The events of 9/11 in 2001 now lie 14 years behind us. On the way to SFO airport today on one of the bridge overpasses on Highway 24, we noticed that the overpass had been decorated with lots of large and small American flags, with people waving at the cars below.
Security at the airport was not visibly tighter than normal, but on the plane the flight attendants were strict about not allowing passengers to stand at the front airplane restroom. During the flight one of the passengers in first class had some medical problem and fainted, but a doctor on board seemed to be able to eventually revive him. After we had touched down at Seattle airport, I think we were all just happy to be back on solid ground.
This picture by Gordon Donovan, and from his website gordondonovan.com. The we page says ‘In what has become one of the most moving — and visible — 9/11 memorials, two giant pillars of light near where the World Trade Center’s twin towers once stood were turned on in lower Manhattan this week to mark the 14th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Tribute in Light art installation consists of 88 searchlights that create two vertical columns of light’.
There’s a big burrito inside the Chipotle bag. The printed text on the side says ‘Have you ever run into someone with no teeth, and asked ‘What happened?’ – a joke by comedian Anziz Ansari.
I discovered a Chipotle franchise near our office here, and now I go there at least once a week to pick up a Mission burrito. These are also known as a San Francisco burrito or a Mission-style burrito and is a type of burrito that first became popular during the 1960s in the Mission District of San Francisco. These burritos are bigger than the Mexican ones, and have additional ingredients beyond the basic rice, beans and meat.
I did stay up last night to watch the start of the new Late Show. Host Stephen Colbert made fun of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s denouncement of Nabisco for closing an Oreo cookie factory in Chicago and moving the operation to Mexico. (Oreos will still be made in three U.S. states).
P.S. I can report that it is still high summer in California : it was 100 °F (38°C) as I got into my rental car at 7.30 pm tonight ! .. and I see the projected high for Thursday here in Walnut Creek is 106 °F (41°C).
Stephen Colbert ate at least four Oreo cookies from the packet while talking about it.
I chose a window seat so that I can try to sleep a little on the early flight out to San Francisco on Tuesday morning.
The Labor Day holiday here in the USA is called the ‘last day’ of summer (unofficially). The kids have to go back to school, and the weather starts to change. For a weekly airplane commuter such as me, the difference is noticeable at the airport as well : fewer people and I might luck out with an open seat next to mine once in awhile on board.
Funnyman of The Colbert Report fame*, Stephen Colbert, is about to assume the role of the host of the Late Show on CBS, this Tuesday. (David Letterman retired from the Late Show in May after being the longest-serving late night talk show host in American television history). The Late Show is actually too late for me (it starts at 11.30 pm! – yikes), but I will definitely make an effort to check out the first shows hosted by Stephen Colbert.
*The Colbert Report was a satirically ‘conservative’ comedy show hosted by Stephen Colbert, but he once remarked during an interview, ‘I’m not someone with a particular political ax to grind. I’m a comedian. I love hypocrisy’.
Stephen Colbert ‘posing’ for the home page of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
origin of bumbershoot bumber- (alteration of umbr- in umbrella) + -shoot (alteration of -chute in parachute)
first known use: circa 1896
It’s Bumbershoot 2015* this weekend in Seattle, the annual music festival by the Space Needle. Late Saturday there was somewhat of a downpour right here in the city, and the attendees had to take out their bumbershoots as well (if they had any). My little patch of lawn in front of the house needs to green up after the hot and dry summer, so the rain was very welcome.
*Confession : I know almost none of the bands in the lineup. There is Deep Creep, Flosstradamus, Hey Marseilles and The Moth and the Flame and many others !
These are different kinds of South African proteas. I was a baby and taking a nap with my older sibling when my mom took the rare time of peace and quiet to paint this, she told me. It’s an oil painting on canvas.This is a pastel on paper drawing, hand drawn from an old photograph of my paternal grandfather. (My mom is the artist).Another oil on canvas painting, from a fishing village at Waenhuiskrans in South Africa. My mom did this one in her fourth year as an art student in 1958.
