I still remember hearing this song for the first time and thinking what an incredibly long way away it seemed.
Soon it will be only 13 years – about as long as I’ve lived in Hamburg.
Or does a really cold winter just make you feel old?
Archive for the 'youtube' Category
Of all the weird ideas, right? Who ever heard of waterskiing or wakeboarding without a boat? I certainly hadn’t up until not too long ago. Having learned to water ski the usual way on summer afternoons at our Canadian prairie lake, it never occurred to me there was any other way to get pulled around the water’s surface.
But the not-so-little-any-more red-haired girl came home from a birthday party a while back with tales of waterskiing at a lake only a few minutes’ train ride from our place. “There’s no boat – you’re towed along by a cable,” she said. “It was fun, but I never got out of the water.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “We’ll go back this summer and we’ll give it another try.”
It’s not at easy as it looks.
Once fitted out with your wetsuit and gear you stand in line for the lift, side-stepping down the ramp to the launch area. When it’s your turn on deck you stand on a plastic grass pad and grab ahold of the handle.
The operator sitting in a booth beside you gives newcomers like us a few tips on how to get ready.
“Stand on that red stripe, sit right down on the back of the skis, and make sure you don’t get pulled too far forward when the rope tightens.”
Sounds all right, but once you get going? The contraption that sends you skimming around the lake is not much more than a huge cable loop strung around five pulleys suspended about 10 metres above the water. 
As your rope goes around each pulley – assuming you actually manage to launch OK - you have to position yourself just right in the water so that not too much slack builds up, otherwise the force of the rope tightening again after it rounds the pulley will jolt you forward – if you manage to stay up – or rip the handle out of your grasp and send you for a flying face-plant.
That happened to both of us a couple of times before we got the hang of it. We each had to walk back from the far end of the lake after having fallen half-way around, but by the time our two-hour ticket was up we’d each made it four times around in one go. That’s how many turns you’re allowed before you’re supposed to drop the tow for the next person waiting in line.
We could have bought a day ticket, but we also wanted to do a little bike ride through the countryside afterward, so the two hours were just right. My arms were aching by then anyway, so I was glad to get on the bike and let the legs take over. But on the train ride home, we already made plans to try it with a wakeboard next time.
For a look at the little red-haired girl’s second time up on the water, I present you one of the shortest videos you’ll ever see on youtube:
If you’re near Hamburg and want to give it a go, you have to get yourself out to Pinneberg, a suburb 25 minutes or so by train northwest of the city. From the S-Bahn station the lake is an easy five-minute walk through a park alongside the tracks back toward Hamburg.
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:
Canadians always shake their heads when reminded of how little Americans know about their neighbour to the north.
Thanks to Regret the Error for posting this Olympic-scale NBC research blunder:
Any Canadian above the age of six would have spotted the problem long before it was broadcast.
Ah well. You see screw-ups in the media all the time.
Entire networks, for example, mistake Sarah Palin for someone worth putting on air.
A long time ago just as this blog was getting going I wrote about why I left Vancouver, a city consistently rated among the planet’s most desirable cities and site of the 2010 Winter Olympics, which start in less than two weeks.
One commenter says he agrees with the taxi drivers who, recognising my foreign accent and asking me where I’m from, tell me I must be crazy not only to have left Canada, but also its brightest pearl.
It will be 20 years this fall that I packed everything I couldn’t sell into a Honda Civic to begin a four-day drive to Quebec which changed my life forever. Much of Vancouver has also changed since then, but one thing’s for sure: it’s still the most beautiful city in the world.
If you have a high-definition monitor, bump this video up to 1080p and push it to full screen. If you’re prone to homesickness – you know who you are – be prepared to be moved to tears between timecode 1:36 and 1:46.
Thanks to Lilalia at Yum Yum Café.
As much as I like our new Sony VAIO laptop, Sony’s PMB video editing software is driving me crazy.
