Friday, November 21, 2008

Photos from Germany, Part II


We visited this castle from the 1400's outside of Schweinfurt early one evening. The castle now hosts wedding receptions and Bryan had attended one there recently. This castle actually had a dungeon and creepy stories to go with it. This was one of the details that actually showed up with my flash...



The next day we were off to Munich by car and passed many of these huge windmills. Germany is very progressive in its Earth-friendly efforts. There are tens of thousands of these beautiful energy-generating windmills all over Germany, and this country alone generates almost 40% of the world's wind energy!
The recycling and other low-use initiatives are impressive also...
  • Recycling is mandatory throughout the country, and our hotels were fine examples of their efforts at saving energy and resources.
  • Our Munich bathroom had a towel warmer hooked up to the regular heating system which allowed the towels to dry for easy re-use.
  • We got one tiny piece of soap per room per 24-hour period to reduce waste.
  • Our hotel in Frankfurt had an amazing electricity-saving system. When we entered our room, we had to use our room key to turn on the lights, so every time we left the room all of the lights were disabled.
  • They also had the new energy-saving hot pots for coffee and tea which heat a cup of water in about 60 seconds.
  • We also saw several nuclear power plants around the Bavarian section of Germany.

On to Munich...this is the Glockenspiel in the centre of the Neues Rathaus square. This was once the castle for the Bavarian King and the Glockenspiel (life-size cookoo clock on the building) depicts the King's wedding day festivities. Amazing! In November the clock "show" only happens once or twice a day, so at 11:00am each day hundreds of people gather to watch the ten minute "show".


The city of Munich is quite large and loaded with history, charm and friendly people. The tram ran just outside our hotel for easy access to the entire city. We walked and walked and walked and ate lots of bakery goods and wonderful meals.


This was the first and only fiber arts shop I found because we only had 2-1/2 days in Munich and it would take 3 weeks to see everything worth seeing in town.

This was an amazing felt shop called Johanna Daimer, Filze aller Art -- Deeply Felt (www.daimer-filze.com/intro.html), where I bought 8 circles of 1/8" thick felt for coasters.


Of course we had to take the tram out to the BMW World museum and Olympic park...


This is the BMW museum which is right next to the BMW plant...




Just outside the BMW museum was the Olympic Park...





Well, after 9 days it was time to head back to Frankfurt to fly home. Bry and his friends were lots of fun and we were sad that our trip was over, but we had one last thrill by riding the ICE high-speed train back to Frankfurt.

Great trip!

A

3 comments:

Julie Bagamary said...

I am so glad you were able to go and Bry be with you too. The fiber shop looks interesting.

Carol Sloan said...

Sounds like you had a great trip! America needs to get on board The Green Train...Love your pictures!

Mai-Britt Axelsen said...

So glad you enjoyed it, thanks for sharing. Looks like you had a great time and really got into the local spirit.