Parting Gift

In my line of work, this is the sort of signed parting gift that makes one happy!

A Royal Wave Goodbye

As it was my last weekend in Hamburg, I decided to visit the museums that were left on my list and to walk around the harbour area for the last time and blow some of the cobwebs away.

Turns out those cobwebs were hunted down, bound and gagged and hurled into the North Sea, just about taking my insides with them, it was that windy. The wind whips up the corridor created by the River, slams into the nearest near-vertical thing (me), spins you around, leaves some dust in your eyes, takes a few hairs from your head plus your breath, and for good measure gives you a kick in the back as it leaves and you wait for the next onslaught.

Haven't experienced anything like it since St Andrews.

It was so windy it kept trying to snatch the camera out of my hand, but I did manage to get a blurred image of the Queen Mary 2 in her dry dock in Hamburg harbour.

On the first day of Christmas...

Advent is here! And that also means only 1 more week until I am back home.

Lady G

You can always count on Lady G for a wacky hair-style. Thankfully, I had a more demure hair stylist, who for only €14 (unbelievable) interpreted my weak hair-cutting terminology in German into exactly what I wanted.

An 'Arch'etypal View

Looking down the Champs-Élysées from l'Arc de Triomphe:

And the glittering Tour Eiffel:

M&S

Marks & Sparks is back in Paris!

30 minute queue to get in. Next time...

Africa Time

Current time in Nairobi is +3 hours from UK time (Sudan is the same time zone as Kenya).

Why are all Germans not enormously fat?

Look at all the yummy sweets on offer all the time!

The house that 'Jack' built.

It's been almost 4.5 years since I was last in Braunschweig and 3.5 years since I last saw the lovely Eva and Florian when they visited me in Paris, so it was wonderful to be able to catch up with them while I'm in the north of Germany.

It was also impressive to see the finalised project that was their house, which they built themselves (and the wall I helped nail still standing).

I'm afraid I totally forgot to take 'now' photos, but it honestly is gorgeous.

We spent the weekend in Churches, with music and in nature - the beautiful things that are close to Eva and Florian's heart [Florian is a Master Organ Builder] and I got some tips for ideas I have for my own house.

Here are some of the other things we did and saw:

 A visit to a 'Starbkirche' (a Stave Church) built in the style of Viking Norway.

 Playing the Carillon (a musical instrument housed in a bell-tower that 'plays' the bells when the keyboard is struck with fists)

 the bells, the bells

 The Carillon

 Church rooves are often underrated

 The Church where Florian and Eva got married in 2003 (whose wedding I missed as I was at another one in Cannes)

 The choir warming up

"Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel"

I just liked the quote, but this post is really to say bye-bye to my long-suffering boots. Actually, they are really long-long-suffering as they are second-hand, passed down from my sister (although it was more of a pass-up from a younger one). They've had a long life but are scuffed beyond repair, the heel has been totally worn away and the strappy bits are falling apart.

At the same time, while Hamburg benefitted from a bit of a late summer around the end of September that kept the leaves on the trees, over the past couple of weeks the temperature has plummeted to around 0 degrees in the mornings. All at once the leaves seems to say 'oo, too c-c-c-o-l.....' before they dropped to earth and for a couple of days it was raining them. Now they are banked up along the bike lanes like snow, which makes for a very slippery yet atmospheric ride to work (especially with that early morning fog), but does make me feel I'm lacking foot fur.

So, out with the old and in with the new....the all-singing, all-dancing leather warm-enough-for-a-German-winter boots.

Time to get into old pair: 10 seconds

Time to get into new pair: 10 minutes.

The Gene Pool: on the Move

I don't know what my parents did, but travel seems to be in our blood. On the other hand, I was just reading the other day how we come from a travelling gene pool of faith....God called Abram to uproot himelf from the security he had known and to go with Him on a journey. Upheaval and relocation were part of the plan. Even Jesus never told his disciples to 'invite me into your heart'. Instead he calls Come, follow me. The invitation is to go. Perhaps not always physically; maybe sometimes it is our mindset that needs to change.

