HOORAY

Photos now on my computer! I'm afraid this will be a rather long entry, with number of themes, but you can take your time with it as there won't be another before Christmas at least.

Here firstly is a shot of me at the Olympic Stadium with one of Sherees friends. I can't remember which one she was though... :(

Sabrina (Derek's girlfriend) and I at the Berlin Wall remnant on Potsdamer Platz.

This is the Holstentor which leads into Luebeck. The city is nicely situated on a quasi-island, so there aren't to many ways to get in. This Tor is pretty famous actually, and featured on a limited edition set of coins (WOOT), like all of the towers in Luebeck these are crooked. The island is basically sand, so everything sinks.

A lovely little Luebeckian street we walked along during our two hour city tour. On the right hand side is a 600 year old wine merchant.

The main church, it was basically destroyed in WW2, and then rebuilt but they left the churchbells smashed on the floor as a reminder.

See, smashed bells....

Other than that, we had lunch at a restaurant where I had Luebeck style fish and potatoes, we went to the Buddenbrooks Haus (does the name Thomas Mann ing any bells?), went up the steeple of the St Paulus church, and bought marzipan. OMG, they make the best marzipan!

Now here is Dana on the train to Dresden. The train was pretty ancient, but it was travelling onto Hungary, and for some reason they don't send the good trains there... There is light outside the window, which means it must be somewhere around 8:30 am. We arrived in Dresden just after 9:00.

Here it is, the lovely Dresden as seen from the Augustinerbrucke. It was soooooo cold that morning. My hands and cheeks physically hurt. If it had rained then we would have had snow.

This wave shows how high the 2002 floods were, Dana provides a good comparison.

The first buildings you come across as you enter the Dresden Altstadt from the Neustadtare the catholic church and the Schloss (castle).

We spent the large part of the morning at an art exhibition, which had been a large part of the impetus to visit Dresden when we did. I saw 6 real Kandinsky paintings, and a whole room full of Klee! In the afternoon we went out to the Grosse Garten (big garden) and saw the Jagdschloss (hunting palace)

There is also the most gorgeous little narrow gauge railway there, but it only runs during the summer months.

Check out this old DDR mural. They certainly knew how to do a mural. It needs a bit of a clean up, but is otherwise a fantastic testimony to all things socialist.

The Christmas Market in Dresden is the oldest in all of Germany. I was a little dissappointed with it though. Too much of the same old stuff you find at every christmas market. Still, they must be doing something right to be still getting that many people attending in their 572nd year.

The Deutsches Hygiene Museum, i know it sound's really weird, but it was actually really cool. They had an exhibt on the medical ideologies and experimentation of the Nazis, as well as the standard exhibit. We spent about four hours in there. My feet were killing me.

TRADAH! Here it is. The Frauenkirche. Ain't she pretty? It's sooo gorgeous on the inside too. I only took the one photo inside, cos we weren't really allowed to take any at all. They broadcast the weekly service there on the tv here though. SO i can have my fill of godliness from home in my pj's.

The I.C.E., my train out of the newly renovated Dresden Hauptbahnhof. Much nicer than the train to Dresden. We had to change trains in Leipzig, so i've spent all of 45 mins there. They have a nice train station...

I was going to do another proper entry today with Luebeck etc, but i forgot to bring my camera with me. I also forgot to mention in my last entry that I went to the Olympic stadium Tuesday before last.

Until I remember to bring the photo files to write a proper entry, please enjoy this photo of the Olympic village I did not get a chance to do a tour of.

No pictures today, just a boring little post.
I need to upload photos from my trip to Luebeck, so i won't say anything about that trip except mmmmm Lecker.
What have i been up to? To be honest I'm struggling to answer that question. I went to see Flushed away with my friend Derek on Saturday night. He doesn't really trust his german very much, so we went to see it in english. I'm kinda glad we did though, the accents were really cool. The jokes about germans being really bad at soccer brought the house down.
Derek's girlfriend Sabrina went home on Friday morning. On Thursday evening I took her to one of the art museums on Museum Island cos Derek had a migrane. Lots of really cool old art, I saw the Thinker from Rodin (again), the Dornauszieher (boy pulling thorn out of foot) (i know you probably dont know what that is, but its really cool to me), some Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Ceyzane (I can"t remember how to spell these french names), and heaps more too. We spent a large part of the night being really critical. No Kandinsky, Marc or Macke to make me happy, and Sabrina has similar taste to me. It was all fairly dark, where we wanted colour. She started it though, I was trying to be nice to the artists. Afterwards I took her out to Potsdamer Platz cos she'd spent a month in Berlin and not taken any photos of the wall. Derek was feeling better by this time, so he came and met us and took her out to Warschauerstrasse where I'd told them about the East Side Gallery. It's an open air gallery on a couple of kilometres of the remaining wall. Graffiti artists just come and use a space, which in a few days or weeks will then be painted over by someone else. I think it was on Race Around the World once. I didn't go with them cos I've seen it before, and also had to get up really early on Friday for my trip to Luebeck, details of which will come later.
Spent a fairly quiet day at home yesterday, I had some reading to catch up on, plus Der kleine Eisbaer (the little polar bear) was on tv, it's so cute. Might have to get the DVD before i come home.

So, I got to do an interview with this guy:
Youri Ziffer, 20 y.o. Goalie of the Berlin Eisbaeren. A really nice guy, and one heck of a hockey player. Completely saved the game on Sunday, as he often does. And i even coped with his Bavarian accent! This photo doesn"t do him justice, bit of a cutie really...


This is really a fairly random shot of the game on Sunday, but you can see Ziffzer in the goals. You may notice the scores are tied at 2 all, and the timer is set at 0:00. This shot is therefore taken at the beginnin of extra time, which then led onto a penalty shootout. The Eisbaeren won 3:2, thanks to the stylings of one Herr Andy Roach, and the quick hands of Youri Ziffzer. Ingolstadt, the opposition, are ranked number 1 on the ladder.
Enough ice hockey though. I'm sure you're all getting rather tired of ice hockey photos. It's not the same as being there.
I went up the Fernsehturm, finally. Had a beautiful day weatherwise, and not much to do, plus i was already near Alexanderplatz, cos I was returning from my interview. So here are some photos of Berlin from above.

Unfortunately the glass is so horribly dirty (they can hardly step out to clean the outside at 203.72 metres), which makes everything look overcast. As stated above, this was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.





That evening I went to the International Club offices to make an Adventskranz (christmas wreath). Here are some of the other ladies putting on the finishing touches.

And of course my pride and joy, my Adventskranz, looking lovely all lit up with candles back at my apartment in Lichterfelde. Isn't it pretty! So easy to make too.

I went out to Spandau to visit the old Olympic Village from the 1936 games on Saturday. Also an International Claub activity. Unfortunately the lady who was supposed to be giving us our tour didn't show up, so she didn't get our money, and we just had to look through the fence. The Club is ropeable, it was very embarrassing for them to have brought 30 people all the way out there just to look through a fence. Got a nice bit of excersize in walking to it though, plus i saw wild deer, and there were mole hills! I didn't actually see a mole, you rarely do, but at least i knew they were there, and hey, deer!