes-- for well over a year, and it's happening with ever-increasing frequency. I thought it had to do with the operating system, but that was an expensive dead end solution-- it's definitely the computer itself and not the programming on it. Anyway, this laptop will be getting a full-blown lobotomy (motherboard, heat sink, hard drive and memory are all being replaced under warranty). So basically I'm getting a new computer today, and will be starting from scratch. Blogging will resume when everything is up to speed.

No Translation Needed

Men's room, The George English Pub, Nuremberg

Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion

To all the local readers of this blog, I'm helping to put together an English language book exchange this weekend-- Sunday the 22nd to be exact. This is a great chance to swap out your used books, pick up some new and different titles, catch up with some of the other members of the local expat community, grab a beverage and meet a notoriously camera-shy blogger (me). For more information, please check out this thread on Toytown Germany. See you there!

Do We Look English Guv'nor?

"Bist du Englisch?" (Are you English?) We get this one a lot-- about once a month on average: a lot of Germans are of the distinct impression that B and I are British. My guess is that we don't dress like Americans (whatever that means, but generally speaking no baggy clothes, no baseball caps, no sports jerseys or white leather sneakers), Americans are, by comparison, few and far between here, and finally, a lot of Germans can't distinguish accents too well. In fact, I know a German person who speaks fluent English and actually lived in the USA for over 15 years who can not tell Irish, British English, Scottish, Aussie, South African or American accents from one another-- it all sounds exactly the same. I am only just starting to figure out the different German dialects after 2 years of constant immersion, so I'm hardly any better myself. At any rate, I've never been mistaken as anything other than an East Coast guy, so it is sort of cool to get pegged as someone from Old Blighty for a change.

Spy Shot

This is an older shot taken when our friends Art & Mo were in town. What you see here is the next generation BMW 6-Series car in prototype "test mule" configuration with camouflage paint. I know this because (1.) I'm a car geek and (2.) BMW's camouflage paint job is very distinctive, and it is used on all of their models-- if you get all the car magazines, you'll see this swirly job time and again, like here and here and here. The swirls are supposed to defeat cameras from getting details of the exact angles and final styling. The funny thing is that this picture was taken only a couple hundred feet from where I took this photo of a Porsche prototype in December 2008, and a few blocks from where I took a photo of a prototype of the next Mini (look for that soon). Nuremberg does have a history of vehicle manufacturing (some Volkswagen production occurred here in the 1940's, and Nuremberg was the home to no less than 6 motorcycle manufacturers after WWII), but as to why we seem to get a lot of car prototypes here-- BMW's Munich HQ is 90 minutes to the south and Porsche's home base of Stuttgart is 3 hours to the west-- is anybody's guess.

Supermarket Follies

Click on photo for close-up. This here concoction in the cartoonish bottle is none other than Eierlikör, or egg liquor. Egg yolks, sugar or honey, and grain alcohol, usually mixed with cream or milk. While I know that this is hepped-up egg nog, I really can't get behind it-- especially not in that bottle. Eierlikör is available year round here, but sales obviously climb around the holidays. Me, I'll stick to my old holiday standard: Borden egg nog with a snort of Southern Comfort.

We Interrupt This Summer For A Slight Break

While friends in Portland are lamenting their blast of temps in the mid-90 to low 100 degrees farenheit this week, here on the other side of the world our August is downright chilly by comparison, with tomorrow's daytime high forcast to be a rather Autumn-like 58F. And raining to boot.

The photo is a shot of the north side of St Sebaldus Church in the Altstadt taken this winter-- and it was a long, cold, miserable winter at that. Church construction first began in the 1230's, though the building as we know and see it today was built around that "core" and enlarged and remodeled well into the 17th century. It's interesting to note that the church organist at St. Sebaldus (a very important position back in the day) from 1695-1706 was Johann Pachelbel, perhaps best known for his baroque composition Canon in D major (aka "Pachelbel's Canon"), and regularly played at weddings to this day.

Vote For These... I Mean Us!

The local elections are long over, but we have this photo of a campaign poster to remind us that sex sells pretty much anything. And they say that politics is showbiz for ugly people. Königstraße, Altstadt.

