Schloß und Schlauch

The opening of the Schloß-Arkaden in Braunschweig has been all of the talk at work. One colleague actually went this morning before work (the Grand Opening was a six this morning), he was able to give us his opinions during Kaffeepause. He was not particularly impressed, but, he grew up in Braunschweig and is very, very, touchy about everything that changes the landscape of the city (cityscape). Hence, he is predisposed towards prejudice.

The Schloß-Arkaden is a huge shopping mall, that has been built near the site of the old Braunschweiger Schloß of Heinrich der Löwe, which was destroyed during the War. The most exciting thing about the new Schloß is that it is an actual reproduction of the original structure, and uses some of the original stone, I think. Another key thing is that, in diverging from general German practice, the mall will be open all weekend. And by all, I mean all. As far as I can tell, the mall will be open from Friday all the way through until Sunday. This includes the night, which they have been advertising as Moonlight Shopping (yes, in English) since at least the beginning of February.

I will eventually get down to that part of town and take a picture for you, but I will wait for all of the fervour to die down. I was taking a bus that went by there yesterday (on the way to a basketball game, more on that later) and there was a huge amount of traffic and people in the area. *

The basketball game: It was the New Yorker Phantoms Braunschweig versus Ratiopharm Ulm and the reason I was there was that the International Office got free tickets.

The Braunschweig side has such a lovely name because one of the richest men in town is the owner of a quite successful clothing store name New Yorker. Let's just say that I do not think anyone (bar of the Dominatrix/Brothel/Goth set) would be caught dead in any of the outfits that I have seen advertised around town, but, after a little tooling around their website, I guess that I can say that the rest of their clothing seems be a little more main stream. Anyway, as you can guess, the Phantoms part of the name follows from that. The have an incredibly silly looking mascot, which is a guy dressed as a 'phantom': ie. in a black muscle-y outfit with a black cape and a white mask. I tried to find a picture, but I was unsuccessful in my attempt. I nearly died of laughter when I first saw him. Add that to the Phantom of the Opera music and the fact that Phantom was a memorable part of my senior year in high school (band trip to NYC, including seeing the musical on Broadway... not to brag or anything.) and I was dying.

Other than the hokey mascot, the game went well. At least, it did go well, until two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, when Braunschweig was up by at least ten. We will just suffice to say that once we hit overtime, it was looking like an interesting mirror to the Tar Heel's loss to Georgetown on Sunday. Or so I hear, since I was not privileged to watch that particular game as noted in a previous post.

And now it is time for me to got to bed, since staying up late on the Internet is no way to kill my sleep deprivation-- the presence of which I am not sure of, since I get at least eight hours of sleep a night. (Yay flex time and nothing else to do with my life.) Hopefully tomorrow my bike will be fixed. (Yet another flat tire, this time the back one. So completely dead that I had to go and buy a new inner tube-- Schlauch auf Deutsch, that word has a nice roundness to it...) I had the tools and other necessities to fix it to-day (except for the colleague from whom I am borrowing the bicycle and the one who does the fixes), but I was too chicken to try to do it myself, since I have never taken the back tire off of a bike before, and, knowing my luck, I would have killed it. Forever. And, as old as it is, it does not deserve the fate that is me trying to fix things. I know what you are thinking: 'Isn't this girl majoring in engineering?'. Answer: 'Yes, but there is a reason why I did not choose mechanical, and remember: I am not fixing the aeroplanes and space ships, I am just designing them. And there are IT guys who can fix the computers.'

Countdown to London: Four days.

* Update 01.04.2007: Here is an artists rendition that I found online, the foreground being the Schloß and the hinter-part being the rest of the shopping mall.

How to make WET into WEST (other than adding an 'S')

Spring has finally sprung here. Hopefully it will last. Along with it has come Summer Time (a much better name than Daylight Savings Time, if you ask me). So, for you edification, the following is a list of time differences between some key locations and me:

-Greenwich Mean Time (Universal Coordinated Time): +2 hours
-Purdue (Eastern Daylight Savings Time): +6 hours.
-Minnesota/Houston (Central Daylight Savings Time):+7 hours.
-Colorado (Mountain Daylight Savings Time): +8 hours.
-Arizona (Mountain Standard Time = Pacific Daylight Savings Time): +9 hours.
-Kuala Lumpur: -6 hours.

The other thing that I like about Summer Time is that it turns WET into WEST (Western European Time —> Western European Summer Time).

Also, I have finally gotten my pictures uploaded to a site where you can look at all of them at your pleasure: Lots of random shots of random things—typical me photography. In this case, it is probably a good thing I decided to be an engineer, instead of a professional photographer. Hopefully at least one or two of the pictures is good enough that your time was not wasted looking at them. Some of the pictures you have seen already (like the first half of the Nature album and most of the Braunschweig album), but many are new; including the Berlin album and the second half of the Nature album, pictures along the Oker which I took this afternoon.

No more streaming basketball for me since CBS only streams the first three rounds, which makes me sad, but is much better for my sleeping habits. Crazy Carolina game the other night—I was up until 05:15 at least they pulled it out and won. Florida is currently leading the Oregon Ducks. Hopefully this game is the reverse of their other ones (trailing until mid-second half and then picking up their play enough to win the game), and they lose. UNC plays Georgetown tonight. I am wearing my Carolina shirt in support.

Countdown to London: 9 days.

How to exit the building.

This might not be the more in depth that I promised last time, but what can you do? I had a great long weekend with my father. He was here from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday morning. We spent Monday in Berlin. It was great fun. I will post some of the pictures I took sometime this weekend. Sunday and Tuesday we spent wandering around Braunschweig, including the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum—the local art museum, which, if my memory serves me, is one of the oldest art museums in Europe and houses quite a few lovely paintings from the Dutch Masters period (1600’s to late 1700’s), including some Rembrandts. They also have a gallery with a huge amount of porcelain and other pottery objects. (Grandma and Grandpa: Fürstenberg porcelain in the Rococo style.)

Oh yes, happy belated Spring. The weather here decided to gift us with about six centimetres of snow and then cold, cold rain for the first two days of spring. However, the weather is looking gorgeous for the next week, getting back up into the fifties and sixties.

More travel updates: I have gotten in touch with my friend in Scotland, and she will be in London on Monday week, so I have booked a flight and will meet her there. (I am going to England! Finally!) I will stay for just over a week, which will include Easter Sunday; I am hoping that I will be able to go to my first Easter Service since going to university at one of the great Cathedrals. If any one has some suggestions about day trips out of the city, let me know.

There was just a knock on the door (quite unusual, since I have few visitors, and those that do come, I know are coming, and they generally call me before hand), and there stood a pizza delivery guy who was having some trouble exiting the building. There is a small trick to getting out; you have to turn the handle before you push the door and not just push like a normal door. Anyway, this guy could not figure it out and came around asking for help. I do not know if my door was the first he tried, or if he had gone down the other hall way, but I guess that is what I get for being one of the only people living on the ground floor.

I am looking forward to staying up basically all night to watch basketball. Carolina plays at three in the morning my time. I did not stay up last night to watch the games (had to go to work), but I am sort of sad that I did not, since the two South-bracket games were only won by one point and Kansas only bear Southern Illinois by three. Too bad the Vols lost. Oh well, better luck next time. Hopefully tonight’s games will prove to be just as good.

That is all I have to say for now, but I will post those pictures this weekend. Go Carolina!

Untitled

It has been quite a while since I last wrote. This is mostly because it has been sort of crazy. So, I will give you a short recap:
-- New computer is now up and running with internet. I am really liking it. I am also more impressed with Windows Vista than I was expecting to be. Not liking Internet Explorer 7 as much though.
-- Posters arrived in the mail last weekend, while I was out rowing, and then the Post managed to loose the package until they finally found it on Friday.
-- Dad arrived yesterday, we had a great time in Braunschweig today, and we will spend the day in Berlin tomorrow.
-- Crewing three day a week until the semester starts after Easter.
-- Amazing weather last week, but it got typical German nasty (like it was when I first got here) yesterday. Just in time for Dad to get here. As I said, typical.
-- Carolina has been cruising through the bracket, with some great play.
-- Purdue has just lost in the second round, but they played a great game against Florida, and were ahead for most of the game, until they pulled a typical Purdue and lost it towards the end of the second half. Overall it was good game and will give the team something to build on for next year.
So, there is a recap of the last ten days or so. Sorry it was so short; things have not been particularly interesting. Later this week, I will sit down and write a little more in depth. I promise.

Water in Various Forms.

It continues to rain here, but not as much as before. Instead of it raining all day, we get scattered rain showers. Shortly after I left work this afternoon, the sky opened up in a veritable deluge. Before I was out of the security gates, I was soaked and getting pelted with what felt like hail. (It probably was not hail, but there was a very, very heavy head wind, driving the rain into face.) If you remember from three sentences ago, I said that these where scattered showers, so, as I was being drowned, I also had sun glaring in my eyes. This made me think: sun, rain… rainbow? So, I stopped my bike and turned around. And, lo and behold, there was one of the most gorgeous full-arc, double rainbows that I have ever seen; a brilliant double rainbow against a dark cloudy sky. I wish that I had had my camera. But I did not. So you, and I, will have to do with my description of it.

And that was just the beginning of my adventure. I found out that the crew team here gets together a couple times a week for strength training and a little water time on the weekend. Strength training happens on Tuesdays, so I decided that I would check out the way to the boathouse. The greater Braunschweig area is laid out like a wheel (the main city of Braunschweig) with a bunch of spokes (the main roads) ending in, or following along, little Stadtteils (which the dictionary defines as quarters, like the French quarter of New Orleans, but I would say that they are more like satellites). Basically, they are little towns that function inside the city of Braunschweig. I live along one of the spokes, the airport is at the end of that spoke, and the boathouse, which is in Thune, is at the end of the next spoke counter-clockwise around the city centre. I thought that I had figured out a way to get from work to the boathouse, using one of the outer ring connexion roads. Unfortunately, the way I chose did not have a bike line, and I was not about to ride my bike on the edge of a narrow two lane road. So, I decided to turn around, and go the way I might take if I were coming from home, which cuts through some farm land/ wildlife preserve to the next spoke. I was able to find my way through a neighbourhood to the spoke, and started following it out of town. Unfortunately, at one point I continued following the main route (which curved to the port on the Kanal), instead of going straight, like I was supposed to. This was not a huge problem, I made it to my goal (after going quite out of my way—think taking one leg and the hypotenuse of a triangle, instead of taking the other leg—and heading through industrial/car sales area of the Hafen). From there (it has been an hour since I left work) I made my way home in less than thirty minutes, along the way I was supposed to have come in the first place. After all of this excitement, I decided that I will take the bus, at least in the evening, when it is likely to be dark, since the lamp on my bike has broken, again. The reason I did not just decide to take the bus in the first point is that the bus takes even longer to get from one point to the other, because you have to take one spoke down, take the street car, then get on another bus up the other spoke. But, since bus and streetcar riding is free, I will take that route when I go out there in the evening.

If you happened to miss the basic message in that long paragraph, I do not blame you. Here it is: CREW!! WATER!!

In case you really would like to know what I am doing around here, other than taking long bicycle tours of the northern section of the city and breaking electrical equipment, I will let you know that I went downtown on Saturday and bought some books. (I am quite excited: The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury, as you can probably tell, it is a Dan-Brown-esque religous-y thriller. Dublin by Edward Rutherford, when I got it, I thought that I had only read part of one of his other books (The Princes of Ireland), but, evidently this is actually the book of which I read the first couple chapters—same book, different name? Needles to say, I hope that I get a little farther this time. And, last but not least, Watching the English by Kate Fox. This is a book that I am very excited about, it is an amusing recount of a modern day anthropologic study on the English people—what make the English different from other groups of people.) I looked at some posters and decided that I was really not into any more Lord of the Rings poster, or any Pirates poster, and especially not any posters of nearly (mostly) naked women (if you have been into the room of any college aged male, you know what kind of poster I mean). That prompted me to go online that evening and find some quite excellent (and quite cheap for being shipped from Raleigh, North Carolina) posters of football players. With the help of the Once and Future Flatmate, I was able to pare it down to three posters: The Pride of England, depicting six of England’s best footballers; a poster of Michael Ballack, a German national who plays for Chelsea; and, an excellent poster comprising mostly of the bare torso of David Beckham. You did not seriously think that I would buy football posters with out getting one of Becks did you? Well, I almost did not, but, for nefarious purposes of our own, we decided that this one had to be purchased—it was also cheaper than a picture of Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Tim Henman, or any of the rowing related posters. The online store (which touts itself as the largest poster store in the world) actually had a few Twins posters: of Corey Koskie, Joe Mays and A. J. Pierzynski—none of which actually played for the Twins for at least two or three seasons. No wonder they were on sale for about five bucks. (They also had a poster of Doug Mientkiewicz, but it was after he caught the last out of the winning game of the World Series for the Red Sox.) With all of this online ordering, I will let you know that both the posters and my new computer should be here by the end of the week, or early next week at the very latest.

Soapbox: Enterprise High School

This has to do with the tornado at Enterprise High School in Alabama. I am really tired of hearing people say that it is the school's fault. Here is my opinion:

The school did exactly what any other school would do when it kept the students at the school. Every school policy that I have known, the school is more likely to keep students longer than send them home early when severe weather is threatened. This is due to many facts; working parents, transportation, etc. I agree completely with the school in its decision, because, in general, it probably was safer for the students to stay at the school. How were the administration supposed to know that the tornado will come right over their school? They had no possible way to know this. And how could they know that the storm would strike in such a way that would damage the structural integrity of the building? Again, they had no way to foresee this. As I heard one student say, on NPR, he probably would not have heeded the storm warnings if he had been at home. Hence, he was, in principle, safer at school than at home.

It is a tragic event, and I have strongest sympathies for the students that lived through it, for their families and the families of the eight who did not live through it, for the teachers, and for the entire town of Enterprise, Alabama, but the school administration should not be blamed for this catastrophic occurrence. If anyone needs to be blamed, blame the Jet Stream and the particular mixture of elements that made it possible for the violent storms of last week to take place.