Peter's Blog

The bad boyz of Baden-Württemberg...lets get this Road Trip started!

Friday afternoon.

Katerina had a hard week, can you tell?

Picking up Katerina from Medical School in Frankfurt am Main, the banking capital of the Germany and the European Union. Katerina had to do a particularly nasty autopsy this week.

Julie. Our beautiful, talented and resourceful hostess for the weekend. Water treatment engineer for a company in Delft.

We arrived at midnight at the same time as the bus from Paris. Its raining in Holland...big surprise.

Happy greetings and hugs all around. After a year apart!

Its midnight, so lets get this party started.

This is AWESOME!!! Everyone is together again!

Why is it that my old German roomate Ole, from Hamburg, always speaks in French at parties? He was our Glen Forrest in house computer programmer, IT guy and had the distinguished title of not missing a single international party in Waterloo for 12 months!

Ole sporting his english hunting vest.

Kevin and Vivien, the french guys are shakin up this night club in Delft. Kevin is a computer scientist from Paris and Vivien is from the South of France and studies Engineering Physics.

The next morning in Delft. Caro is an Chemical engineer working for an Oil Company (ie the dark side) in Paris. We bonded during a terribly difficult graduate statistics course at U Waterloo, and came out laughing.

Delft Town Hall and central Market square

What did Julie's apartment look like with 18 people? I sat outside most of the time. Late at night I thought this could be symbolic of a genuine difference between Europeans and North Americans. 400 years ago when it got too crowded in Europe and people were dying of the plague all over the place from over crowding, some of us had the good sense to get out! Just as a side note there were no cases of the plague reported at Julie's this weekend.

Kevin, Philip and Christian in the Amsterdam main train Station

Ready to rock Amsterdam! Saturday afternoon.

This is one of my favourite buildings in Amsterdam.

Canal in Amsterdam, you wouldn't want to swim in it, but it is beautiful nonetheless (trotzdem).

Group picture in Amsterdam.

Christina, Arne and Kevin. Arne forgot his camera somewhere.

Rebecca, Wolfgang, Katerina and Christian. Catching up with the rest of us who took the train to Amsterdam. They drove and had to park three cities away in... Belgium I think.

Dutch style buildings in Amsterdam. I dont know how they would ever close those windows if a storm came. They seem rather impractical to me, but quaint.

18 of us in a restaraunt on the Singel canal. Prost, Zum Wohl, Sante, Cheers.

Saturday night.

Roop and Willem
She is the other Canadian in the group. We could talk about BBQs and hockey and Toronto, and complain about all the smoke in the air together. Love the person...hate the smoke!

Julie you rock! Awesome rib dinner for 11 Euros...i dont know what that green stuff is, maybe it is to feed the ducks on the canals?

Thats Philip. Aka The Independant! He grew up in both Germany and France so he totally fluent in each, he is even a pretty good skater so he would make a good Canadian. Right now he is an aerospace engineer with Airbus in Toulose, France.

Roomates forever (or as long as we have cable TV). Delft, sunday afternoon.

Eating a whole herring with onions, but no vinegar...i thought it needed something else...

Two different reactions...Willem thought it was really not bad, I thought it tasted and felt like a tube of raw fish tooth paste

So Roop finished mine off

I really didn't feel well afterwards

Group Picture in Delft

Christian, Christina, Rebecca, Caro, Julie, Fabi, Vivien, Philip, Kevin

Ole, Peter, Christian, Arne, Roop, Willem

If the dutch know anything, they know how to deal with water! They get their drinking water from the Rhine River, build canals throughout the country for recreation, sanitation and beauty, and are continually fighting off the North Sea from re-consuming 2/3 of their (already crowded) country

Katerina, Wolfgang and Herr Stamm, Sunday night

The Stamms took good care of these recovering party cats from Holland. They fed us delicious German food and over the dinner table we squeezed in a couple interesting German history and European architecture lessons from Mr. Stamm.

The Stamm bros. out for a drink in Bergisch Gladbach after dinner. (OK guys I know it wasnt Bergisch Gladbach, but close by) (ok Jüngs, ich weiß genau es war nicht Bergisch Gladbach, aber in der Nähe)

What you see from the windows of the Hauptbahnhof (train station) in Köln (Cologne)

ahhh Monday morning with a cappuccino in front of the Cologne Cathedral!