Ugly Ducklings

As mentioned in the previous post, here are a few photos of the classic French automobile the Citroën 2CV. While barely sold in the USA (indeed, most North American's introduction to this car was in this clip from a James Bond film), the 2CV was in production for an amazing 42 years (1948-1990) with only modest running changes as time went on. All told, 2CV and its descendants' production totaled almost 9 million units. Interestingly, for a car that all but screams "France," I've seen more 2CV's here in Nuremberg than I have in Paris. As a fan of classic cars and sound engineering and design (the innovation and engineering that went into this auto is astonishing), I must confess an affinity for these "Ducklings" and "Tin Snails," as their cult of fans lovingly calls them. It's such an iconic design that modern versions of it are regularly discussed and brought to auto shows. In fact, I even entered a contest (sorry, German residents only) to win a completely restored 2CV. I'll still take a classic Saab any day, but these cars are most intriguing.

This Means Something: Deciphering License Plates

Forgive the sophomoric (freshmanic, even) attempt at humor, but this is as good as any photo to illustrate how to figure out at a glance of where a certain car is from-- because here, we can say stuff like "that car has Berlin plates" with one look. I can tell this particular car is from the neighboring city of Fürth (pronounced "fyrt"), and furthermore, can be certain that it is NOT from the smaller city of the same name/spelling in the neighboring state of Hesse. How? Basically (and there are exceptions-- this is Germany after all), cars registered in large cities have one letter on the far left of the plate, medium sized cities have 2 letters, and smaller cities have 3. So Nuremberg plates all start with "N"; Berlin plates start with "B," Munich plates all start with "M" and so on. Fürth is a city of about 115,000, which puts it squarely in the medium size realm. Next to the 1-2 or 3 letter city code are 2 stickers (click on photo for close up). The top sticker is the registration expiry; the lower sticker is a shield with one of the 16 German states-- in the case of this plate, we see the Bavarian shield so if you don't know what city a car is from, you can figure out the region. To the right of the stickers are a letter and number combination, usually (but not always-- hello? Germany) 2 letters and 3 numbers. Sometimes these have meanings like the outlying areas of a city, but a lot of the time it's randomly generated. Vanity plates can be found but aren't overly common, especially seeing as the city code must be present. An informed source tells me that some folks from Fürth know what they're doing, know their slang, and are having some fun getting one over on the authorities.

The car these plates are attached to is an old Citroën 2CV6, a bit of a cult car, and the French's answer to the VW Beetle. I have some shots of this car from around town, so I'll put those up soon as well.

Mercury Rising

Spied over the entrance to hipster D-bag hell, Club Mojito in Nuremberg is this nice architectural flourish, the winged god Mercury (note the wings on the helmet, a la FTD Florist or early incarnations of comic book legend The Flash). Actually, the older buildings in town all have little touches like this to one degree or another-- if I ever get over my disdain of lugging a camera around all day and the weather starts to behave, I'll start taking more shots like this.

Smart. Very Smart (an occasional series).

Parking in Europe is a bear to begin with; parking in the medieval Altstadt is even worse. I really liked these lockable parking protectors in front of an apartment parking structure. As you can see, a simple padlock fastens this guard in the "open" position so nobody bogards your rare and expensive parking spot; unlocking the lock allows it to fold down so you can drive over and park.

The Coolest Design That Ever Bombed

Behold, the BMW C1 Scooter. I'm seeing less and less of these, but they were all over the place in Paris a couple years ago. What we have is the classic example of an answer to a question that nobody thought to ask: a motor scooter with a roll cage. BMW wanted to offer car-like comfort and safety with the ease and (comparative) low cost of a 2-wheeler for city transport. Despite some truly great and thoughtful engineering-- very much ahead of its time, folks couldn't seem to get over the fact that this was, well, an ugly looking and expensive scooter with a capacity for one person. After 2 years and worldwide sales of about 12,500 units, the program was scrapped in 2002. For a brief recap of the C1, check this out.

Flight Options

I normally don't hawk this sort of thing or overtly shill for products and services, but for our friends and family back home, I'm making an exception. Two pieces of news came up recently that make coming to Europe (and Germany) a little bit easier and hypothetically less expensive.