Well, I'm back from a year in Asia, another sister is back from almost a year in Haiti, one other sister is likely to be on the American continent for a while yet, and sure enough the remaining continent of Africa is about to provide plenty of wanderings and wonderings to another sister. Next stop: South Sudan.

Where?

Here:

The newest, and certainly one of the poorest countries on earth.

Thanks to Google Earth I got my first view of the capital, Juba. And thanks to 'Emma's War' and 'What is the What', I got a view of much of the rest of life in Sudan. Well, we are not promised a comfortable ride, but we are assured that God himself will be with us.

A temporary interest in Google Earth and Africa resulted in me flying over some of the largest refugee camps in the world, such as Kakuma in Kenya (featured in 'What is the What?'. This all tied in with a story on a different part of Africa in the most recent National Geographic, commenting on resource scarcity, tribal loyalties and colonial legacies that are similar to South Sudan.

This image from the magazine shows how Africa was divided in the last century - such as 'the Belgian Congo' (now the DRC), 'German East Africa' (now Tanzania), 'Anglo-Egyptian Sudan' (now North and South Sudan), 'German South-West Africa' (now Namibia). It's incredible what we did to that place and what we've left them to do to themseleves....another topic for an IR class. Below is a photo from the magazine showing population density (orange is 200 people per km2; red is 1000; lime are destroyed forests) in one of the most geographically - and humanly-speaking - violent places on earth. 

Plenty of work to do in Africa I shouldn't wonder.

Weihnachtsmarkt

Back in Hamburg, where every square seems to be erecting wooden 'chalets' with Christmas lights, overhead heaters and where mulled wine flows magically from every one of them...

Berlin

Berlin is only 1.5 hours by train from Hamburg and so it made a lot of sense (to me) to visit it again. The last time I was there was over 6 years ago and I had a fantastic time seeing Berlin from an architectural viewpoint (thank you architectural-sister). This time I had a fantastic time seeing Berlin from the benefit of a central city location (thank you diplomat-friend).

Even over only one day, some things are pretty obvious. For one, Berlin is c-h-e-a-p. I had change from 25 euros after buying a day travel card, two meals and a mulled wine (including paying extra to keep the glass). For another thing, Berlin is incredibly arty, grungy, punky, cultural. That's more than one thing but somehow they all seem to be interacting all the time. It's a vibe. Like when I was watching and listening to the 'We are the 99%' protest outside the Parliament, and then the on-stage band ripped into some techno live music and the thousands of banner-waving protestors all started bopping away while 'anti-conflict technicians' kept a watchful eye on proceedings. Third, Berlin is stretched out. There is so much space, greenery and parks, aided by the low buildings. This means you get a really good view of the momument you are approaching from a long, long way away. Even longer if you don't have a bike. It opens up the whole city and give you time to see what you are seeing. Fourth, Berlin has an incredibly heavy history. There's simply no escaping it...from the paving stones that mark the path of the wall to the holocaust memorial that takes up an entire block. Even when I went to one of the most easterly train stations, it's impossible to ignore the architecture, or not notice you are in the former east, while the TV tower at Alexanderplatz domaintes practically every view. And Berlin doesn't want to ignore it. It doesn't want to celebrate it either. And although some of the memorials are controversial, I personally think the city has done an incredible job of acknowledging, remembering and honouring, while enabling life and art and culture to grow and move on. I think they have been able to do this through innovative memorials that are modern, symbolic and respectful, while at the same time leading visitors to find out more about the architects behind them and ideas expressed through them.

Anyway, I always enjoy my visits to Berlin.

The path of the former wall dividing East and West:

Standing on the former border:

The wall has been almost entirely removed, although the rods below symbolise the wall and form part of a memorial:

One long stretch of the wall that remains as part of the memorial and visitor information centre:

Das Brandenburger Tor/The Brandenburg Gate:

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:

11.11.11

You know what they say sometimes about booking last minute travel and how it might be cheaper and all that? Totally not true in Europe: if it weren't for my airmiles, I'd be stranded in Paris. All the trains are apparently full, which wasn't all bad news and gave me an extra day in Paris as well as a chance to attend the Remembrance Day service at Notre Dame. It's probably no more than one day a year that I do think more deeply about freedom, peace, war, 'just war', the cost of war and other topics that I should think contribute to discussions in International Relations undergraduate class seminars at St Andrews still, although I find that even this solemn day has been taken over by the political correctness associated with poppy wearing.

