Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts

Monday, September 5, 2011

Wishing Fleischmanns a Speedy Recovery

The charming Catskills village of Fleischmanns, where we spent a fantastic holiday a few years back, was swamped by the hurricane last week. Mountain creeks took over everything and the people are busy cleaning up, repairing, refurbishing. I hope they will soon again be able to welcome the tourists on whom they depend. It is such a charming town, and I wish them all the best.

Here a video of what Irene did there:

Fleischmanns NY - The Day After Irene - August 29th 2011 from VeccVideography on Vimeo.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Lighthouse

The lighthouse perched on the Dornbusch rise on our beloved island of Hiddensee blinked us a farewell as our cruise ship sailed off into the night from Rügen to return to Kiel this morning. Now we're home and filled with enjoyment and elation!

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Baltic Cruise

The first day out of Kiel was at sea, we roamed the ship and never had a boring moment, are still on Tuesday finding new nooks and crannies to sit or look that we hadn't discovered before.
Riga was covered with a guided walking tour of the old town, and our guide Aja could explain everything. It is a beautiful town, even if the landing was at a lumberyard dock.
Tallin was the third day, and we "did" it on our own. It is even more beautiful than Riga, has a Russian Orthodox cathedral where the worship and standing ceremony evidently never stops. The only thing ugly was a strange concrete bunker like step construction from the foot of the old town's hill out to the harbor. No one wanted to explain it to us, until the vendor of juniper boxes at the ship was willing to talk about it in English. It was an over-dimensioned concert hall built by the Soviets that no one liked and that was abandonned with independence. The massive concrete is too expensive, till now, for anyone to invest in demolition.
St. Petersburg is glorious, if faded at the edges. The first day, with a walking tour, was tiring, as it is vastly laid out. Our guide Anja was an extremely proud St. Petersburger and set a walking pace nearing a trot, but otherwise we would have never covered everything in the allotted time. She was also our guide on the second day for a boat tour through the canals and on the grand river Neva, as well as to the original fortress of Peter the Great, where the Church of Peter and Paul stands with its long gilded spire and all Czars since Peter are buried.
Helsinki is ok, small, we've already walked it, quaint, some nice buildings, a beautiful main square with a giant Lutheran cathedral, but we are already back at 10:30 am local time on the ship and I'm trying to take the time to organize photos for further upload and to make these first notes about our cruise.



To sum it up: WE ARE HAVING A FABULOUS AND LUXURIOUS TIME!
(The photos of the ship scattered in among the sightseeing pix and the sunsets and sunrises from ship board might give you a hint...)

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Island Reality

This island is so much more than a possibility, with fog and sun and sand and cliffs and friends and smiles and skies so blue and hazes so dense you can't see the lighthouse yesterday that you climb up and oversee the whole island from today. Pictures will help, and the video of the whit-fire on Saturday.



The slide show will be expanded daily as we upload more photos from the days on the island.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

There are seagulls there after all...

After waking up having dreamed the question as to why there are no seagulls in Palma, or anywhere else in Mallorca we had been, while lazing at, in, and by the pool Sunday, we looked up from our loungers and actually saw two or three flying way up high. Detlef said they probably just land in the mountains, but we had been in the mountains ourselves and never once caught a glimpse of one, not even flying, so I disputed that assertion.
Then, later in the afternoon, for one last little outing in town, we took a bus back down to the center of Palma, still near the shore, and strolled up a little park to the "river" Torrent sa Riera, where we saw quite a few seagulls bathing like sparrows in the birdpath of the concrete river bed and lounging on the grassy banks under palm trees, all protected by high stone walls and fences from people accessing the area in any way.
So Mallorca's seagulls have devolved into some kind of rain-floodwater-runoff-stream-gulls...



And that was definitly the last posting re this wonderfully relaxing vacation. (Koko gets another visit from Pedro as houseguest beginning Friday, by the way.)

From here on, its MH GA Bd.76, L'Infini n°108, and Infinite Jest mixed with writing and teaching and translating and just simply thinking which will be reflected here.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Cloisters, lizards, dams, and hikes - beach, too

On Friday and Saturday, two adventure days, one riding around with Renate through the mountains, and one just us today hiking across a mountain between two port towns here, Port Andratx and Sant Elm.
Here are the slides:

Friday, October 2, 2009

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Beaches You Don't Need

We ventured around to the Ballermann beach yesterday, which we would only dream of doing on a cloudy afternoon when the German beach drinkers wouldn't be there. Today we went to another such site, Port d'Alcúdia, more popular among English sots, and then into the actually beautiful old town of Alcúdcia, still with ancient fortification walls, but it was market day (north african trinket sellers everywhere selling the same stuff you can buy at markets in Berlin: fake these and those) and FULL of all the beach tourists from the port a kilometer away because it was cloudy to rainy.
Tomorrow we're doing another driving tour with Renate.
And here, the slide show of beaches you don't really need and beautiful towns you can only see if you look up above the crowds of people buying scarves and handbags...

