Dutch skating world on edge as 11-city tour may be announced

What the hell am I doing in Paris?

Talk about horrible timing.  Don’t make me wrong, I like being here, my old friend and I are having a great time and we’ve still got lots of  things lined up to do, BUT:

The famous Dutch 11-city skating tour might be announced this week!

There have been thousands of volunteers working to prepare the course.  All that remains is the go-ahead that the ice is safe enough with an overall thickness of at least 15cm.  If the race actually happens, 16,000 people will take part for the first time in 15 years.  The canals have frozen enough to skate a couple of times since then, but never enough to allow the Dutch to re-open this legendary race.

Not that I’d actually be foolish enough to punish myself with more than 200 km of skating in one go.  My  legs were rubber after about 70km three years ago, and that was just leisurely sliding all day.  These guys go flat out – the record is under seven hours!

I have to arrange time off to get over there.  It has to stay cold another few days after I get back.  Damn you, Paris.

Hamburg car burnings hit close to home

A wave of car torchings that started in Berlin a couple of years ago and spilled over to Hamburg hit close to home over the weekend.  This burned out lump of charred Mercedes was sitting just around the corner from our place when I came across it this past Sunday afternoon.

There have been well over 300 car burnings in Hamburg so far this year.  It’s even worse in Berlin, where more than 500 have gone up in flames.  Police are powerless to do anything about it because it’s completely random who’s doing it and for what reason.  Putting an extra 200 Hamburg police on night patrols didn’t work out, so now they’ve scaled them back to 20, with just as much effect. 

Some say there’s a political motivation behind the attacks, that it’s the marginalised of society roving around getting their kicks watching fat-cat Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches reduced to scrap.   But there’s no pattern to the burnings or their timing, and there are never any notes left behind.  A couple of yahoos here and there have been charged and thrown in jail, but it just keeps on happening.  

We always thought we were living a decent life in a safe and modern country.   But having once again been the victims of theft and adding up everything that’s going wrong right in our midst, sometimes we get the feeling we’re living in some besieged Middle Ages village, its citizens left to fend for themselves and wondering when the next attack will hit.

Cologne on high alert as Germany expat bloggers gather

by Dirk Dajerk

COLOGNE (CP)  A special task force has been set up in the western German riverside city of Cologne to prepare for what officials are calling “a catastrophe waiting to happen” as Germany’s band of English-speaking expatriate bloggers prepares to descend on the city in late October.  Police have already booked reinforcements from neighbouring Bonn and Aachen to help cope with the threat.

“They trash practically every place they visit,” moaned Cologne police desk sergeant Pensell Puscha.  ”Just look at what they did in Dresden.”

Now generally known as the “Dresden Disaster,” in public safety circles, the 2007 bloggers’ meetup/donnybrook at the eastern German city on the Elbe is now used in training sessions as an example of how not to prepare for a visit from Germany’s English-speaking bloggers.

“Dresden was hit totally by surprise,” said Cologne city counsellor Bieriz Mylaff.  ”By the time we called in for extra help, the rioting was totally out of control.  We’re definitely not going to let that happen to us.”

The annual bloggers’ meetup has grown from an informal gathering eight years ago of five online droolers desperate for the real-life company of anyone willing to tolerate for more than five minutes their tedious whining about the trials of expat life to an unwieldy gaggle of at least 25 who plan the event down to the last triviality for months in advance on three different platforms: their own blogs, an event website and discussion board, and now Facebook, that death of all blogs.  That’s not to mention the usual slurry of time-sucking drivel on Twitter.

“You’d think they could just decide they’re going to get together somewhere and have a few beers, but no-ooo,” lamented Cologne police detective Slyck Dyck. “From the morning after the last meetup ends they start planning the next one.  They plan side trips with Umlauts.  They plan Friday night dinners and guided tours the next morning.  They kick back for the afternoon, but that has to be planned, too.  They gather for a Saturday evening dinner and then go out to a frickin’ gay bar!  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“Then they all have this thing they call brunch when they’re all hung over on the Sunday.   They even make allowances for kids, the annoying little brats.”

The choice of Cologne as a meeting point and the timing itself has been the subject of controversy ever since both were decided months ago in an online poll.

“Cologne?  Nothing but a massive pile of bricks, bells and gargoyles surrounded by whackos, clowns and an ugly shopping centre,” lamented one blogger from Hamburg.  ”I haven’t even considered going there for years.  That part of Germany is so full of whores, they outnumber the cars!  Even the neighbouring city of Bonn has decided to take action, setting up parking meters so the city can recoup a few losses on the clean-up.

“And while we’re at it, what about the timing?  Why hold it at the end of October? It’s damn near winter!  Didn’t we decide a few years ago to hold it closer to summer so we could at least have half a chance to enjoy a warm evening or two?  November in Dresden, we had to burn buildings just to keep from freezing to death.”

