Frühling kommt

Spring is coming!



This picture taken last weekend, a "Winterling" coming up through the snow.

The days have gotten noticeably longer. The kids are getting up to go to school with some twilight in the sky. It has also started warming up, the snow and ice have melted and there is a lot of fog in the air in the mornings. Two spring flowers "Winterling" (little winter) and "Schneeglocken" (snow bells) have started coming up all over the place.

The Lake is Frozen!

The Grosser Ploener See (Great Ploen Sea) had ice over it as far as I could see yesterday morning. It is the largest lake in the region and rarely freezes. I am told the last time this happened was 6-7 years ago. The school children are even taught that the name Ploen comes from an old Slavic name Plone that means the place where there is no ice. By the time I took pictures it had started snowing and the snow was melting in some pools on the ice.

Back from Goettingen

I went south to Goettingen on Tuesday and came back yesterday (work related trip). It started snowing when I left to Hamburg at 7:15 am. In Hamburg I took an ICE (Inter-City Express) train that got up to 170 km/hr (over 100 miles/hour) at points along the way! It took precisely 2 hours to get from Hamburg to the center of Germany, faster than you could have flown with the checkin, security wait, rescheduling and all--I was impressed. The landscape changed near Goettingen with rolling hills near the Hartz mountains, the train even went through a few tunnels! It made me realize how long its been since I've seen hills or mountains in any form in N. Germany (and most of the land around the Baltic extending into the Netherlands is as flat as it can be). I spent the night and Wednesday morning it was snowing nicely in Goettingen, I walked around the old city for a bit before heading back. Unlike the trip down there were a number of delays on the way back and I actually got to Hamburg an hour late. They handed out ticket vouchers on the train for missed connections. Back in Schleswig-Holstein there was a couple inches of snow that had fallen and the kids had attempted some snowmen out on the porch.

Pictures from Goettingen:

Synagoge Square


View up inside the Synagoge memorial




The "Goose Girl" statue. This is supposed to be the most kissed statue on the planet (link).

Mohamed's Article

This is a brief followup to two of my earlier posts, here and here. My friend that I mentioned, who was blocked from buying software because of his name, wrote an article about it and it was picked up here, The News & Observer. A nice version is posted by Duke University here.

Movies

Last weekend I made stop motion animation with the kids as a project. Here is M's



She added a sound track and a title page (but the title page doesn't appear in the YouTube Version).

and here is T's (no sound track)



He did a school project on the HMS Titanic, so this is related.

Winter Wonderland

This (Winter Wonderland) is a wonderful phrase because it is the same in English and German (just pronounce the W's like V's).

It cooled back down and frost has formed on everything, especially around the lake. The trees are white from frost. It is beautiful. (Also part of the lake froze and some snow fell since posting, pictures added.)

M's Birds

This is something that happened earlier this year, and I wasn't there at the time (V told me), but I wanted to mention it before I forgot.

M likes to feed the birds next to the lake. (There are signs warning against this but the locals ignore them too.) Usually when people throw bread to the birds it is a riot of squawks and feathers. Once however, M sat very quietly on a stump with some bread and the birds flocked around her as usual, but this time she only fed the ones that were waiting patiently and quietly. After a short while the birds got the idea and held as still as possible on the ground, in a circle around M, who was sitting zen-like. Occasionally she would flick a small piece of bread out to a bird who she thought was patient enough. It lasted long enough that V said the people walking by stopped to watch in amazement.