Author: Willem

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Wednesday/ arrival in Berlin

I made it into Berlin’s Tegel airport in the afternoon.  I dawdled a little getting out of the airport, taking my time to take the scenery in.  Berlin’s new Brandenburg airport is under construction (years late and billions of euros over budget.   So little Tegel airport with its hexagonal main building around an open square that Berliners have become very fond of, will be closed, but probably not before 2018.   Walking distances are extremely short at the airport.  Our baggage claim was RIGHT THERE at the entrance into the terminal as we stepped off the plane.   And another 30 meters puts you outside the terminal where the taxis and buses are (no S-bahn or U-bahn train to take directly from the airport).

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Here’s the Tegel airport’s control tower and part of the main building. The airport started operating in November 1974 and now handles more than 20 million passengers per year.
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Here’s a look at the inside of the airport.
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And the chalkboard at the Starbucks gives a nod to the Berlin bear (the city’s coat of arms and flag has a bear on). Buy some coffee from Kenia and you will get your favorite Starbucks drink for free, says the bear.
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Here’s Potsdamer Platz as one comes out of the underground. The Marriott hotel where I stay is in the distance. The Berlin Wall ran right through this area. The Marriott is literally 100 ft on the west side of where the Wall used to be.
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And another friendly bear to welcome me at the hotel.
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Tuesday/ back to Frankfurt

My time in South Africa was up on Tuesday, and I headed out to Cape Town International airport by noon to return my rental car.   I was on South African Airways, a code share with Lufthansa.  We stopped in Johannesburg, and then on Tuesday night went on to Frankfurt.   I will stay over a few days in Germany before heading home to Seattle, and plan to go to Berlin for a day or two.

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Here’s the quad-jet Airbus A340-600 that brought us to Johannesburg. We are waiting on the tarmac for our shuttle bus to take us to the terminal. (Yes, it looks like the gangways go to a terminal but they dont!).
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Here’s the flight tracker en route to Frankfurt with 2 hours of the 10 hours of flight time left.

 

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Monday/ Strand & Somerset West

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Check out this children’s book from a book store in Somerset West with my name on : Speurhond (Sleuth Hound) Willem in New York.

I drove out to Somerset West today to meet up with old friends there.  I had some time to spare beforehand, and stopped at the beach at Strand. (Check out the pink area in the map from Saturday’s post to see where these are).  A few dozen people were out for a walk on the beach, and two hardy souls even braved the cold water. (The Strand’s water is rarely on the warmer side, since the cold sea current from the West Coast usually prevails.  But once in a while the water temperature would be very pleasant).

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The surf shop is closed ! .. but I like the artwork.
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The beach at Strand, and some of the many holiday apartments that line Beach Road on the beach front. (The guy in the picture is flying a tiny drone with his iPhone. Look for the black spec just to the left of the sand-colored building).
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Sunday/ Stellenbosch

sbStellenbosch is South Africa’s second oldest European settlement (after Cape Town), founded in 1679 by then-Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel.  Stellenbosch means ‘(Van der) Stel’s Forest.   Stellenbosch University was founded in 1866.   Its logo has a little oak leaf in it, a nod to the nickname for Stellenbosch,  ‘City of Oaks’.

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The main building of the Faculty of Engineering (with some construction going on downstairs). Freshman engineering students attend lectures in the main building and then graduate to the buildings dedicated to Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering behind the main building.
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The JH Neethling Building houses the Faculty of Agrisciences.
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This Jewish synagogue is on Van Rynveveld Street, and is almost 100 years old.
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This building used to be a girls’ school, but is now a museum (containing exhibits of earlier days and peoples from Africa). It is also on Van Ryneveld Street.
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These giant ficus trees are at the back of the main administration building on Victoria Street.
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A building in Plein Street displaying the typical Cape Dutch architecture that prevailed in the 17th and 18th century in the Cape Province.
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Saturday/ the V&A Waterfront

My friend Marlien and I drove out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront today.  The enormous V&A Waterfront shopping mall has too many shops to even count – clothing stores, book stores, home and kitchen gadgets, music, African artwork – anything under the sun. Outside one can take a helicopter ‘flip’ (short ride of 10-15 mins, about US$300 per person), take a harbor tour, or go out to a Robben Island excursion.    We just took it easy and took in the sights, and bought a little souvenir here and there.