All I want to do is put three simple digital video scenes together to make a short 45-second movie in MPEG-2 format to upload to YouRube to show brother Gordon all the ice clogging the Elbe. I mentioned it to him on the blower the other night and told him I’d post it.
After two hours of trying to decipher Sony’s cryptic instructions IN GERMAN and scouring various audio-visual forums, I’ve given up. Out of time, I am left with posting just one short clip because I can’t figure out how to jam them all together to one file.
Oh wait, yes, I figured that out, but it saves the individual .mpg files to some useless Sony-only format that Youtube doesn’t recognise. And trying to convert that file back to .mpg didn’t work.
I rarely go cap in hand to readers, but I ask you now: Do you know of any simple video editing software that is easy to use and readily downloadable? Links to good sites where I might do some more research? Thanks very much. And in the meantime, here’s that clip. It was taken from a ferry two days ago.
We plan to be completely cut off from the rest of the world over the next four days, so if I you do have a tip and I don’t respond right away, that’s why.
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:
19
Dec
09
First slide of winter, 2009
I love taking advantage of little bits of time, especially during this hectic pre-Christmas whirl.
Saturday morning in the fresh snow and cold the little red-haired girl and I headed with the wooden sled to the Elbe riverbank near where we used to live when we first came to Hamburg.
We were only out there for an hour or so, but every time we do a childhood tradition like this I savour it, thinking: this might be the last. She’s growing up so fast, how much longer will she feel like going out with her old man for a bit of fun in the snow?
Translation of the end:
How you supposed to steer?
You gotta lean!
But I did!
Oh…
Ah…
There’s a lot to do in Hamburg, but one thing that’s been going on for a long time now might be gone forever.
A few Sundays a year they used to close off the streets ringing the beautiful Alster lake at the centre of the city so that inline skaters – rollerbladers if you like – could do their thing. It was only for three or four hours in the afternoon, but if you skate well enough, that’s enough time to go around the lake a few times.
But now, because they can’t get the sponsors willing to shell out the total of €15,000 the city is asking for blocking off the streets and security, organisers are reduced to asking participants to donate a few euro each.
I gave them a few bucks yesterday, but as one of the people setting up the course yesterday said, things don’t look good. He said they’re now reduced to holding it only once a year, and each time there are fewer people showing up. I guess it’s just not a trendy sport anymore.
As for the city getting involved, forget it. Hamburg would rather sink untold millions into the bottomless pit of taxpayer dough called the Hamburg Philharmonic Concert Hall.
Ah well. We had some fun while it lasted. I get yelled at right at the end of this video, though I can’t figure out what she’s saying…
I’m really grateful to our daughter for introducing us into the world of horses. She’s got a horse to take care of at nearby stables, sharing his care with two other girls and getting riding lessons on him three times a week. I show up when I can to poke around, take a few photos, and marvel at what I can discover about a creature that always belonged to another world.
Today I went a little step further into equestrian culture, tagging along with wife K and the little red-haired girl to the Spring and Dressage Derby, an 80-year-old Hamburg tradition. We rode our bikes through the sunshine, bought some standing-room tickets, met the girl’s friends, found a spot on the shady side, and settled in to watch the jumping.
I’d watched riding on TV and always found it a bit boring. Unless you’re there, you don’t feel the thud of the hooves pounding the grass, see the puffs of dirt kicked up, hear the horses snorting, the riders shouting, the crowd falling silent as as the horse approaches that final hurdle, then bursting into roars of approval as a rare perfect ride comes to an end.
They billed it as the most difficult course in the world, 1200 metres with 17 obstacles including two water jumps, three back-to-backs obstacles, and a frightening, near-vertical wall that led to the disqualification of at least a half-dozen riders as their horses went twice to the brink and balked.
This rider went down the wall and through the course beautifully, despite losing points for knocking over a couple of bars. If you listen carefully, you can pick up wife K’s commentary.
Note to self: pick up that HD video camera you’ve been wanting ASAP.
I’ve not used the wordpress photo gallery feature yet. Maybe it’s time. Here goes:
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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