Effective in October west coast powerhouse Alaska Airlines will code share with Icelandair, and Alaska customers can earn and redeem frequent flier miles on Icelandair. Icelandair, for their part, offer flights to over 20 European cities including Paris, London and Amsterdam via their hub in Reykjavik, Iceland. This may not be the best solution for folks coming here to Nuremberg, seeing as Icelandair's closest destinations are Munich and Frankfurt. However, where there's a will there's a way-- both cities are a train ride away, and in the case of Munich, a mere 28 Euros will get two people from the Munich Airport to about 100 yards from our front door using the excellent German Rail and Nuremberg public transit networks. Icelandair flies to several US cities, but to really take advantage of this arrangement their west coast portal is Seattle.

Air Berlin, now Germany's 2nd largest airline (and Europe's 5th largest) is poised to become a full-fledged member of the Oneworld airline alliance which includes folks like British Air, American Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Quantas. Air Berlin's footprint in Europe is impressive-- we've taken many of our European jaunts using these guys-- and for a "discount airline," it sure doesn't feel like one; it feels no more cut rate than, say JetBlue. As is often the case in these sorts of arrangements, full integration of Air Berlin (and its Austrian subsidiary Air Niki, chaired by former Ferrari Formula One driver Niki Lauda) won't take place until 2012. Despite its impressive roster of airlines, Oneworld has comparatively little penetration to the European market, and regulatory hurdles and boneheaded management (US-based fliers could not earn miles on British Air flights out of America) have hamstrung efforts-- the inclusion of Air Berlin is a very savvy move. The upshot is that I can finally use my American Airlines miles, which have been gathering dust of late-- providing we're still around here in 2012 of course. Air Berlin currently flies to San Francisco, L.A., Vancouver and NYC among other places, and are well worth checking out as their fares are usually extremely competitive.

Wow, Hell Is Getting A Lot Cheaper

Click on photo for close up. In Europe, we use commas to separate the 'dollar' and the cents so these candles (stabkerze) are the Euro version of $2.99. The word "Hell" is just the model name and instead of Hades and brimstone, it means "light." Taken at our local Mömax furniture store-- Germany and Austria's answer to Ikea, and a great source of funny, racy, and frankly a bit NSFW (dubbed into English) commercials too.

You Know It's Spring...

Click on photo to enlarge. Now that we're in the shank of summer here, I found this photo from earlier this year, complete with still-bundled-up Nuremburgers. Center of the photo is this street performer who does only one (admittedly impressive) trick: He balances himself on a wine bottle, and this cat is no spring chicken. When I saw him out and performing, I knew Spring was around the corner-- winter was long and brutal here. Taken on Karolinenstrasse, the main shopping drag in the city.

Live Music Fest

This past weekend B and I were in the throes of whatever latest illness is going around, but we succumbed to cabin fever and walked downtown to check out Nuremberg's Bardentreffen outdoor music festival that was taking place all over the Altstadt. While there were 7 main stages and lots of invited musicians, the real fun lies in the street musicians who all come here as well to strut their stuff. While there is a fair share of more-nerve-than-talent snotnoses doing their thing, we were also treated to tuxedoed classical quartets, folk music, singer-songwriters of all stripes, and some pretty undefinable stuff-- like the garage-zydeco-punk band we saw, or last year's Mongolian duo which featured throat singing. This free festival brings about 200,000 spectators downtown for its 3-day run, and it's very good for local business--in fact these guys were so good for business at Nuremberg's cherished Bratwursthäusle (a restaurant whose roots date back to 1313), that the restaurant even prepared an outside table and dinner for them! This is a must-stop on the busker/street musician circuit, and as a former drummer, I was personally blown away by the prevalent use of the cajon "drum," a combination chair and tiny percussion instrument (and a lot more mobile than a full kit). The photo shows the band Billy Bob Buddha-- stripped down swampy blues mixed with some funny bits--going through their paces, and these guys totally killed. A good street band can make several hundred Euros with one set between tips and CD sales.

For more information on this year's Bardentreffen check here and here and here, and here's a roll of brief YouTube videos from this year's event. Well worth checking out!