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Here are the main areas around the Cape Peninsula. I stay out in the Northern Suburbs (Durbanville). The Waterfront is in the City Centre (where it says Green Point, actually). Robben Island is where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner.
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The Clock Tower at the V&A Waterfront was completed in 1882, and restored in 1997. I’m happy to see it painted red once more (it was painted yellow in 2013 as part of an advertising campaign).
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‘Each Man To Do His Duty’ says the inscription on the ribbon of this sailor mast head.
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I suppose I should have cropped the yellow picture frame from the photo, but then the longitude and latitude information would be lost.
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This is the train station building at Muizenberg. It opened in 1913 and is another one of the Cape Town area’s national historic buildings.
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Friday/ rusks from Woolies

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Woolworth’s rusks are top-drawer : made from Ayrshire* buttermilk and with free-range eggs! (They are delicious). *Ayrshire are dairy cattle originally from southwest Scotland.

A rusk is a hard, dry biscuit or a twice-baked bread, and Woolies is the nickname of Woolworths in South Africa, chain of retail stores modeled on Marks & Spencer in the United Kingdom. (The first store in South Africa opened in Cape Town in 1931).

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Thursday/ a totter of giraffes

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The rhinoceros has a golden horn (maybe because the artist wanted to indicate its value to poachers?), but I like the bicycle best.
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Some (or any one) of these giraffes are going to be difficult to carry onto an airplane! And a collection of giraffes is .. what? A ‘totter’ of giraffes sounds good to me (I found the term on line). ‘Totter’ means a feeble or unsteady gait.

I drove my mom out to Stellenbosch today and as usual we checked out the art shops that line Plein Street.  It was a beautiful and mild late winter day, but there are not a lot of tourists to be seen this time of year.

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Wednesday/ the Seattle Coffee Co

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This ‘Seattle Coffee Co’ is next to a big bookstore in the Tygervalley Mall nearby in Durbanville. There are 90 of these coffee shops around the country.

There are no Starbuckses in South Africa, but the first one is slated to open in Johannesburg in 2016, with others to follow.   South Africans do love their coffee : it is not referred to as boeretroos* for nothing in Afrikaans.

*Troos translates to ‘comfort’. Boer is much harder to translate.  It could simply be taken to mean ‘farmer’, but it also stands for the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier .. and to this day is used for Afrikaans-speaking South Africans that are aware of that heritage.

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Tuesday/ the Hungry Lion

Hungry Lion is a fast food franchise found in South Africa, Botswana, Angola and Swaziland. It was started in 1997 by Shoprite grocery stores. The outlets sell fried chicken and chicken burgers only. Does a hungry lion eat chicken? I guess SO!
In Afrikaans we would say ‘Ek is so honger soos ‘n wolf’ (as hungry as a wolf).
The Germans also say hungry as a wolf, or ‘Ich habe einen Bärenhunger’ (I have the hunger of a bear).

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This Hungry Lion fast food outlet is in the EIkestad Mall in Stellenbosch.
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Monday/ arrival in Cape Town

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The sign at the security check point in Frankfurt.

I made the long journey south (10 hours) from Frankfurt to Johannesburg on Sunday night in a big A380-800*, and then took a 2-hour flight on South African Airways to Cape Town from Johannesburg.  At our arrival in Jo’burg we were all heat scanned by a camera, for fever/ Ebola symptoms, said the sign.

*I sat all the way back in row 96G, in a little coach section tucked upstairs into the tail of the A380.  It made us forget we were flying in an enormous airplane, but the seats were not particularly comfortable, nor spacious, of course.   The other problem was that my luggage took a long long time to come out in Johannesburg (the fault of the big airplane or slow baggage service? both?) : some 45 minutes.  So I had to make a run for my connection to Cape Town.

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I liked the set of cut-outs of German band members in their lederhosen in the duty-free store at Frankfurt, but they did not persuade me to buy any booze or chocolate. (I had too much to carry already).
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Here’s the nose of the A380 at the gate in Johannesburg.
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Sunday/ the Experiminta Science Center

The Experiminta Science Center is just a block from the Marriott hotel as well, and it was great to see such unabashed enthusiasm for math and science on display.  My pictures are of some items that interested me, but there are many other interactive displays geared toward school kids of all ages.    Here is the link for Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum.

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Sorry! but I could not resist the mirrors. Inside the 3-sided mirror caleidoscope, ‘wide’ me, ‘skinny’ me, ‘upside down’ me in a giant spoon mirror, and ‘center of attention’ me in a ceiling mirror.
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Here’s a tornado in a tube .. a six foot high display of what happens when hot air and cool air mixes and gets a twist.
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These colorful (and playful) 3-D math representations all have names, which I suspect were assigned by the mathematician that had spare time to play around with Mathlab (a graphic modeller of mathematical equations) !