Monday, September 28, 2009

Train and Boat Trip on Mallorca

By vintage old train, then old tram from Palma to Sóller and Port de Sóller, then by boat out on the Mediterranean around the coast line to Sa Calobra was our outing yesterday. Absolutely enchanting.
First a short video of how it looks out of the train window riding through the olive and almond tree groves just north of Palma, and then a photo slide show of much more interesting pictures of the rest!



Saturday, September 26, 2009

Road Tour : Western Mallorca



Just a sampe of those in full in the slide show

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Friday, September 25, 2009

Mediterraneanized

Now, as it should be, here in Palma we have sun and blue skies, blue water, and are relaxing by the pool, swimming even in the Sea of the Middle of the World, and heading out tomorrow with a friend (Pedro's "mother") who plans to drive us around to some secret sites on the island. She and her husband have had a house on the east coast for years, so this should prove quite the treat. Reports will be given.

Here, some photos from today, but again, don't forget to check the slideshow from the first Mallorcan posting, as it is automatically updated with all photos I upload from this trip!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Dressing for the Dinner Buffet

The pasty-faced lanky-haired English girls (30-50 years old) who squawked and generally oxforded utter nonsense all afternoon at poolside ...
  • "Oh do say, my word, but my hair takes at least fifteen minutes to dry on a hot dry day in summer."
  • "My Frederick taught me an undercut method that lets your hair look longer than it is so you can dry it faster all year round."
  • "I think she said that he said her sister had wanted me to tell her, but I didn't."
  • "Whatever for?"
  • "There's a special attachment for that."
  • "I think it's fine he's getting his own place for his own space as I after all need my own space as well."
  • "Whose children are they then?"
  • "Those boats are surely quite dreary."

... came dressed for dinner in gowns designed for vaudeville shows only, carrying silly useless purses, like the QE2 herself, always dangling in the way and tangling in the tongs of the buffet from which you fetch your meal yourself here. They had mistaken this for the captain's table on the decommissioned QE2 one supposes.

Equally as over perfumed as dressed, they appeared a bit uncomfortable as the mockery, inevitable if subtle, of the at least 4 gay couples seated in the dining room at the same time performed their stilted tableware posturing better than they could, with unsubtly raised pinky fingers. But then, we all could savor the succulent dishes, while they certainly found everything rather tasted like the airport-duty-free-shop scents with which they had doused themselves.

Yet all their hair was dry and incredibly flat, more Englishly straight than ever, and at the desert buffet, they popped one pastry directly from the trays into their accented mouths for each piece of pie they piled on their plates.

  • "What's that?"
  • "I'd stick to the ice cream and pastries if I were you."
  • "Could it be flan?"
  • "Isn't that a gasket for automobiles?"
  • "Moose?"
  • "Someone told me Miriam said the Europeans call it thusly."
  • "With her and I not looking, Saundra would open her purse."

They amply confirmed today what the delightful pair of Scottish ladies said about people with Oxford accents yesterday afternoon on the terrace. "You can never be sure if it's not simply affectation, because it very often is." The Scots dressed sensibly for dinner and had no purses about to strangle them and passers-by, enjoyed a red wine on the terrace afterwards.

I recall an episode of "Absolutely Fabulous" in which Patsy's sister visiting from France said, "I thought all Englishmen are gay." After seeing these manifestations of English femininity at poolside and buffet bashing today, I finally understand why she could think so.

Then again, someone has to provide models for drag queens to imitate in travesty shows around the globe, and since these dithering twittering English women are surely one of the reasons for the loss of British Empire, they can at least serve to spread British taste among transvestites.

Just the observations of a day of vacation in Mallorca, poolside in the sun and overfed for dinner. Burp!

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Slide Show Extended

This brief vacationer's note is merely to let you know that more photos have been added to the slide show from Palma in the previous posting. More text will follow in the coming days as new post-worthy posts, but now I'm going to read and write some analogically

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Arrival Day

3:00 am, the alarm would have rung to wake us up in time to do morning preps for the trip and eat breakfast if we hadn't've already gotten up a quarter hour before.
4:00 am, the taxi arrived promptly to fetch us off to Schönefeld airport, where we arrive a few minutes ahead of the required two-hour pre-take-off check-in time for our flight, and we were the first ones checked in and through security.
This of course meant waiting longer to board the flight, which wonderfully enough however pulled back from the gate a full ten minutes ahead of its scheduled 6:45 am starting time.
We arrived through lightning and thunderclouds at the airport of Palma de Mallorca 25 minutes early, at 9am and were sitting in our transfer bus to the hotel by 9:30.
Then more waiting began, because the room wasn't ready until a little past 11:30 and we had reached the hotel only a little past 10. But we could look down at the harbor from the terrace, which the rain kept us from venturing out onto.
Nonetheless, after a short nap, we noticed the sun coming out and headed out ourselves for a first exploration through Palma and snapped a few random photos to testify to this place's beauty even beneath an overcast to drizzly to thunderstormed sky.
While Detlef is bathing off the arrival day's grit, I'm posting this first Mallorca entry and uploading the photos, which you can see below, before heading for the shower myself.
Then we get to go to the dinner buffet! Because we have half-board, i.e. breakfast and dinner all you can eat every day. And we both are indeed hungry.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Party - Parrot - Palma

