Well, how about that... #1112

Just gone done and won another prize....

The local city monthly "Der Mainzer" runs a photo competition sponsored by Saturn*, a big box consumer electronics outfit.

This was "Refreshment".

I knew it had won as soon as I sent it off.

€100 to buy some useful technological kit.

Think I'll buy a new MacBook Pro.

Won't have to pay that much on top, I wouldn't think...


* Some of the fans thought it was the American auto manufacturer and that I'd actually won a car...

Ups and downs - #1111

Skill sets on display at Villa Musica.

Not many places in the world where you're pretty much guaranteed of getting high levels of artisan skills.

Here, for sure

Make mine a ....#1110

....Hefeweizen.

At the Alte Patrone, a one-time munitions dump for the circle of fortifications around Mainz dating back to the late 19th C.

Then again, maybe 8 in the morning's a bit early.

Other folk seem to think so, too....

You know it's autumn... - #1109

when sweetheart cabbages, leeks and celeriac start crowding out raspberries, blackberries and nectarines...

Talk about biblical - #1108

I seriously expected the four riders of the Apocalypse to emerge from all that cumulo-whatever.

At least, I THINK that's what's meant to happen on Judgement Day.

I'm sure someone can set me straight...

Gutenberg and his apprentice....#1107

"Here I am, working my butt off and the boss just sits there reading the bloody newspaper. I think I'll join the union"

"Sod him. He should consider himself lucky to have a job in the first place"

Details from the plinth of the Gutenberg statue.

And God said, Let there be light - #1106

....and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

(I've always liked Genesis. Especially the pre-Phil Collins era...)

Verily it was good, too.

The Lux family has left an indelible mark on Gonsenheim.

This is Ulrich Lux, who runs "Papier und mehr" (Paper and More - lifestyle magazines, ribbons, elegant wrapping paper, cards, girls stuff) in the Breite Strasse in Gonso. (Think Champs Elysee minus the Arc de Triomphe with a tram running down it and you're close...)

His sister Susanne runs "Nimmerland", the excellent kiddies bookshop at the end of the road and his parents ran the eponymous bookshop (for grown-ups and kiddies) just across the road from his place until his father's death in 2005.

Let there be light indeed.....

Sibling rivalry - #1105

I DO enjoy the annual Wissenschaftsmarkt (Knowledge Fair) in Mainz, being that it's housed in yurt-like structures (takes me back to my time in Almaty - all 22 hours of it...) that provide ideal lighting conditions and that the target market is kiddies.

Which means that I've a fair chance of understanding what's going on. (And - to save embarrassment - I leave my school reports at home..)

In other yurts, they were blowing out candles with 120dB drum beats, stirring up Macbeth-like concoctions and (probably) splitting atoms.

But this is more my level.

Daria and her brother Luis attempting cunningly to remove blocks from a skyscraper so that when brother/sister removes the next block, gravity takes over and the whole shebang crashes to the ground.

As in the picture, which sadly documents the fact that Daria lost.

And it turns out that I used to work with their Dad.

Now, how cool is that..?

The tension builds...

Intwinned - #1104

Mainz has almost as many twin cities as Paris Holidayinn and Lindsay Lolife (or whatever their names are) have "friends" on Facebook and Twitter combined.

Has some advantages.
Firstly, it forces you to dig out the atlas to research the more obscure additions and secondly, you're treated to a steady stream of art exhibitions in the Town Hall.

This one, for instance.
Massive collage of images from Dijon, covering an entire wall.

Good stuff
- Posted using BlogPress (Still....)

Deja vu all over again - #1103

I'm sure I've posted the 50th-Parallel-running-through-Mainz on numerous occasions, but in honour of World Alzheimers Day, I figured that no-one would notice...
- Posted using BlogPress

Dig in - #1102

Hope they said grace beforehand.

"2, 4, 6, 8

Dig in, don't wait..."

Posted using BlogPress in the absence of any Internet connectivity thanks to 1&1, my ISP, who had the BALLS to try and sell me an UPGRADE before fixing a non-functional service........

Organic - #1101

I'm sure that there's a booming industry, supplying the local poultry farmers with polyester feathers and fake chicken faeces.