I could finally unpack the paintings that I had shipped from South Africa that had arrived on Monday. One is a pastel drawing of my paternal grandfather, and the other two are oil paintings.
We’re in the final stretch of our project. We are fixing defects and making functionality improvements for the pilot solution, and then the final solution has to be rolled out to all of the rest of the target users. The next few weeks will be a busy time, since the full user group and the data conversions that support them is about ten times the size of the pilot user group and their data.
The view of the International Terminal at San Francisco airport. I had just dropped off the rental car, and I was on the little ‘air train’ that is taking us from the rental car facility to the airport building.
a market in which prices are falling, encouraging selling.
Some financial analysts argue that we’re in the early stages of a full-fledged bear market. Well, we will just have to wait and see. Many of today’s investors here in the United States (and as a consequence, the world at large) have lived through two fairly nasty bears: a decline of 58% from 2000 to 2002 and a 57% plunge from 2007 to 2009.
I saw this ‘bear’ beer in the grocery store tonight .. Anchor California Lager® is a re-creation of a historic American beer that was brewed during the California Gold rush.
The Shepherd Gate Clock on the wall outside the Royal Greenwich Observatory building in Greenwich, Greater London. Installed by Charles Shepherd in 1852, the clock features a 24-hour analogue dial.
It was not too hard to get up very early for my 6.00 am flight out to California on Tuesday! .. since I was still more or less on Greenwich Time. But I needed a few cups of coffee to get me through the afternoon, of course.
I just thought today of a special shipment I had sent from South Africa, and wondered when it will arrive here in the States, when the doorbell rang. There it was, with the DHL Worldwide Express courier : three bubble-wrapped paintings bundled together with FRAGILE stickers all over it. The air freight cost was not cheap at US$400 (actually it was, a previous quote had ran well over $1,000) – but the paintings had been done by my mom a very long time ago, had been in my parents’ house in Stellenbosch for many years, and so have a high sentimental value. I promise I will show the paintings once I open up the wrapping ! I am shipping myself out to San Francisco in the morning and still have to pack!
The departure lobby at Frankfurt Airport has big shiny pillars! (And I have too much luggage! But I like to take two bags for long trips, that’s just how I travel).
I had to hustle a little this morning to get to gate Z69 for Seattle at Terminal Z at Frankfurt airport on time. Several little travel time breaks went against me, and at the airport the automated baggage check machine would not let me check two bags (grrr) and I had to flag an attendant down. The extra bag fee is €75 ($84), said she – and yikes! no, I’m not paying that, I said. We got that squared away when I remembered I had a card up my sleeve : a Gold Star Alliance card. They waive the fee for a second bag. The passport check and security check was still ahead, but I made it to the gate in good time. The flight headed out northwest, across Greenland, Canada and some 9 hours later, made its descent in the Pacific Northwest.
Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof (main station). It’s a short ride on an S-bahn (regional train) from here to Frankfurt Flughafen (airport), just 10 mins or so.Here’s the 747-400 that took us to Seattle, parked at gate Z69. I sat in the back of the bus. Check out the cool maintenance hangar in the background. There were several other US-bound flights from the Z gates that I walked by, leaving at almost the same time as mine : to Miami, to Houston, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles.
My angry Tyrannosaurs Rex, that I had just purchased at the toy dept of Galleria Kaufhof, refused to be stuffed into the suitcase .. and ended up being hand-carried onto the airplane.
I am staying overnight in Frankfurt before my trip back to Seattle. I packed in one last walk and a shopping spree at the Galleria Kaufhof (nothing too expensive, just a few items), and squashed everything into my carry-on bag. Marriott allows me to check out late, and so I did, at 1.59 pm (I was to check-out by 2 pm). It’s not so easy to get from the hotel to Tegel Airport with public transportation, but I did it anyway. It’s ride a U-bahn ride on the U2, step over the the U12, and get out at Zoologischer Garten. From there, there is an express bus to the airport – except it was a little late today (so even in Germany buses run late sometimes). I had plenty of time at the airport, though.
