Fotograf in Potsdam

Dutch Christmas Market

Every year there is a Dutch chirstmas market in Potsdam, in the Dutch Quarter. It’s a little bit nicer than the normal Christmas maket in Potsdam. There was a old man there making wooden shoes. It was really impressive to watch him. It made me want to buy a pair!

There are more pictures in the gallery.

Christmas in Germany

This weekend Franziska and I went to visit her parents. This was the start of the Christmas season in Germany, as last Sunday was the first day of Advent. I decided to try to take some pictures to sort of capture a small part of what it like to be in Germany for Christmas. Many of the pictures didn’t turn out so great - I was taking some of the picutres at night - and so the shutter speeds are slow and you see the shake of the camera. Normally I’d delete all these blurry shaky ones, but this time I left some of them.

The first series is of a little celebration/ceremony to start the big pyramid spinning in Oelsa. I bought my parents a pyramid for Christmas, and also Dyan. They are kind of candle powered windmills flipped on their sides. The heat from the candle generates some air circulation, which spins the windmill, which makes some Christmas figures go around in a circle. They are very nice. In some of the towns and Christmas markets they have huge windmills with figures that are a few feet tall. These are powered by electricity. Oelsa has a cermony to turn theirs on for the first time each year. There was a trumpet quoir, children’s choir, a speech, gluwein, and bratwurst. It was nice. But it was cold. We went home before they actually turned the thing on.

Then their are pictures of the Christmas markets in Dresden. The regular market is supposed to be the oldest in Germany, and of course therefore the best and nicest. It’s basically a Christmas-themed craft show. There is also an ‘Old Market’, which is kind of a rennaisance-style Christmas market, and this is really nice. The stuff they sell is nicer, and the overall atmosphere makes it really special. I think you should be able to tell which is which!

It seem that most larger places in Germany have a Christmas market, including potsdam. It makes Christmas time a nice time of year here in Germany!

There are more pictures in the gallery.

My new orchid!

For my mom’s birthday I bought her an orchid, along with a book on how to care for them. I found out that although they have some special requirements, some of them are actually supposed to be fairly easy to care for. For some reason I was motivated to see if I could keep one alive.

I bought this one this past weekend in a home-center do-it-yourself place. Amazingly, it only cost about $9! I think this one would have cost around $25-30 in MIchigan. Three flowers are open, with maybe 8 more to come. Will it ever bloom again? Let’s see….

There are more pictures in the gallery.

Riding the Rennsteig

We had a long 4 day weekend coming up, and one of the things we have been thinking about trying is to ride a trail called the Rennsteig which sort of follows the old East/West Germany border. It’s around 200 km long (120 miles) and takes most people between 2-4 days to ride. There was some doubt as to whether or not we could finish it in the 4 days that we had because we haven’t been riding all that much, and the rides are usually no more than 2 hours long. And, we live in the flatlands, but this ride was in the, small, but nevertheless mountains. But, 50 km per day isn’t too much, so we decided to give it a shot.

We drove to Franziska’s grandma’s house on Friday night. She lives pretty close to one end of the trail. In the morning we drove to a place called Hohe Sonne, which is actually 15 km in along the trail from the start, but it was more convenient than going to the actual start, and the truth is that we didn’t think we’d be able to finish the whole thing anyway. We got packed up and took a couple of pictures to mark the start of our trip. We hit the road. I think we started at around 11:30am, which isn’t exactly early. But, it seemed like we had plenty of time. The next days, though, we need to start earlier because of the time change. In principle that’s not really a problem, but since breakfast is typically served at 8am, it’s hard to avoid losing that hour of daylight.

I was a bit demoralized after only a few miles of riding. The bags I was carrying felt really heavy. I wasn’t used to the load. I didn’t think it would be a problem because we were going pretty light, as we planned to sleep in little hotels instead of camping. I was seriously considering turning around after only riding for half an hour. But, Franziska was in a pretty good mood, even though it started to rain. The first day was supposed to be the nice day! We kept spinning those cranks, though, and eventually, we started to make some progress. We rode up to one of the high points of the trip, the Inselsberg, and had a nice view of fog!

We stopped for some lunch in a little shack (literally) which was what we needed to get from 35 km to 55 km, where we would spend the night, in Oberhof. We climbed around 1500 meters total vertical elevation. We ended up with our own little apartment for the night, for only 44 euro, with breakfast. We were pretty tired, but pretty satisfied with our effort. At least we didn’t end up back at the car!

The problem was that it was supposed to be bad weather the next day. Lots of rain and windy. I woke up at 5am to rain and wind, as forecasted. I knew our ride was over. Too bad. But, when we got up at 7:30am, things looked better. The rain stopped. It was windy, but not too bad, for the time being. We decided to give it a shot. We could bail out at a train station after only 15 km, and there was a good place to stop after only 35 km, which might still allow us to finish the next day. The weather turned out pretty well. We passed the train station and the first chance to stop with no problem. We made it to lunch with still no rain. I had some pizza, Franziska had some spaghetti, and we rolled on for the last 20km or so for our second and last night. We made around 75 km the second day.

We found another nice place to stay, we were the only guests, except for some family and friends that were in town visiting. I thought the food was pretty good… beef with gravy and dumplings. We were up the next morning at 7:30am, for breakfast at 8am. Today was expected to be a relatively short day. We hoped that we could make it to the 12:38pm train at the end. We figured we had about 40 km or so of riding to go, and, it should be downhill for the most part. The weather was a bit chilly, but no rain. Everything went as planned, and we took some fairwell photos at the end of the Rennsteig. We were both amazed that we made it. Twice it just seemed like there was no way we would finish. But, we pushed on, and the bad weather stayed away for the most part.

It turned out, though, that we weren’t quite done yet… we still had a 3 hour train ride ahead of us, and still some significant climbing to get from the train station, back up the mountain, to where our car was parked. But, we made it, even though we were pretty tired. We finished in 3 days, by the way, so now we had an extra day to relax! The riding was pretty nice. It was mostly dirt backroads and double track, but this was fine by me as it wasn’t much fun to ride bumpy trails with the bags I was carrying. If I did it again, and I would, I would go in the summer when you can carry even less gear. Then maybe it could be done with two backpacks instead of extra bags. Ok - over and out! Enjoy the pictures!

There are more pictures in the gallery.

Yes! I’d like to meet Robert for coffee, especially since he’s buying!

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