 

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What do these emoji sentences convey? 1. (The message sender is blue). Will you come with me to the movies tonight? 2. (The message sender is green). I heard that your friend’s little sister said that I am coming to the (birthday) party.
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Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum consists of a middle piece that can rotate around its center (the black segment in the middle) .. but then it has additional segments attached to its ends that can rotate through 360 degrees as well. The trace of the tip of one of the attached segments is quite unexpectedly ‘chaotic’.

 

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Saturday/ the Senckenberg Naturmuseum

I was surprised to learn, from looking at my Frankfurt map, that the Senckenberg Naturmuseum was barely a five-minute walk from my hotel.  Well, you have to go then, I told myself, and hurry up !  The museum closed at 6, along with every other establishment in Germany*.

*Shopping malls close a little later, at 9 pm .. but there is not much open on Sunday (convenience stores at gas stations are).  I think that’s a good thing .. even with the Saturday evening rush that I got caught in at a grocery store just trying to buy a yogurt and bananas.

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Here is the entrance to the Senckenberg Naturmuseum (museum of natural history) here in Frankfurt.
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This is the main exhibition hall. One the left is an Iguanodon, and on the right a complete Diplodocus skeleton, gifted from the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. Diplodocuses roamed around on earth 156-147 million years ago.
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Ready for your close-up (encounter with a 5-ton iguanodon?) Lucky for humans the beasts died out 110 million years ago.
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These are two woolly mammoth skeletons : on the left the ‘Mühldorfer mammoth’, a complete skeleton found east of Munich. On the right the American woolly mammoth, found in Little Britain in the New York State area. Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared between 14,000 to 10,000 years ago.
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Saber-toothed cats lived for 42 million years until about 11,000 years ago. This specimen’s bones were found in California.
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Open wide! Lucky for us this big fin whale does not eat humans! A close relative of the bigger blue whale, this skeleton lines the entire wall in the big exhibition room.
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Here’s the Coelacanth, the famous ‘dino-fish’ with bones and all, and a lung. A live fish was caught in a net off the South African coast in 1938, a sensational find for the archaeologist community, and today methods have been put in place to try to prevent catching the rare fish in fish nets.

 

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I like the pictures and the tailors’ tapes on this tailor shop and offices for the sharply dressed man (and woman)., on Bleichstraße.
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The old and the new : in front Eschenheimer Tower (built in 1810) that guarded the old city’s Gothic walls, behind it the Jumeirah Frankfurt Hotel that opened in 2011.
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This is the Alte Oper, the old opera house. The original building was badly damaged in a World War II night raid, and only the facade remained. It took several decades before the building was restored.
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The early evening view from my hotel window. The little red aircraft warning lights are already lit up. The building with the pyramid is the Messeturm (offices); the silvery stepped building in the middle the West End Tower; the black building two more to the left of it is the Frankfurter Büro Center, home of my German namesake company, PwC.
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Friday/ Frankfurt Altstadt

Friday brought cooler temperatures and a little rain late in the afternoon as well.  The Altstadt (old city) in the historic heart of Frankfurt is undergoing a lot of new construction here.  At least the Römerberg square is now nicely cleaned up (it was not when I checked it out a few years ago).

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Here’s a 1950s vintage engineering handbook that was for sale by a vintage art and bookstore. I love the crisp graphics (showing a lot of very ‘engineered’ ways to measure temperature, in this case).
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Here are some of the buildings around the Römerberg square. I suppose there are people that live upstairs from the cafes and restaurants .. why wouldn’t there be?
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Here is the Kaiserdom St. Bartholomäus cathedral, holding its own in the middle of all the construction. And why would it not? The current church was built from 1250-1514, the third building in the same place, and it survived World War II .. at a time when most of Frankfurt was destroyed.
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This paving, lighting and wall tiles at the Domplatz (Cathedral Square) U-bahn station is new and very nicely done. (I waited for the silly humans in front of me to disappear so that they would not spoil the clean lines in picture!).

 

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Thursday/ arrival in Frankfurt

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‘I am a king’ .. why would anyone want to shoot me? asks the lion on the cover of Stern news magazine at the airport.

(Thursday night USA time, Friday morning Frankfurt time).  Well, I made it in.  I had fantasies of open seats remaining open next to mine as I checked in on-line and selected my seat for the flight, but none of those came true : the flight to Frankfurt was packed. Mostly German and Dutch peeps returning home, from what I could tell.  A Flemish-speaking family near me (I inadvertently eavesdropped on them) was going home to Brussels.   It was was warm today here in Frankfurt and I was sweating as I walked the short distance for the Festhalle/ Messe U-bahn stop to the Marriott hotel !

