Wednesday/ paying for parking (the old way)

We went to Columbia City on Wednesday night for a beer and a bite, and lucked out with the last parking spot in the lot across from our regular ‘watering hole’.  I love that lot’s parking fee ‘machine’ .. hanging in there, defiant, retro and analog, with no such fancy tech as accepting payment by mobile phone or debit card.   Paper money and coins, stuffed into a slot !

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The instructions may be fading, but they are still legible!  The pay box comes complete with a tool attached to stuff any old folded banknotes into the matching slot for your parking bay .. and if you ran out of numbers down by #60 because you are parked in bay #61, #62 or #63, go back up and use #1, #2 or #3.

Tuesday/ so .. it’s Trump

So it’s official (per Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus) : the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump as their party’s candidate for the 2016 US Presidential Election. Trump won the Indiana Republican Primary Election easily today, forcing main rival Ted Cruz to drop out of the race.   The result : we have an egotistical-billionaire-reality-TV host, with no political experience whatsoever, who is really not even a Republican, as the Republican Party’s nominee!  That’s why the New York Daily News cover of Wednesday announces that the Republican Party as we have known it thus far, is dead.   Also check out this analysis that Ezra Klein from explain-the-news web site vox.com offers.

ChlFXyHVEAANUAo

Monday/ good times in Leicester City

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I had to put Leicester City on a Google Map to see exactly where it is (exactly at the center of gravity of the UK, it seems!).
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Pub-goers celebrate the moment it became clear that their team had won the Premier League. Look at those faces :).

I don’t follow any of the soccer leagues closely, but there were several articles in the news lately, describing the against-all-odds run of the Leicester* City soccer team in the Premier League this past season.  (They have just won it, with the outcome of a match between Tottenham and Chelsea making Leicester City end at the top of the league, and by a wide margin).

Sports commentators describe it as the greatest season in sports history. The full story in the New York Times reports that the Leicester team’s payroll is roughly a quarter of Chelsea’s when it won the 2014-15 title, and that they finished 14th last season, and that their escape from relegation is a story (and a soccer miracle) all its own.

*Say LESS-ter

Saturday/ tunnel update

The elevated stretch of waterfront highway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed on Thursday night, for two weeks.  It is as a precaution for the digging of the new tunnel for State Route 99 that goes under the Viaduct at this point.   (When the tunnel has been completed, the Alaskan Way Viaduct will be demolished).   On a typical weekday some 90,000 drivers used the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and for the next two weeks there will be a lot of extra traffic using the downtown Seattle streets.  For those that can : use the bus, use the light rail, bike, walk.  Driving around in a car in downtown Seattle should only be done if there is no other option.

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This picture called ‘Viadoom’ was tweeted by an artist Gabi Campanarion from his Twitter account @Seattlesketcher.

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Friday/ Copenhagen mementos

Here are some of my mementos from my trip.   I love foreign coins and banknotes, and foreign stamps as well.

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Danish krone coins from left to right : one, two, five, ten, twenty. Exchange rate is 6.5 DKK to 1 USD. The 5 Kronor coin on top is from Sweden. Something tells me we will never, ever put holes in our coins in the USA – but I believe the holes are practical, to help blind people distinguish the ones, twos and fives from the tens and twenties.
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This is the entrance of ‘Danmarks Nationalbank’ on Havnegade 5, Copenhagen. It took me awhile to find it. Inside, it is like a World War II bunker, but with greenery and orchids in glass cases. This is where I bought a set of Danish proof coins.
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And here is a collection of Danish bank notes. There is a 1,000 DKK note as well, but these are not in general circulation, and a little hefty at $US 153 equivalent to hold on to as a souvenir.
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Here’s my Copenhagen Card, good for any public transport for 72 hrs. It was a little pricey at DKK 629/ US$ 96, but very convenient. It gives discounts to places like museums and the zoo, but I ended up not going to any of those. The stamps are all the nicest ones that the convenience store had to sell me. That’s Margrethe II of Denmark on the first one.

Thursday/ arrival in Seattle

I’m home!  The travelers from Frankfurt arrived into Seattle shortly after noon Pacific Time.   I sat next to the window, and looked out at just the right time to see a beautiful view of the Columbia river as we crossed it in Canada, right after the British Columbia border.

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The Columbia River is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada.
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This is a view from 33,000 ft up of Kinbasket Lake.  Look for it on the map up high, near the British Columbia border with Alberta province.
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And a little later there was this view of a sea of mist with the snow-capped mountain tops as the islands in it.