In that order, the to-do list of the next few days is set.
Tomorrow, if Lea is well (today reportedly feverish and hoarse), will see us out in the idyllic noisiness of Berlin's suburbia to celebrate with her and her little brother their birthdays after-the-fact with the family. (The children's party with friends already took place on the proper day with bowling and resultant semi-to-real illness of Lea.)
We have already told Edith, that if everything she has prepared for the garden party ends up unneeded, we will go to visit her and help her eat it there.
Monday, Heiko plays taxi driver for Koko to be transported out to the same suburbia for Lea to provide with tender loving foster care while we are off on vacation.
Tuesday morning will see us flying off to Palma before the sun rises, airport check-in at shortly before 5am. But then we have two solid weeks in a nice hotel with nothing to do but relax and play tourist.
Books have been selected and are ready for the trip, writing materials, and of course the laptop for wifi connection from the island to post up pictures as currently as possible.
(Yesterday evening was the final internationales literaturfestival berlin event for me this year, with Diderot on the relegation of religions.)

Monday, April 13, 2009

A Polish Easter for a German-American Berlin Couple

As the weather has continued to be non-stop warm and intensely blue skies, we spontaneously decided for a trip to Szcecin (Stettin) on Easter Sunday. And our idea was right: while here the city was bursting with tourists and Berliners vying for space in the sun and in front of landmarks, the train to Angermünde was full (many having headed for the cloister in Chorin or on to relatively close Baltic Sea beaches), but the little connector over the boarder and on to the former Hansa town of Stettin, now Szcecin, was basically empty, as was this charming Oder harbor town itself.
EVERYTHING except the churches was closed, with the exception of two restaurants and one cafe, all on the same terrace overlooking the river, where the Polish citizens came after church in their Easter finery for lunch or ice cream. And thank goodness for that, because we had begun to wonder if we'd be able to eat lunch anywhere at all. So the Colorado Steak House provided us with ample and quite tasty food, although the only thing Polish there was the beer, and the waitress seemed surprised that we wanted it, as Carlsberg was what they are trademarked as in that place.
We almost thought the picture taking would end, when our batteries gave out, but then near the station there was miraculously one 24-hour 7-day supermarket of sorts with the cheapest batteries I've ever found. We first bought a pack of four for 2.50 zloty, stuck them in the camera and it worked. Then we realized they had only cost us about 50 euro cents and decided to buy another pack; even if they only worked a couple of hours they'd be worth it. Well, the first two are still working today.
And it was a really very pleasant trip, hardly any people around at all, proving a devoutly Catholic country can provide a safe haven for urbanites seeking stress-free city sightseeing without encountering the mobs of their home metropolis. We may well return again.

Check out the photo documentation in the slide show here:

Monday, July 21, 2008

Home Again

1. Weather cooler and rainier than what we left behind in Ireland, but they're threatening with 30°+ again by the weekend.

2. Schools are out for summer holidays, so the city is calmer and has less traffic than usual.

3. The Berlin mom is packing for her rehab of 3 weeks beginning tomorrow and let us take her out to lunch today.

4. Obama is going to deliver his European speech here at the Siegessäule, a very fitting location for as many as possible to get to see him. But bushbaby-sliming Angie, who first criticized the idea of him speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, now is popping buttons and claiming this to be a politically incorrect location as it stands for Prussian victory over France in 1871 (as if she'd have preferred a victory of the Communards!), finally making clear to the last idiot in town that she's simply playpenally averse to Obama speaking anywhere and would prefer a mccanny playpen substitute if she can't stay stuffed up the back end of a bushbaby.

5. We're looking forward to seeing and hearing him speak here, a wonderful chance for Europe to see there's a good America to root for and for expat Americans to see the candidate of change up close.

6. We still have a few more days before the daily trot reconvenes.

7. The Siegessäule is by now primarily and simply a symbol of the wonderful city of Berlin.

Friday, July 18, 2008

It Doesn't Rain in Ireland

Even today, as they predicted showers and fog, we had the sun shining down on us and blue skies up above (ok, with some clouds, too, but that's fine) in the old port town of Youghal (pronouned yawl) and ate a truly fine meal of fish in the inn our B&B host here in Cork had recommended to us at breakfast. Now it's too hot to go out, so we're resting till later in the evening for another walk in town. Tomorrow will allow leisurely preparation for a late afternoon/early evening flight home.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Blarney is NOT baloney

As it says on a sign in the castle there, Blarney is highly varnished truth; baloney, an unvarnished lie; Blarney, flattery thinly applied and appreciated; baloney, flattery spread so thickly as to be disgusting.
I might add, Blarney seems to have more to do with style and baloney with that strange lunch meat circle my mother put in our sandwiches when we were kids.
Anyway, only my nose smacked the stone well, my lips by association, as my gab needs no improvement.