North and South towers of the Cathedral

South tower and facade of the Kölner Dom. There was some light restoration work going on while we were there. That was nothing compared to what you sometimes see at churches, thank goodness. I read that hundreds of people died during the construction of a big cathedral like this. As well as the money involved, I guess you could conclude that people had a lot of faith then.

The Rhine River, rises from the mountain glaciers of Switzerland and flows 1,320 km to the North Sea in Rotterdam, Holland. This picture was taken from 157 m above the square in the southern church tower. The northern one had an elevator but was closed!

Elegant gothic spires around the main knave of the Cathedral. Fortunately, WWII bombings missed the building, only knocking off the top part of one of the main towers.

Christian is a former roomate from the summer of 2004 in Waterloo. Now doing his Phd in making really cool robots at the University of Karlsruhe! That's all I got out of it, but i saw some matrices on the black board in his office. He also plays saxaphone in a big band (as in "Big Band"..not just a big band, although they are that as well)

Rhine river flowing north. I think I can see some Salmon in there! There is a lot of excitement among Germans that Salmon have come back to the Rhine and the Elbe Rivers, after years of imposing strict rules on pollution. Since I have spent all of my time in Germany at Scientific Institutes, it could be this excitement is particular my lunch time tables.

Looking west over Karsruhe, Germany accross the Rhine River graben (geologically active valley) to the mounains of France

Fortress in Baden Baden where Wolfgang works...ok he doesnt work at the fortress, that would be way cool! He works for Luk, an autamotive company doing his Phd in theoretical mechanical engineering. In particular he studies how to model frictrion using computer models. Fascinating and impenetrably complex to me, but thats why they pay him the big bucks!

Pisa aint the only thing leaning in Europe. This Delft church was first started in 1200 AD.

From the left, Vivien, Philip, Rebecca, Ole, Fabi, Wolfgang, Katerina, Christian Shacht, Karo, Julie, Peter, Christian Simonidis.

Missing from picture but present in Delft are Kevin, Arne, Christina.

Missing from Picture are Jens who was at his Godfather meeting in the Bavarian Mafia and Fred, overworking himself in Strasburg for too little money.

Here is a glance at the beautiful city of Delft in Holland where we had our 2nd University of Waterloo, Columbia Lake Townhouses international student-click reunion.

Friends came from all over France and Germany to converge on Julie's apartment in downtown Delft. Toulose, Paris, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart were some of the places people came from. Altogether there were 18 of us mostly sleeping on the floor of Julie's aparment or apartments of very kind Dutch friends of hers.

After 12 hours on the road we arrived in Delft at midnight and the party was just getting started. We went to a pub for a couple hours to talk and then to a shady disco playing 60s rock music, hard rock and euro-techno dance music. Odd combination, but no one cared about the music or the fact that we were the only ones dancing. When there are 18 of you that is enough no matter how dead the place was! After the disco closed at 5 am we went back to Julie's apartment and most stayed up late talking, while some tried to sleep...hah good luck!

The topics of conversation until 7 am in on Saturday morning included what's up with you since I saw you almost 2 years ago? French, German and English tongue twisters (as the only native English speaker I could only come up with "she sells sea shells down by the sea shore"). And my personal favourite "Where is a Starbucks in this town"?

Saturday morning didnt happen.

Saturday afternoon we went to Amsterdam to walk around and around the circuits of canals in this beautiful and tasteful city. It was a little hard to fit 18 people into cafes and restaraunts but we managed fine. On Saturday evening Julie wrangled the manager of a restaraunt down from around 20 to 11 Euros for a great dinner for everyone, in Holland, as in North America, volume is cheaper. Speaking of this phenomenom I bought a 1.5 L fanta drink in the Delft train station for 1.5 Euros. I didn't need 1.5 L of pop but, the 300 ml size costs 2 Euros...go figure?

Everyone was a little more tired and drained of energy on Saturday night. So we went to a disco with a live band and danced a little but left early around 2 am to take the train back to Delft. Sitting in the train station for 45 min in Amsterdam some of us played the game "I'm going on a trip and I'm packing in my suitcase....". Some of the objects in the suit case included a Sneltrain (fast train in Dutch), a prosthetic foot, a bottle of nano-robots, a pair of rattlesnake-skin cowboy boots and blue prints for a ski lift.

Sunday morning didnt happen.