Well, in the end Notre Dame was 'no entry' for me, as I was pulling my wheelie case so that I could go directly to the airport afterwards. In some ways this year's ceremonies were more symbolic as they occured on 11.11.11, and my wheelie-case security refusal was a reminder that we are really still quite far from true peace.

Rungis

*The following post contains lots of pictures of animals, but not in an instantly recognisable form. Be warned!

Rungis is the location of the largest wholesale food market in the world, in the southern suburbs of Paris. The whole market used to be located right in the centre of Paris at Les Halles, but in 1969 it was moved to its current site in order to enable its expansion as well as the cleaning and clearing (and commercialisation) of the central city area.

Rungis is the stuff of lore. The general public are not permitted entry (although tours for groups are held on the first Thursday of every month, but as they begin at 6am, they are clearly for tourists), and yet despite 22 000 tradesmen employed at the market and various hints dropped in my interviews, it's taken me months and months to set up a visit. Eventually, a very nice fish buyer contacted one of his suppliers, who agreed to pick us up at 3am for a full 'day's' visit (i.e. ending at 12pm).

And that is how I came to find myself standing at 2.45am at the assigned meeting point outside a McDonald's in the west of Paris, wrapped up in layers of clothes that I knew would shortly be stinking of fish, watching the rats run around the restaurant floor. I managed to defrost my fingers enough to snap a photo of one of the babies. Not sure if you guys can spot him though!

[It should be noted that El Puma, despite a concert later that day, gallantly escorted me to the meeting point in the dead of night].

Rungis is actually a town or perhaps even a city, although you do have to flash a special card and pass by barriers to gain access. But once you're inside, it's enormous and bustling. A French city: without traffic rules, and everywhere you look there are enormous halls with things for sale, enormous trucks delivering things to the halls and other enormous trucks taking things away. We finally arrived at the fish hall:

Although it looks big, the actual number of traders has rapidly decreased from 200 in 1969 to 50, and then most recently to 20. This occurred because the hall had to be upgraded to comply with EU regulations and rents went up at the same time. Many wholesalers either decided it was cheaper to be located elsewhere or found they were pushed out of business with the rise of direct purchasing between producers (e.g. fishermen/farmers) and buyers (e.g. retailers, fishmongers).

The finest Scottish farmed salmon has found its way to Rungis:

Here is a common label for a box of fish, detailing what it is (Latin name plus commercial name), the size or weight of the fish, where it was fish/farmed, the price per kg, the name of the importer and the license number.

I think we stayed in the fish market for close to two hours, speaking to various wholesalers, eyeing up the fish and generally absorbing as much of that yummy fishy smell into our clothes before we moved on. By now it was 5.30am, we were frozen, and the meat market was opening [final meat-related warning!].

The first stop was the tripe hall. It was amazing to see various parts of animals separated for onward distribution, and somewhat disgusting to learn the French eat all of them. Here is veal fat packaged and ready to be sold to butchers in Paris. They use the fat to wrap meat up.

Cow brains:

Kidneys:

Feet:

Heads:

And then on to the ducks (most of these seemed to be sold with heads on):

Pheasants:

It's hunting season and so we also found some rabbits:

Then on to the carcasses:

It was actually at this point that we had breakfast. As we'd already been up for 6 hours and it was now 8am and 'lunchtime', we tucked into some steak with a glass of red wine, before continuing:

New building, new commodity. This time, cheese:

And one of my favourite halls. Cut flowers:

And finally, an unexpected hall: home decorating. This hall is for the use of tradesmen who are doing up homes and it contained some incredible antique (and other) furniture:

I'm afraid that by the time I got home in the early afternoon I was good for nothing and fell asleep. I don't know how all those people live like this 6 days a week, but they make around 6 000 EUR a month, so maybe I can see.

24 hours after I got up, and it still wasn't over. Remember that concert I was telling you about?