And a service industry paying people a pittance for gluing a feather on here and dabbing some turd on there and - abracadabra - you've miraculously added 10c to the price of an egg.

Organic, you see...

Oh really? -#1100

Someone's not convinced.

Unhappiness personified and to be found all around Mainz.

Documented comprehensively elsewhere by Fish & Chips and Gucki

Grape or grain? - #1099

Not that I'm a drinking man (anyone who claims otherwise is a liar..), but it the sight of ripening grapes does fill me with great happiness in anticipation of early 2011.

Which is when this stuff will have been bottled and I can rip into it  enjoy a tipple......

And no-one told me....? - #1098

I can normally smell microbreweries at a distance of 15 kilometres or so, but this one appears to have slipped under the radar.

The Goldener Engel ("Golden Angel") brewery in Ingelheim has supposedly been there for a year or so, and I'm a tad miffed at the thought of all the hefeweizens that I've missed.

And not so "micro", either.

Decent-sized restaurant, a Biergarten with excellent Bier, good looking menu, stunning architecture.

A mere 17km. 45 minutes. 370 kcal.

That's 2 beers already.

And I can have FOUR if I bide the rike hoom...

Do this, do that....#1097

The ferry operators plying the Rhine are nothing if not direct.

Assertive, even.

Turn off your engine!

Pull on the handbrake!

Switch off your lights!

Stay with your car!

All passengers are required to obtain a ticket before commencement of the journey (what was that about not paying the ferryman until the other side..?), to retain it and show it on demand.

Passengers not holding a ticket will be forced to walk the plank.

I think that's what it says, anyway...

In the pink - #1096

Now, would you happen to be pro- or antisecco?

I'm definitely for the former, especially if it's from Matthias Wolf's vineyard in Lörzweiler...

Stumped - #1095

Despite having become a recognised expert on things nephological, I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

And this is only PART of it.

Imagine this as the left hand panel of a triptych that's mirrored on the right hand panel and connected by the solid cloud layer in the middle panel.

Quite stunning.

Above the vineyards in Bodenheim

A good feed - #1094

Great crop of wild mushrooms this year.

Out in the hills on the bike today and found loads.

Checked in my edible mushroom book and they all look pretty safe, so it's a big feed tonight.

Exclusively yours... - #1093

Ripping along the river the other week with the Prof on one of our heroic bike rides when we almost bowled over this trio.

Prof barely dodged them and headed off into the distance in search of a beer.

I threw out some anchors, came to a sort-of screeching halt and asked if I could take their photo.

Unless the photographer had exclusive rights, of course.

"No mate" he said "Go for it" and started sidling out of view.

He wasn't quite quick enough...

Lunch - #1092

You can do 2 things.

You can go to one of the ubiquitous bakery chains and buy a roll with the consistency of cirro-cumulus enveloping a slice of plastic cheese.

Or you can ask the nice lady at one of the cheese stands on the market to cut you a thick-esh slice of a mature cheese from cattle that graze in the Alps and pop it in a wholemeal roll.

OK, so it'll cost you €3 instead of €2.50.

Life's too short to eat junk food.

Is it a bird...? -#1091

Is it a plane?

No, it's Bicycle Repair Man!

That's what the sign outside the corner shop in the Kirchstrasse in Gonsenheim says.

Inside, you'll find Fred Willem who - along with his sidekick - does wonderful things to bikes.

Friendly. Not expensive. Knows what he's doing. Looks like Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski"

What more could you want...?

Legless - #1090

 

Evidently one of the students from the European Business School, an elite college in the Rheingau, which hit the tabloid headlines the other day with lurid reports of an initiation ceremony gone wrong.

All sounded like pretty innocuous team-building stuff run by current students for the newbies -  human pyramid, egg and spoon race, sack race.

Except that the losers had pay penance in the form of alcohol consumption resulting in drunken students lurching through folks' back yards and comatosing themselves in the vineyards.

Police chopper called out - again... - and by the time things died down and everyone was accounted for, 10 of them ended up in hospital to sober up.

This is, of course, on the other side of the river.

These things don't happen in Mainz. (Ahem.....)

Gobble, gobble - #1089

The various Mainz city coats of arms in the town hall, starting with Ebersheim at the bottom and doubtlessly ending up with Gonsenheim (with a halo) at the top.

The city fathers of Mainz are a voracious bunch.

Not satisfied with merely running the city itself, they have a long history of snaffling up surrounding villages and then hyphenating them onto the city.

By the beginning of the last century, they'd grabbed 3 (dating back to the 13th C even) and didn't even bother with the hyphenation.

That started in earnest in 1907 with Mombach and continued without a break until 1938 when they swallowed Gonsenheim, the undisputed jewel in the crown.

1945. No steps forward, 5 steps back
Amöneberg, Kastel and Kostheim, located on the American side of the Rhine, are grabbed by Wiesbaden (although this lot still maintains that it's a temporary administrative blip....) and Bischofsheim and Ginsheim-Gustavsburg were shifted to Groß-Gerau.

Then 1969. Big gobble gobble gobble

Drais, Ebersheim, Finthen, Hechtsheim, Laubenheim, Marienborn all get swallowed.

Legend has it that they made a play for Klein-Winternheim a couple of years later (closer to Mainz than Ebersheim, in fact), but abandoned the idea when they realised that they'd have to hyphenate an already hyphenated village.

There's evidently a "hyphen limitation" statute on the books somewhere....

Life's a beach - #1088

I seem to have misunderstood the concept.

I fronted up here last week on the bike, changed into my swimming togs and performed a fairly (for me) elegant entry into the Rhine.

What a kerfuffle!

Women screaming, men fainting, police cars all over the place and - to top it all - the rescue chopper turned up as well and scuba divers fished me out before I could have a decent paddle.

Article in the paper next day about a suicide attempt by an elderly (THAT I found quite offensive...) foreigner next to the Theodor-Heuss bridge.

Apparently, you're only supposed to go there and DRINK.

Well, I can do THAT too......

(One of the multitude of ersatz Copacabanas lining the river at this time of year)

Local hero - #1087

Jochen Rindt, the Formula 1 racing driver and 1970 posthumous World Champion died 40 years ago today.

A brake-shaft failed at the end of the main straight during practice for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, his Lotus 72 turned sharply to the left and penetrated an incorrectly installed Armco barrier.

He was born in Mainz in 1942, orphaned at the age of 1 when his parents, owners of the Klein & Rindt spice mill on the Rheinallee, were killed in a bombing attack on Hamburg in 1943.


Brought up by his maternal grandparents in Graz and to the rest of the world, he's Austrian.

Especially in Mainz.

Nowhere will you find a reference to him and the last trace (the spice mill) was bowled a few years back to make way for the new corporate headquarters of Werner & Merz, manufacturers of cleaning products.

Photo at the top is a scanned and converted negative of him at the 1969 New Zealand Grand Prix at the Pukekohe racetrack.

I only stopped worrying about my children...- #1086

...when I found out they were in an old folks' home."

Exhibition in the foyer of the Rathaus (town hall) of large format photographs of centenarians, based on selection criteria that excluded dementia or having dropped off the perch in the meantime.

Great images and wonderful quotes.

As in:

"My son-in-law told me about a discount that that a local optician is offering - 1% discount for every birthday..."

He was 104.....

Mirror, mirror... - #1085

...on the wall
who's the ugliest sod of all?"

The photographer, for sure.

No doubt, as Omar would say...

(Cool t-shirt, though)

"Weinhaus zum Spiegel (mirror)", Leichhof

Magical powers - #1084

Minding my own business on the way to the market the other day when the water normally issuing from the fountain miraculously parted in front of me..

Stopped.

Took 2 steps back.

Fountain goes back to normal.

Approach fountain.

Water divides, just like in Exodus 13:17-14:29.

I thought of walking across, but I wasn't being pursued by a horde of Egyptians and I couldn't see the Lost Tribe of Israel anywhere to tag along with me so I gave it a miss.


Anyway. the walking-on-water bit is in another part of the Bible and I was buggered if I was going to get my feet wet...

Monthly Theme Day - Open Air Market - #1083

Open Air Market.

Thanks a bunch.

Of the 20,000+ digital images I've got stored on iPhoto, in excess of 19,500 (I think..)are of the market in Mainz.

Lazy as I am, I've recycled some of them.

Valuable prizes await the first person to link the collage bits to the original blog post.

Entries on a $50 note, please

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