Thursday/ arrival at Frankfurt airport

I made it to Frankfurt .. Next stop Seattle.

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Here’s our arrival into Frankfurt airport, from Hamburg. In the distance a Boeing 747 is just being pushed into the hangar (for some maintenance, I’m sure).
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And I stopped by this mean machine on the way to my gate for the flight to Seattle, the BMW i8. Competition for the Tesla? Maybe.

Wednesday/ Hamburg

[From Wikipedia] IMG_4720 smHamburg, a major port city in northern Germany, is connected to the North Sea by the Elbe River. It’s crossed by hundreds of canals, and also contains large areas of parkland. Its central Jungfernstieg boulevard connects the Altstadt (old town) and the Neustadt, passing Binnenalster lake, dotted with boats and surrounded by cafes and restaurants. Oysters and traditional Aalsuppe (soup) are local specialties.

I did the best I could with the day-and-a-half and rain/ freezing rain at times in Hamburg!  I will have to try to come back in summer some time, when the weather is warmer.   The HafenCity* area’s development continues, even after 15 years since it had started, and I would love to spend more time there when it had been completed.

*HafenCity is an urban center with many shops, restaurants, hotels and cultural venues as well as rising visitor numbers. More than 2,000 people now live in HafenCity as a whole; there are more than 5,000 students at the various academic institutions; upwards of 10,000 employees work in more than 500 businesses.  It aspires to generate and use clean energy and be a model for the new cities that will have to be built around the world this century.

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The Rathaus (Town Hall) of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is a spectacular work of art, inside and out. It was inaugurated in 1897.
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The inside of the main entrance hall in the Rathaus.
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This is the Alte Elbe Tunnel (the old Elbe tunnel), a tunnel that was completed by 1911 that runs under the Elbe river. It is still in use to this day : by pedestrians, bicyclists, and even the occasional car or taxi !
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Here is a car that had driven through the tunnel, and is entering the car elevator to get it up to street level. That HALT makes me think of the Berlin Wall and the World Wars!
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The U-bahn (and walking) was pretty much my only mode of transportation in Hamburg. In Copenhagen I used the bus much more, since there was a convenient bus stop right by the hotel. This is the train station at Ganzemarkt, on the U2 line.
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This is close by the Elbe Tunnel, stone construction on the river bank.
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An entrance to St Pauli U-bahn station, and by the Plante-en-Blumen Park. It was too darn cold, with an icy wind in the park! and so I spent very little time there.
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The U4 route goes to HafenCity Universitat, and the line and stations are much newer than the others. This green overhead light and color on the station changes to blue and purple .. and I would probably have seen more colors, if I stayed longer.
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A brand new truss bridge for cars and pedestrians at HafenCity.
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There are lots of stylish new office buildings and apartment complexes in HafenCity, such as this one.
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This building belongs to Anglo-Dutch multinational consumer goods company Unilever.

 

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Right next to the Unilever building, in HafenCity .. I think this is an apartment tower.
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The entrance to one of the two new U-bahn stations at HafenCity, called Überseequartier.

 

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No, it’s not a work of art (but it could be) .. lots of reflections on the way down to the U-bahn platforms of the Überseequartier station.

 

Tuesday/ train to Hamburg

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The train route from Copenhagen to Hamburg took a little under 5 hrs. That segment across the water between Denmark and Germany is where the train sits on the ferry! Amazing.

I learned on Monday night that Wednesday  – the day of my scheduled departure from Frankfurt to Seattle –  is going to be an ugly day at Frankfurt airport.  A massive service workers’ union strike forced Lufthansa to cancel 350 flights at Frankfurt, including the one I had to get there for the Frankfurt to Seattle flight.   So I pushed out my return by a day .. and thought to squeeze in one more train trip : one from Copenhagen to Hamburg. (I plan to fly early Thursday from Hamburg to Frankfurt). The train ride was quite something.  When Deutsche Bahn engineers design and build tracks for their trains, they stop at almost nothing.  The train track runs across bridges to cross rivers and narrow channels, and into tunnels to go through hills, or underground.  And for a ferry crossing, such as the one between Denmark and Germany that crosses the Fehmarn Belt Strait, they built a train track right on the ferry’s deck, to ferry the whole freaking train across the strait.   Or at least half the train.   At our final station in Denmark (Roedby), the front four cars were disconnected from the rest of the train.   As we reached the ferry, the train cars were run onto the ferry, passengers and all. Then we were shooed off the train (the train is locked for the ferry crossing) to go onto the ferry itself during the crossing, and we boarded the train again before the ferry docked. And the train ran off the ferry onto the track and into Puttgarden station.  ‘Welcome to Germany’ announced the conductor.