Sunday afternoon we walked around the canals and shops in Delft. I tried eating whole, raw heiring with Willem and Roop, a special dutch tradition. Went to cafes and took pictures of churches that had been there a long long time. In late afternoon we parted ways and I went to Köln (Cologne) to stay with Wolfgang's parents in the neighbouring willage of Bergisch Gladbach. The next day we went around the inner city of Köln taking dozens of pictures of the famous Cologne Cathedral. The construction of this cathedral began in 1350 and continued until 1850 or so. 500 years! I thought a Phd was a lot of work. It is at once massive and elegant, and entirely in the gothic style. Before Gothic, churches were bulky and had small windows but because of the addition of supporting buttresses the walls could be made thin and the windows large so that much light could stream into the church through stain glass windows. These multi-coloured windows told stories from the bible or from the last 2000 years of church history in Europe. We climbed the tower to a height of 157 m up a spiral stair case, so the height was dizzying in two ways. From the top we had a great view of Cologne and the Rhein river making its way north to the Ocean 350 km away in Rotterdam, Holland.

Wolfgang's parents fed us well and we were actually able to sleep in beds! Awesome!

Monday night Wolfgang, Christian and I dropped off Katerina in Frankfurt and went back to good old Baden-Württemberg, my home state for a few months. I checked out Karlsruhe on Tuesday after staying with Christian, and then headed back to home sweet home Stuttgart on the train.

And now I have to get some work done!

Giddy up!

Stuttgart Kickers, Regional Soccer League, TV tower behind Waldau Stadium

Stuttgart was full of excitement this weekend with lots of different things to do with friends. Sabine and Julia and I spent Saturday together going to the Zoo and then to the city wide Culture Night, where different, musical, theatrical and artistic venues were staged throughout Stuttgart. We started out at the house of Architecture with some photography and cool modern 3D artwork with projected lights and mellow music. After that we went to the kulturwerk (Culture Work) where there were some impromptu skits, hilarious, even if I didn’t understand everything. After that went to a weird hall where guys were smoking with bongs on Persian carpets and a lonely guitar player was singing to a mostly empty room, good music anyway, Sabine felt sorry for him. Next I went to a dramatic poetry and literature reading with Julia and Bettina. It was very dramatic with this eccentric bald poet yelling at his audience, but Julia didn’t think it was very poetic (I wasn’t in a position to comment naturally since it was all in German). Next we went to a really packed bar where a band was belting out da funk. Then around 2 pm we ended up in a funky student bar, wrapping up the night with a couple of Radlers (7up and beer mixed).

We might have been the only fans that weren't soccer hooligans at this game! Germans are passionate Soccer fans!

The Wilhelma Zoo

Julia and Sabine at the Zoo

Papugai

Hey, give me my camera back!

Mugshot

This guy didn't make it to the South Pole with all the other Penguins this year

Culture Night in Stuttgart

I loved these 180 vertical degree photographs

Grand Canal in Venice

The house of Architecture, Stuttgart

Impromptu comedic acting and singing. I thought this guy looked like Drew Carrey.

Unwinding after Culture night with a Radler in a cool bar

Bettina and Julia

Trip to Bad Urach in the Schwäbisch Alb

The next day I took the train around the countryside south of Stuttgart and ended up on the edge of a very steep hilly region known as the Schwäbisch Alb. I found a castle and climbed up it pretending I was a Germanic warrior attacking the Romans around 500 AD (no really I did!). Maybe if I write another amateur novel I can incorporate this. Although it was a steep hard climb (nothing compared to Switzerland) I was totally rewarded by what I found. The castle was quite large at one time, with impressive, thick fortifications surrounding it. I tried to scale a wall for fun, like Robin Hood, but realized I left my grappling hook at home. All the while I was trying to figure out how that student health insurance plan I have works just in case. I wasn’t sure if it covers evacuations from medieval castles on mountainsides, you have to read the fine print! The inner courtyard was very serene with some trees, an old well (attesting to the importance of groundwater in ancient cultures), and one wall still standing. It occurred to me how strategic that well was to the defences of the castle, and how difficult it would have been for them to bore through 300 m of limestone bedrock to (where I guessed) the water table. This water supply would have allowed the people in the castle to water crops and animals within the walls perhaps too. It could also not be cut off or poisoned by the enemies from the outside since it drew water from deep within the mountain. No wonder they went through the trouble to dig so far down. At this point in thought, I was a little inspired about my master’s research. A reliable water supply is vital, so vital that all the walls, weapons and wealth in that castle would be futile without it.

Limstone Cliffs behind Bad Urach