Critics are also pointing out the dangers of just walking around Cologne, citing the tendency of entire buildings to suddenly collapse in on themselves, swallowing up irreplaceable manuscripts by, among others, Karl Marx and Heinrich Böll –  along with the odd human life or two.  They’re calling for safety checks to ensure visitors won’t end up in some sort of black hole.

Feeling stung by the criticism, organisers are scrambling to reassure attendees as well as the general public.

“We’re gonna have like, fun and stuff, so they should just lighten up, you know?” said one organiser.  ”Besides, if they don’t like it they can just stay home.”

The Cologne engineering department is taking no chances as the group is set to storm the upper reaches of their famous cathedral sometime on the Saturday. “We’ve installed structural reinforcements, so we’re reasonably confident the building will withstand the extra burden of the lot of them humping up those stairs to the upper reaches,” said chief city engineer Helmut Askew.  ”We’ve also taken the precaution of installing audio reminders at every level suggesting they look up from their smartphones once in a while at the amazing artwork surrounding them.”

Participants are expected to hold a vigil in memory of one member who has been to every meetup since the beginning, but will no longer be attending.  J, or J for short, has finally decided that Germany – or at least Bonn – indeed does suck, and has voted with his feet accordingly.

J’s absence will most be felt on Saturday evening when the evening’s traditional gay bar outing will take place.

“He never really used to know whether we were in a gay bar,” said one blogger, “and so we had to remind him that yes, indeed, we were in one, even though he might not have realised it at the time.”

Other absentees include Eurotrippen, holder of much of the blame for the 2007 Dresden Disaster.  Having lived the expat life for a number of years, Eurotrippen and brood returned to the States in 2009 to become ex-expats, then returned to Germany not long after to become ex-ex-expats, but are now back in the States, finally having decided that the status of ex-ex-ex-expat is what they enjoy the most.  For now.

Any illusions the gathering is attended by all of Germany’s English-language blogging scene will be shattered by a brief Google search.  Perennial hold-outs include the culprits behind Observing Hermann, Planet Germany, Charlotte’s Web, Ich werde ein Berliner and some guy in Cologne itself who calls his kid His Holiness.  The Irish Berliner, voted in an informal poll of one as Germany’s most outstanding blog, is a newcomer to the no-show crowd.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” said one Cologne officer. “The damage would be much worse if they showed up, too.”

hamster flashback

Socke was a nice enough hamster.  Couldn’t skateboard worth a crap though.

Who wants to read yesterday’s news, anyway?

It was beautiful to watch, but today’s a new day, Obama says bin Laden’s dead, and I’ve got work to do.

Migrating cranes in northern Germany

Lofty

 

 

 

Ensemble

 

 

Formation

 

 

Migration

 

Hunger

 

Searching

 

Space

 

Flight

 

 

to

 

 

warmth

 

 

and

 

 

Freedom

Why we said no to Google Street View

Call it Blurmany if you will, call us uncool and throw eggs at our apartment building if you love Google so much, but I’m very happy to say I live here.

It didn’t take long for us to decide to say no to Street View.  After all, we already have an unlisted telephone number that’s kept our place reasonably quiet since we applied for it about four years ago.  We no longer get crank calls from drunk jerks in the middle of the night – usually students my wife teaches or once taught – bored out of their minds and playing around with their cellphones.  We also never get telemarketing calls.  I remember in Hong Kong we used to have to rip off five or 10 feet of paper every day from all the junk faxes until we made HongKong Telecom change our number.

With Google Street view, the angle was more subtle.  It’s very unlikely you’ll get hassles just because you’re visible online, and even less likely you’ll be burgled, the politician’s scare tactic of choice when this whole thing blew up in the German media a few months ago.  And as for getting caught sunbathing on the balcony – well, that’s obviously an argument put forth by those who don’t know how Street View works.

Sure it’s great for businesses, but what possible benefit could we, as private individuals living in a private household, obtain by letting Google put up a photo of the place where we spend the greater part of our lives for the whole world to see?   What have we to gain by it?

I could understand it if we were the owners of some boutique called snotty and desperate for a little free on-line publicity, we’d even pay for the right to have our store burst onto the screen with arrows, flashing  lights and pop-ups.

But here I am, some duff who was always taught to be wary of those on the sell side.  Since Google is basically a multi-billion dollar advertising company with the world’s most powerful search engine attached, why on earth would I want to help them?  What’s in it for me?

Even if we were to  ignore the accusations of WiFi network data theft and other questionable goals as their octopus-camera cruised the streets, the ONLY benefit to Street View that we could think if – and the only argument I found online in favour of not opting out – was that perhaps friends and relatives living far away could look you up.