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Our stop at Naestved, the third of ten stops, on the way to Hamburg.
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Here is a sequence of stills at the moment when the train runs onto the ferry (slowly, of course). 1. Approaching the ferry dec k. 2 &3. A large transportation truck drives by, also going onto the ferry. 4. My train car about to enter into the ferry. 5. Almost inside; an attendant is keeping an eye on the train. 6. Inside the ferry. 7. A tour bus has entered as well. 8. Almost done. 9. Coming to a stop.
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I’m standing on just outside the train and took a panorama shot of the train & heavy vehicle deck. There is a car deck above us, and the on the top decks is where the passengers hang out and shop and dine and enjoy the views while the ferry crosses.
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Here is what our ferry looks like. This is one crossing to the other side.
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Approaching the German side of the crossing. I had to go downstairs and board the train immediately after I took the picture.
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This is the inside of Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (main train station) some time after our arrival. My train was a white Intercity Express train, and had left already.
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And here is a view of the outside of Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. It opened in 1906. It handles some 480,000 passengers a day, making the station the busiest in Germany and after the Gare du Nord in Paris, the second busiest in Europe.

Monday/ train to Malmö

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The Øresund Bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo, and was completed in 2000 at a cost of €2.6 billion. The bridge made a big difference to the economy of Malmo.

I could see a bridge far away from my hotel room and discovered that it is the Øresund Bridge to Malmö in Sweden : a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm in the middle of the strait.  So!  I have to go, I thought, and besides, my feet and legs needed a break from walking all over the city of Copenhagen in between bus rides and train rides.    I literally just had time to make the ride out there, look around the Central Station for 15 minutes, and then catch the train back again.

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This is the grand old post office building across from the Malmo Central Station. Looks like the right side’s copper tower and dome is getting renovated.
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The original, old building of Malmo Central Station opened in 1856.
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And here is the new extension that had been added. I think it opened in 2011.
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This is a brand new building right next to the Central Station, still under construction. I think it is for a drug company.
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Hmm! An M&M candy machine right there at Copenhagen Main Station in the 7-11. (Why don’t we have these in the USA? But maybe that is a good thing for me, that there isn’t any).

Sunday/ Copenhagen sights

Here are some of my favorite pictures from Saturday afternoon and Sunday.  Yes, the Danes are very friendly and laid-back, and they speak good English.  Watch out for bicycles : they go fast, so do not step into the bike lane or cross it before looking both ways!  The public transport is top notch.  Even the buses have display screens for the routes, and the connections at the next stop.

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This is the Royal Copenhagen flagship store. Officially the Royal Porcelain Factory, it is a manufacturer of porcelain products and was founded in Copenhagen 1 May 1775 under the protection of Queen Juliane Marie.
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This building is on the corner of Studiestraede and Vester Volgade, but I could not immediately find the name of it.
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Porcelain displayed in an antique store.
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The new Axeltorv (Axel Square) towers are still under construction, but makes for quite a visual impact. ‘Copenhagen’s new landmark’ proclaims a sign on the construction fence. To the left is the is a circular building called the Circus Building, completed in 1886 to serve as a venue for circus performances. The last circus to use the building was in 1990, though. It now shows movies.
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Here is another building that I do not know the name of.   I see the beautiful spires from a few blocks away, and then I just have to walk there and check out the building up close!
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This is the view from my 8th floor room in the Marriott Hotel on Kalvebod Brygge (literally “Kalvebod Quay”), a waterfront area in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen.
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I don’t have plans to go to the Copenhagen Zoo, but I love this bus, especially the polar bear.
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This is the main entrance to Tivoli Gardens : a famous amusement park and garden. The park opened in 1843 and is the second-oldest operating amusement park in the world, after Dyrehavsbakken in nearby Klampenborg. It is still pretty chilly outside (45 F/ 6 C), but there were some brave souls out there on the swings, the roller coasters and dive bomber.
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Here is Hans Christian Andersen’s statue, looking toward the Tivoli gardens. He was a Danish author, a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, but best remembered for his fairy tales.
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The Scandic Palace Hotel is gorgeous. Check out the gold trim on the balcony rails. [From Wikipedia] Influenced by the Art Nouveau style, the red brick building was designed by Anton Rosen and completed in 1910.
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Here is a close-up of the copper-clad trumpeter statue in the previous picture. They stand on a pedestal in front of the Scandic Palace Hotel.
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This little gazebo-style tower is on Nytorv (English: New Square or New Market) – a public square in the centre of Copenhagen. It serves up Carlsberg beer. The tourist season is not yet in full swing (it has to get a little warmer first!), so the outside spaces are still empty and quiet.
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Care for a Danish butter biscuit? Might that be Margrethe II (queen of Denmark), deployed in the window displat? Probably not!
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Here is the clock tower of the Copenhagen City Hall (Danish: Københavns Rådhus).
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This is the rooftop of the Copenhagen City Hall. Check out the incredible detail in the coat of arms and the copper-clad figures
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Here is a Tesla that I spotted, actually making a very illegal U-turn. Hmm. The building in the background is the rebuilt (2013) headquarters of The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI). It houses several companies that do industrial design work. At night the white segments light up in patterns and in different colors.
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This is ‘The Crystal’ (completed 2001), the headquarters of Nykredit Bank. The founding of the bank date back to 1851, but this year in February 2016 Nykredit faced public outrage among their customers due to significantly increased service fees.

