Bike riding

In the past month or so I finally started to ride my bike a bit more. I thought it’s about time to do some more movement and to take advantage of the summer, which won’t last for much longer now. So whenever I went to Munich I just put the bike in the car and I took it with me. And whenever the weather was nice, I would just go riding after work for 1-2 hours or so.

Munich is a city where the infrastructure is excellent for riding a bike. There are bike tracks almost everywhere on the roads and sidewalks. And in addition to that, there is the Isar river which goes through the city. On its banks there are bike paths all over the place, paved or gravel, so you can ride all day long if you want.

That is where I did most of my riding. My hotel is somewhere at the east city limit so I would just ride to the Isar (only 15 minutes away) and then I would just go either north or south along the Isar. And of course, I would always have my camera with me because the whole area is just beautiful. Just see for yourself, some of the pictures I made along the river:

I also thought it would be a good idea to track my rides and since my N85 has a GPS unit inside there is an easy solution for this. Nokia used to have a beta program called Sports tracker, a small application which would run on your phone and it would record your route, along with stats like speed, altitude, distance, etc. The program was discontinued but recently a new company picked it up and improved it a lot. The application itself has been improved and a new service was launched at http://www.sports-tracker.com. The routes tracked on your phone can be uploaded to the service and then you can view it on the website on a map with all kind of interesting statistics. The pictures you take with your phone during the ride can be also uploaded, so whoever looks at the website can see what it was like.

And the nice thing is, all this is free. The company makes their money by selling a heart rate transmitter belt which you can pair with your phone over bluetooth. Then the program can also record info about your heart beat which allows you to train more efficiently. While nice to have, it’s somewhat expensive and nobody forces you to buy it.

The program is of course not only for riding but for all kind of other workouts: walking, running, skying, working indoors, etc. For example, you can see what one of my  typical ride looks like.

Visit to Prague

Last week we took advantage of two free days and we went for a quick getaway to Prague. We left on thursday, we wanted to leave in the morning but it didn’t quite go as planned so we left a bit later in the day. But still, Prague is not that far from where we live and almost all the way is only autobahn so we got there in the afternoon.

That was not so bad in itself because the weather was rather bad that day, it rained a lot. So we only went a little bit to the city to look for some things at Tesco, one supermarket which is not present in Germany. Even though I did read a lot about this before, I still did the mistake of trying to park in the city center. That was a bad mistake, the timing was bad and traffic was horrible. We did find a place eventually but it was very annoying.

The next two days we had really beautiful weather. This time we parked some ways from the city center where parking was really cheap, at least compared to Germany (something like 60 cents per hour). And then we walked through the city. A LOT. We spent about 7-8 hours that day in the city and most of that was walking, except some breaks for food, stores and stuff. Even though we were kinda dead at the end of the day, we liked it a lot and it’s one of the best ways to actually “see” Prague.

The city is beautiful. Even though it also suffered some bombing from the americans during the 2nd world war, the damage was far less extensive in comparison to other cities which were bombed during that time. As a result one can see a lot of very beautiful old buildings in very good condition. You also see a lot of cobblestone roads which reminds of Bucharest, there are quite a few there too. But unlike Bucharest, Prague is a very clean city. It’s actually quite a lot cleaner than many German cities.

As prices go, Prague is in quite a lot of aspects cheaper than Germany. Food is cheaper, cigarettes are cheaper,  diesel/benzine  is the same, accommodation is much cheaper. As everywhere, you can pay hundreds of euros for a room if you really want to but the normal prices are much lower than in Germany. First night we stayed at a hotel closer to the city center for 55 € and second night we found another hotel, little bit farther from the center for only 39 €. That is for a double room, breakfast included. There is no way you find that anywhere in Germany, not in a city anyway.