Well, whoop-de-fucking-do.  One photo from the ground floor and a blanket email and that’s taken care of.

Google Street View is merely one more brick in the infrastructure for a much wider array of capabilities not even invented yet that could further erode what few avenues of privacy we have left.   Maybe it’s like trying to turn back the tide, but if we can spit back at it a little, maybe some good will come out of it.

Woman on bus in Cairo

I’m also going to be on the road for a while…

The great stork migration through the Sinai

The bus trip from Dahab back to Cairo was one of the worst we’ve ever had, but one thing made it all worthwhile: the chance to see hundreds of storks on their annual migration northward from Africa to eastern Europe via the Sinai Desert.

Because they’re taken through the window of a bus travelling at 100km/hr, these photos aren’t the best.  You don’t usually see more than one or two storks at a time, so I’d love to have been able to stop for a minute just to stand there and marvel at the spectacle of these enormous birds swirling high in the air above the flat sand and ocean, but we just kept trundling along, our ears bleeding from the endless blaring of Friday prayers from the driver’s radio in competition with the grossly violent DVD he’d cranked up – for whose benefit we’ll never know.  Certainly not the young mother behind us, whose pleas to turn down the racket because her thrashing, screaming two-year-old couldn’t get to sleep fell on deaf ears.  Mind you, he was OK with jamming on the brakes and yelling at a passenger stupid enough to light up a smoke in the bathroom – the one wafting nauseating waves of piss throughout the bus every so often – he was OK with yacking on the cell phone and even text-messaging on the highway, and he didn’t hesitate to drop us off in a huff at a Cairo bus stop miles from our scheduled destination forcing us to get involved in yet another taxicab haggle we’d thought we’d be spared.

But the birds made up for it all.

The sight reminded us of another stork spectacle we were also lucky enough to witness on a bike trip along the former border with East Germany last year around this time: storks mating in a chimney-top nest.  I’m happy to re-publish this photo:

To end, a stork swarm over the Sinai courtesy of YouTube:

Notes on skating on the Alster, Hamburg

It was great to be out on natural ice again, feel sun on the face for the first time in weeks, hear the rhythmic scrape of the blades  and send a few slapshots skidding across to untracked terrain.

The whole Alster is frozen over, deep enough to hold the dozen or so strollers and skaters already there when I was lacing up at 9:30 in the morning, and the more than 1,000 who must have been crawling over the surface by the time I left about five hours later.

But as you can already tell from the photo at left, the ice is lousy.   It’s been cold for six weeks, but in the meantime we’ve had snow and rain.  The first layer before Christmas got covered in snow, and then after a bit more cold it warmed up and rained for about a day before the lastest plunge to -15 Celcius the last few nights.

So although the deep cold has made the ice safe enough to skate on except under the bridges at either end of the lake, the surface is mottled.   White and frothy as frozen cappuccino in some places, chunky in others, you have to skate and skate and skate before you find a spot that’s shiny enough to tell you the surface is smooth, and the skating a little less effort.  I finally found the sweet spot right in the middle after a couple of hours’ searching.  It was the size of a normal hockey arena, so I dropped my bag and just stayed there, circling around as you normally do when you’re penned up on rink.

I was watching the local news last night and they said an 11-year-old boy broke through and was taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia.  He must have ventured too close to those bridges, because the ice there isn’t just thin, it peters out to open water!

That’s why a dozen or so members of Hamburg’s finest were out setting up barriers to keep the riff-raff away from the danger zones. By the time these fellows got to work setting up a wide perimeter around the north- and south-side bridges, I was ready to head home and leave the ice to the strollers, the ladies skating along with baby carriages, the over-dressed shoppers diverted from the stores of Mönckebergstrasse, the golfers.

The golfers?  FWT?

Don’t ask me.  Last time I heard of golfing in winter it was 1978 and I was pissing myself laughing with a friend to a scratchy vinyl album of Canadian humourist Nestor Pistor Live at the Prince George World Championship Snow Golf.

But there they were, getting their photos taken teeing off.

As Deutschland über Elvis points out so well, if this is Germany, the signage should be in English, right?

I hate to compare, but if only it were as good as the canals of Holland were a year ago, if only it had frozen as one uniform sheet of ice to a rich, thick, black surface, I’d be back out there this morning adding to the aches and pains I worked up yesterday.

And finally: if you’re anywhere near Hamburg, they just might open up the Alster to Alstereisvergnügnen – Ice Enjoyment??   All it will take is a couple more centimetres of ice – pure, bubble-free ice – and they’ll open it up to an outdoor festival on the ice.  The last time it froze thick enough to do that was January, 1997, when a million people thronged the surface for a three-day party.  I saw some archive aerial footage at work – can’t find it on youtube unfortunately – but it was awe-inspiring.  This one gives you an idea though: