Indian Summer

A 3-week vacation started at the beginning of September – during which, for various reasons, we didn’t go anywhere unfortunately – just ended and we both started working again and we both got swamped with stuff which backed up during our leave. I guess now we could use a real vacation where we could get away and relax for a bit ;-) Well, maybe in the Christmas vacation or next year.

After a period of colder weather, it got surprisingly nice outside and we have now what they call Indian Summer. It’s very nice outside, no clouds, blue sky and temperatures above 23 degrees. A bit of mini summer at the end of autumn. Bit foggy and chilly in the mornings but after that quite nice. It’s supposed to last until at least end of next week or so. So today we got out and we went to two Flee markets, one in Esslingen and one in Stuttgart.

Freya is a big fan of flee markets. I was slightly skeptic at first (didn’t really go to flee markets before I met her) but I have to admit that among the impressive  quantity of junk she did manage to find quite a lot of nice things. Or things she restored and made them look a lot better than simply nice. Like the table below, for example. For the table itself we drove all the way to Frankfurt but the 4 chairs we got cheap from one of the local flee markets:

After putting quite a lot of work in it, now it looks like this and it replaced our living room table:

It’s actually a heavy wood old english table and the whole set, nicely fixed as it is now, would sell for quite a bit should we want to. Which is not gonna happen, we like it and it’s gonna stay in the living room.

Unfortunately we didn’t find anything at the flee market in Esslingen and not much at the one in Stuttgart. But at least it was really nice outside and afterwards we lamed around a little bit in Stuttgart. Made pictures too:

Bad Cannstatt

Bad Cannstatt, the largest city district of Stuttgart. We took advantage of the (somewhat) nicer weather and went for a walk in the old part of Bad Cannstatt.

The second picture represents the oldest residential building in Stuttgart, it was built in 1463. That’s old.

Stuttgart by night

Königstrasse, one of the main shopping streets in Stuttgart.

Stuttgart21

Stuttgart21 is a zoning project which has as purpose the complete redesign of the main train station in Stuttgart, Germany. As part of the project, the station will be transformed from a terminus station to a pass-through station and all of it will be moved underground, below the current station. A total of 57km of new track will be laid, out of which 30km as high-speed track (designed for speeds  of minimum 200km/h and up to 350km/h). Since the city of Stuttgart sits in a valley and it’s surrounded by hills, a total of 16 tunnels (around 33km) and 18 bridges will have to be built as well. Parts of the the old (and recently renovated) main station building are also to be demolished, even though they fall under the law which protects old buildings.

The project will be funded by the Deutsche Bahn, the Baden Württemberg state and the federal government and it will transform the whole Stuttgart area and mainly the city center in a construction site for years and years. The initial costs were 2.6 billions Euros and now they are up to 4 billion Euros.

Needless to say, there is a huge opposition for this whole project for years now. Despite all the opposition, the project went ahead and recently work started at the land clearing, demolishing and tree cutting near the main station building. That is when the people started to get out in the streets and there have been a lot of demonstrations, people tried to stop the demolition crews, many of them tying themselves to the trees about to be cut and so on. Yesterday night things  got rather violent and the riot police intervened against a legal  demonstration with water guns, tear gas and pepper spray. Many people got hurt, among which a lot of young kids who were also taking part of a legal demonstration.

People are now in uproar and supportive demonstrations are taking place in many German cities and not only. A new bigger demonstration was planned for tonight and since Stuttgart is Freya’s hometown, she is not amused about the whole issue (that is a rather huge understatement). I am also not indifferent at all towards the whole issue, so we drove to Stuttgart and took part in the demonstration. Depending of the source, there were between 50.000 and 100.000 people present, the sight of so many people in one place was overwhelming. The demonstration was peaceful this time and at least until we left, nothing happened.

Yes, I made pictures too but they don’t do justice to what happened there:

Still alive

As I was saying earlier, last week I had vacation. We didn’t go anywhere, we stayed at home because my parents came visiting. We had a somewhat busy schedule, as can be seen from the pictures below:

The little one was the guest of honor, if I can say that, so we went to all kind of appropriate places. It was quite nice at Tripsdrill, an entertainment park near Stuttgart, the oldest in Germany. This year they celebrated 80 years since opening. It’s quite big, we spent a whole day there and we didn’t get to see everything.

We also spent two days in the Fairytale Garden, another theme park for kids which inside the huge gardens from the Ludwigsburg Palace. There we saw over 40 scenes from well known children stories such as “Hansel and Gretel“, “Little Red Riding Hood” and so on. It was very nice, we had good weather and Diana had a great time.

The holiday was a chance for my parents to finally see what The Cave (that’s our house) looks like, I hope they were not too scared. We would’ve liked to finish with the renovation before we have visitors but it’s too much work. That does not mean the house is a construction site but some things are just not done. Oh well, what can you do.

Tuesday I went together with a guy from work and two of his irish friends to see Terminator: Salvation:

What can I say, nice special effects but I was not overly impressed. The first two movies were a lot better, I would say. Maybe also because the rating was just PG-13 as opposed to R for the first two movies (strong sci-fi action and violence, and for language and brief nudity). Of course, the reason was money I guess, PG-13 means a larger target audience. But it’s like one of the irish dudes said: if you just shutdown your brain and want to see pretty colored lights, then the movie is quite good ;-)

Today and maybe tomorrow I can relax a little bit but after that there is more work to be done. Stuff to do in the house and the whole next week I have some training class for my next Cisco exam. At least I get to do that remotely from home so it’s not that bad.

Dacia Bridges

No, it’s not that Dacia, nor this one, but the band “Dacia Bridges“. They have a concert saturday evening at a jazz club in Stuttgart and we got a reservation there. I hope it’s going to be interesting ;-)