Saturday/ arrival in Copenhagen

I am spending a few days in Copenhagen* before heading west, home.  The flight from Frankfurt to Copenhagen this morning was just an hour, but it took a while to get here : there was trouble with the on-board computer of the incoming plane, and another one had to be found.

*I thought I would check up on ‘The World’s Happiest Country’ .. as Denmark is frequently referred to when ‘happiness indexes’ are compiled.

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This is 7 am this morning and I am sitting in an express train headed for Frankfurt Flughafen (Airport). The train is a world unto its own : comfortable seating, a lot of bike and luggage space, toilet on the far right, and wi-fi as well.
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(it was raining in Frankfurt as well). We’re stepping out to the Airbus 320 from SAS that will take us to Copenhagen. I like the red paint on the jet engine!
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Denmark is a land with a lot of islands .. first sighting of land as we come in to land at Copenhagen.
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Here’s my welcome! sign. Hej! is actually pronounced much the same as ‘Hi!’ the way we say the greeting in English.
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And here’s the gorgeous steel pillars and roof of the Copenhagen main train station, shown as København H on maps. The train station opened in 1911, and is the work of architect Heinrich Wenck.  I took the Metro Light Rail to Norreport station, and the S-tug (S-train) to the main station. 
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Finally, here’s a nod to the quadrennial (400th) anniversary of William Shakespeare’s passing away with The Spiegel’s cover. ‘The Terror Expert : Power, murder and morals : the astonishing current world of William Shakespeare’, says the subtitle. In other words. the world has not changed much since Shakespeare wrote about all of those.

Friday/ in Frankfurt

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I dropped off my rental car at a wet Cape Town airport. This is the main arrivals and departure lounge. It started raining in Cape Town on Thursday, with more in the forecast for Friday.
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Hello there! I’m looking up at a life-size giraffe with its head in the tree leaves, at the Out of Africa gift store at Cape Town airport.
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An African mask .. these are likely from a country in West Africa or North Africa.
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Alright! We’re finally boarding the Boeing 777 from Air France. I had a ‘Premium Economy’ seat with a little more width and leg room.

I made it into Frankfurt.  We left Cape Town more than an hour late, after midnight.

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From the flight tracker on the Cape Town – Paris flight. We are leaving Africa and starting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

We arrived into Paris some 11 hours later, shortly after noon on Friday.  From there, the Hop! Embraer 190 commuter jet took us to Frankfurt.

Thursday/ long way back

It is time to IMG_4050 smIMG_4053 smpack my bags to start traveling north.  I will travel back to Paris and Frankfurt tonight, and will stay in Europe a few days before flying west to Seattle.  I try to keep my souvenir purchases to a minimum these days (my study and my house are full of items already!) – but I could not resist this t-shirt, and the little colorful beaded giraffe.

 

 

Wednesday/ Stellenbosch

A visit to the Cape Town area is not quite complete for me without checking up on my old alma mater, the University of Stellenbosch, and the town itself.  It was very late on Tuesday afternoon when I got there, though – and so the shadows were too long for taking fully lit pictures of the beautiful buildings.  But here they are anyway.