On saturday, before we left for Germany, we went and visited one of the biggest flea markets in Prague. The place is huge indeed and we went there thinking we will  get loads of nice and cheap things. We did not, unfortunately. The flea market is big indeed but most of it is full of junk. I mean that’s what you usually find at flea market but here things were really junky.  So we were kinda disappointed with the whole huge flea market thingy. I did make some pictures though:

Anyway, overall it was really nice and we plan to go there again because there is a lot we haven’t seen. And of course, some of the pictures I made in the city:

Miscelaneous

Just things that happened recently, in no particular order.

• Last weekend it was really nice and warm outside, almost like a summer day. So we went to the nearby town of Waiblingen to walk a bit around. Waiblingen is the also the main city of the Kreis we live in and it has a nice historical city center. Yep, I made pictures too :)
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Next week is a really short one, thursday we have some sort of national holiday in Baden Württemberg and I took friday off so we have a long weekend. We decided we will go to Prague and spend two days there. None of us saw the city so far. I hope the weather will be nice.
• Last week I saw surfers in Munich:
  

  

  

Rheinturm

And yet another post which was sitting in my Drafts folder :)

Some 3 weeks ago I took a small trip to Düsseldorf  so I can visit the Rheinturm , a 240m tall telecommunication tower, the tallest building in the city. At a height of 170m there is a revolving restaurant and an observation desk from where you can have a very nice view of the city. There was a beautiful sunny day outside so I took some pictures from the tower itself and also from the nearby area.

Köln

These weeks/months, due to my project, I find myself again 4 days a week in the small and shitty lovely town of Rheinbach, somewhere in the west of Germany. Nobody really understands why one of the two main headquarters of the company had to be in this particular location but that’s beyond the point of this post.

In any case, I’ve been bringing my DSLR camera with me and I tried to do some small photo trips in the neighborhood. I was less than impressed by the potatoes fields around the town but there are 2 big cities within driving distance: Bonn and Köln. I’ve been to Bonn a couple of weeks ago, around the university area and it was not so bad. Yesterday I decided to drive to Köln and see if I can get on the observation deck of the “Köln Triangle” tower (103m high) and take some panorama pictures.

That’s the place. I kinda planned to go to the much taller TV tower but since a couple of years, the top platform is closed.

It’s only a 50 minute drive to Köln, most of it on the autobahn, so I started right after I got off work. 10 minutes later I got into a really bad snowstorm on the autobahn and my mood kinda dropped, there was no way I could take any pictures in that weather. But I didn’t have anything better to do so I pushed on and luckily I got out of the storm and found out there was none of the white crap in the city itself.

The tower has it’s own underground parking, which was cheap enough. I went up up, paid the 3 euros fee at a machine, got into the elevator, arrived on top and got out on the platform. Then got quickly back inside to actually close my jacket, put gloves on and some on my head ’cause it was cold as shit up there.

I quickly found out that this is not the ideal place for pictures. All around the platform edge there is a 3m tall glass fence and while you can see through it, of course, it’s not good for taking pictures because of  the reflections. There are also markings on the glass sections, with the building names which you can see in that particular direction. I  kinda expected a fence of sorts but I was hoping that with the help of the tripod, I could get above it. There is none of that, the visitors must be secure! The visitors must be watched too, there are security cameras all over that platform.

The view is indeed impressive, you can see the whole city from up there. And it’s probably even better when the sky is clear. I did take some pictures but due to the weather and glass reflections, they are not that great. First 4 are HDR pictures (made in Photomatix, 3 different exposures per picture), I tried to bring out some details.

I want to go up on the TV tower in Stuttgart, which has two observations decks at 150m and 153m and has a total height of 216m. But I have to wait for better weather.

Drive home

Whenever I am home, on Mondays usually, I drive Freya to work. It’s really not so fun to go there in the morning with the bus and train. Just some pictures I took on my way back, a 30 minute drive. No, I didn’t take my eyes off the road. No, I didn’t ran anybody over. Yes, I can take pictures and drive at the same time ;-)