The scene at Tegel Airport today.This building is the Berliner Philharmonie .. I see from on-line pictures I should have walked all around it, to the main entrance – but hey, it looks very interesting from all sides.The building at another angle.As I looked down Hardenbergstrasse, I immediately recognized the damaged church building of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, never rebuilt after WWII, as a reminder of the war. I will have to go look at it closely next time !
Here is the damaged church building after World War II.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from all the places I checked into and checked out around the center of Berlin.
The Sony Center with its spectacular inside-outside partial roof is close to Potsdamer Platz. I read that the whole business of rebuilding Potsdamer Platz and awarding projects has been the subject of much controversy from the beginning, and still not everyone applauds how the district was commercialised and replanned.Artwork on the manhole cover. I have to confess I cannot name all the structures on it .. just the Berlin TV Tower, the Brandenburg Gate and the Bundestag.A subtle advertising poster showing the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin TV Tower from the you-know-who beverage company !I went through Gleisdreieck U-bahn station many times the last few days. I love the metalwork on the gate.This plaque is of the House of Representatives building on ZImmerstrasse.This picture is a propagandistic wall painting at the entrance of the Bundesministerium der Finanzen on Wilhelmstrasse, promoting socialism in the DDR. I took a series of pictures to capture the whole thing.. more of the picture... more of the picture... more of the picture... and the final part of the picture.
Here’s my Reichstag building picture. As one can tell, it has been around a long time,(since 1894 actually), but was badly damaged in WWII and only fully restored with a new dome and all in 1999, so that it once again became the meeting place of the German parliament as the modern Bundestag.Yes, yes, I know the Brandenburg Gate has been photographed a million times, but here is my fresh picture from Thursday night! The gate is an 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch, and one of the best-known landmarks of Germany. Having suffered considerable damage in World War II, the Brandenburg Gate was fully restored from 2000 to 2002 [Wikipedia].Let’s see .. four hazelnuts on top of six pillars .. what could that be? Billboard from chocolate maker Ritter Sport in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. ‘Da kiekste, wa?’ is a local Berlin phrase. Translated into ‘authentic German’/ English it is: ‘Da guckst du, was?’/ ‘You’re looking, huh?’- as a reaction of the amazed/surprised expression on the face of someone else.I love the pointy roof on this building close to Alexander Platz .. not sure what’s going on inside, though.Here’ the U-bahn platforms at Alexander Platz. It also has an S-bahn (regional train) platform.I was fascinated by the clean-up crew sucking up the trash out of all the spherical trash cans around Alexander Platz.Here’s the outside of Alexander Platz. Formerly part of East Berlin, this town square certainly has not seen the money and effort poured into it that Potsdam Platz has, but this is being remedied right now to some extent.Here’s the Berliner Dom, the Berlin Dome Church in the center of the city near Alexander Platz.This is the Humboldt Box, a temporary ‘info pavilion’ (it looks so very German-engineered), to provide to public with information and updates about extensive construction and expansion in the Berlin city center around Alexander Platz, the Berlin Dome and the Rathaus.The entire area around the stately old dame of the Berlin Rathaus building (town hall, completed in 1869) is under construction. They even have tunnel boring machine in place similar to Seattle’s Bertha boring machine, to extend the U-bahn network.
The modern building for the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station) opened in 2006, all glass and steel.Artwork at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. See the man in the horse? And then there’s even another horse motif in the cover of the cylinder in the center.