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Here is a view of a row of Lufthansa tails from Frankfurt’s Terminal Z shortly after I stepped off the plane at 8.30 am.
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Here is the main train station, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. We had just arrived from the Flughafen (airport). I stepped over from the S-bahn to the U-bahn here at Hauptbahnhof.
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Here is a view of the ‘Messe Frankfurt’ from high up in the Marriott hotel. The ‘Messe’ is one of the world’s largest trade fair centers : anything from industrial tools, cars, household items, even books, are exhibited for buyers in these halls. The building top left with the colored roof sections is a large shopping mall.
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Wednesday/ my bags are packed

My bags are packed.  I am leaving for Frankfurt in the morning.  This is part of my trip to South Africa.  I have checked in on-line; I have my Frankfurt Metro app on my iPhone, and I have some left-over Euros from previous trips.  (Yes, I have my passport.  Without Mr Passport in one’s pocket, the journey will not even start !).   It’s a 747 we will be flying in, and the flight time is about 9 hrs.

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Here’s a little graphic outline of the route, and below the technical flight details from flightaware.com.

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Tuesday/ ‘Real Life’ is not that bad

Here is the little clapboardIMG_8662 sm that was on the pavement tonight just outside my neighborhood pub called the Canterbury Ale House.   Well, yes.  Booze and food does make for fun, but could be too much of a good thing as well, right ?

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Monday/ Google, now Alphabet

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Is the new Alphabet logo just right and all ‘grown up’ or is it too bland?

As one analyst put it : Google grabbed itself by the lapels of it colorful jacket, and turned it inside out, with the announcement that Google is turning into a holding company called ‘Alphabet’.   Google still has search, ads, YouTube, Android and maps, but then there are the other companies called Fiber, Calico, Nest, Life Sciences, Venture, Capital and Google X.  (Google X includes driverless cars and drones).

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Sunday

We made it out to the tennisIMG_8654 sm2 court as well as the swimming pool on Sunday, and checked out the sporting goods store on the way back.

Check out the blow-up shark ‘floatie’ that was on display.  (Better be careful and not sneak up and surprise unwitting swimmers with that thing in the sea.  You will frighten the living daylights out of them : not good !).

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The sun was lying low at 8.00 pm as we were getting ready to be pushed back from the gat at San Diego airport.
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Saturday/ Tide Park Beach

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The underside of my paddle board had a Kraken tentacle on. The Kraken is a legendary sea monster of large proportions that is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland.

We spent some time today at Tide Park beach – part of the larger Solana Beach area to the north of the San Diego metro area.  I even dipped my toes into the California surfer culture by going out on a standing-up paddle board for a bit, with some coaching from my brother.  The surfing area by the beach is called ‘Table Tops’ because of a reef right there. Absolute beginners such as me were wise to steer completely clear of the surfers, of course.

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My nephew is ready to hit the surf down below with his surf board (and for good measure has a boogie board as well). It was a beautiful day, with the marine layer (visible in the distance) staying offshore.
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Here’s the Tide Park beach, part of the larger beach area called Solana Beach. The lifeguard station is on the left. A guy came hobbling up from the beach with a stingray wound to his foot, that they treated and bandaged up for him.
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Friday/ to San Diego

I traveled to San Diego on Friday afternoon for a weekend visit to my brother and his family.  We went to dinner in the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego downtown.  Afterwards we strolled around the waterfront on North San Diego Bay.

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Here’s our approach into San Diego International airport. The airport has only ONE runway (making it very busy), but for now proposals and plans to build a bigger airport outside the city have been shelved.
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With brother Piet. Piet, Krista and I had dinner in Little Italy, a neighborhood in downtown San Diego. In the early days of the city this was an Italian fishing neighborhood but now it is filled with Italian restaurants, Italian retail shops, home design stores, art galleries, and residential units.

 

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[From Wikipedia] The Star of India was built in 1863 in the Isle of Man, a full-rigged iron windjammer ship. After a full career sailing from Great Britain to India and New Zealand, she became a salmon hauler on the Alaska to California route. Retired in 1926, she was not restored until 1962–63 and is now a seaworthy museum ship home-ported at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. She is the oldest ship still sailing regularly and also the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship still floating. The ship is both a California Historical Landmark and United States National Historic Landmark.
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This is the San Diego County Administration Center, a historic Beaux-Arts/Spanish Revival-style building in San Diego, California. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the building on July 16, 1938.