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The renovation on the Faculty of Engineering’s main building is almost complete. The canopy at the entrance is new, and will help students to prepare for going out into rainy winter weather. The lecture rooms inside have been redone as well.
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One of my favorite buildings, the ‘Old Main Building’. I should have tried to use the camera’s flash to light up the two pillars for the gate in the foreground a little bit.
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This is Crozier House, a student residence that accommodates 6 or 8. I was squished in between the house and a big tree and a street behind me, and so I could frame only the middle section of the house. This is a case where I should try to use the ‘RAW’ version of the picture to increase the contrast between the pastel colors (this a .JPG picture).
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Stellenbosch used to have Afrikaans only as instruction medium at the university, but in recent times that has been challenged, with some organizations even calling for it to be abolished. In a recent settlement, though, Afrikaans and English will have equal status. This poster from the organization Afriforum says that ‘Afrikaans Will Stay’ and that education in one’s mother tongue is a constitutional right.

 

Tuesday/ lunch at the Westin

I met my brother and nephew for lunch on Tuesday.  We picked the swank Westin Hotel restaurant in the city’s Foreshore district.   My nephew ordered a chocolate milkshake (not on the menu) to go with his lunch – and to their credit, they were up to it. ‘It will just take a little time’, said our server.

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Here’s the view towards Table Mountain from the 19th floor of the Westin Hotel.  To the right of Table Mountain is Lion’s Head, and on the far right is Signal Hill.  I used to work (this was in 1994!) in the Metlife Centre building on the left. The bulge is really a 180° viewing bay on each floor, looking out over Cape Town harbor.
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The Westin is all glass and steel, with vanishing edges on this side. The Metlife Centre building is the one in the reflection. The Cape Town International Convention Centre is right across from the Westin.
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This statue of Bartolomeu Dias is close to the Convention Center. Dias was an explorer and a nobleman of the Portuguese royal household. He sailed around the southernmost tip of Africa (what is today known as Cape Town) in 1488, reaching the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, the first European known to have done so. [Source : Wikipedia].
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Some very African motifs from the lobby of the Cape Town International Convention Center. There are baobab trees (thick trunk with round fruit), gazelles and an elephant.

 

Monday/ proteas for mom

Protea is both the botanical name and common name for a large group of flowers found in the Cape Town area and on the slopes of Table Mountain.  They are named after the Greek god Proteus (who could change his form at will), because they have such a wide variety of forms.

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We brought my mom these proteas. They make great flower arrangements, and can even be left to dry out for a ‘permanent’ floral display. These are queen proteas, as far as I can tell from looking at pictures on-line.

Sunday/ Camps Bay

After I had dropped my friend Marlien at the airport on Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Camps Bay.  There are two ways to get there from Cape Town : across the ‘neck’ of Table Mountain called Kloofnek (a kloof is a ravine), or along the Atlantic coastline through Greenpoint and Seapoint.   I picked the Kloofnek road out there, and wanted to drive back along the coast, but found the late Sunday afternoon traffic too much, so I went back the same way I had come.

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Camps Bay is on the south west of Cape Town, on its slopes with the Atlantic Ocean.
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For this panorama picture, I walked out on the rocks by Camps Bay beach. Those mountain peaks in the background are on the Cape Peninsula and are called the Twelve Apostles. (I can never get exactly 12 when I count the peaks!). There is a little speck on the highest peak on the left : the Table Mountain Cable Car house at the top of the mountain.
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Here is the ‘main drag’ at Camps Bay beach with a mountain peak called Lion’s Head in the background. Camps Bay beach is on the left. The water is a little frigid year-round, and summer is over now, but a few brave souls still ventured in. The palm trees reminds one a little bit of Miami Beach. They have been there for at least 50 years.
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This is the large tide pool right next to Camps Bay beach. (There is a low sea wall on the far end and at high tide the seawater spills over the wall and into the pool).

Saturday/ the V&A Waterfront

My friend Marlien and I ran out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, the way we normally do when she visits me here.  We did not stay too long, though : a blustery wind came up and made it unpleasant, and so we left early.   I see my picture of the Enigma XK does not quite do it justice.  Checking into it again later, I found out that it used to be a fisheries patrol vessel, but has been turned into a luxury expedition yacht !  I think that some of the spectacular pictures on the link were taken in Antarctica.   

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The calm before the wind came up : tug boats in the harbor at the V&A Waterfront, with Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain in the background.
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The Enigma XK at anchor in the Cape Town harbor at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Originally built as a fisheries patrol vessel, Enigma XK has been converted into a luxury expedition yacht.