I love this clock inside the Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main train station). I want one for my kitchen (maybe just a little smaller!).Here is an ‘ampelmann’(traffic light man) decorative lamp, invoking East Germany/ DDR nostalgia (is there such a thing?). This little man with the hat figure was widely used in traffic lights in the old DDR. After unification the DDR ampelmann figure proved so popular it was put into traffic lights all over the city.This is the new building of the Deutsches Technikmuseum that opened in 2005. The old part of the museum is in a historic brick building. The two hours I spent there was much too short ! (I like the street sweeper machine cleaning the street ! .. can the city of Seattle buy a few, please?).This is a 1942 Lufthansa airplane model (so must have been just after WWII) .. complete with the the frame that could hoist the engine up and out for maintenance,I’m on the 4th floor looking down all the way to a wooden ship that was unearthed and rebuilt (I did not take notes of its age! Sorry ! and then almost at eye-level there is an old single man-copter.This ‘cyclops’ automobile is a 1923 design. It had 6 cylinders and could do 95 km/h (60 mph).How about this really retro desk telephone? Built by L.M. Ericsson & Co in Sweden in 1895 !And of course I want one of these spherical TVs .. only a small number were made, and sold in Sloane Square, London, in 1970.And this fantastic archetypical mechanical computing machine is a Z1 was built in 1938. It has an arithmetic unit, a memory unit and input and output units. The program that drove it was coded on punched tape.
It looks to me from all the tourist buses and hubbub around Checkpoint Charlie* that it is Berlin’s top tourist destination, beating out even the very popular Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building. I did not make it into the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (the line was too long), but there was a series of chronological, annotated pictures on display outdoors which I found very moving.
*Charlie is the ‘C’ in the NATO phonetic alphabet, not a person’s name. For more information that I could possibly document here, check out the excellent Wikipedia entries for Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.
Here is West Germany and East Germany after World War II. West Berlin was a free city and political enclave surrounded by East Berlin and East Germany that existed between 1949 and 1990. It was located some 100 miles east of the East/West German border and was accessible by land from West Germany only by a narrow rail and highway corridor (from Wikipedia). [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].And here is greater Berlin with its four sectors : American, British, French, USSR [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].Families were separated by the very closing of the East-West sector boundary. The wall was built to stop an on-going and massive migration of people from the East to the West. [Picture from a display in the Potsdamer Platz Arcade, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the unification in Germany ].
The next few pictures are from an outdoor display at Checkpoint Charlie. This one taken in 1961, so shortly after construction and completion of the wall.This picture shows that the Wall really is not a single ‘wall’ but several walls that create no-man’s land death strip areas that were patrolled by armed guards. Look for the ‘you are here’ caption in the middle of the picture, the location of the Checkpoint Charlie gate. Developers demolished the East German checkpoint watchtower in 2000, but a substitute symbolic guard house is still there.Protesters in 1988 with the names of their family and friends that have been jailed, presumably for attempting to cross the wall.The fall of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November 1989.This is an outdoor museum two blocks from the Checkpoint, called Topography des Terrors. It is dedicated to the history of the Wall and its victims. Alongside the edge is a remaining section of the Wall.The Checkpoint Charlie Museum.Another picture of the Museum Building (is it my imagination, or do I see ominous dictator-Communist rule edges in the architecture?).Here is the little guardhouse model complete with sandbags and ‘guards’. (They are resumably working for the museum. They accept payments from any tourists that want to pose with them for a picture).This is a section of the wall in its original place (in a park nearby Potsdamer Platz), but now with artwork painted on it.
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).
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.Here’s a look at the inside of the airport.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.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.And another friendly bear to welcome me at the hotel.
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.
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!).Here’s the flight tracker en route to Frankfurt with 2 hours of the 10 hours of flight time left.
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).
The surf shop is closed ! .. but I like the artwork.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).
Stellenbosch 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’.
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.The JH Neethling Building houses the Faculty of Agrisciences.This Jewish synagogue is on Van Rynveveld Street, and is almost 100 years old.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.These giant ficus trees are at the back of the main administration building on Victoria Street.A building in Plein Street displaying the typical Cape Dutch architecture that prevailed in the 17th and 18th century in the Cape Province.
On the way to SFO airport today on one of the bridge overpasses on Highway 24, we noticed that the overpass had been decorated with lots of large and small American flags, with people waving at the cars below.
