Socceroos & sunshine

The passing of the solstice not only means various druid rituals, it also means it is summer here now. I didn’t even know they had one. But for the last week it has been gloriously warm and brilliantly sunny. In fact if this continues for 3 months, I could get sick of it. But the weather bureau and the locals assure me it won’t last. And if it does, I can escape to my air conditioned lab. We are also in a drought, which may explain why the land of mist and rain has been so pleasant and sunny. The greenery is still verdant and lush, and the grass grows impossibly fast. The only water restrictions are on unsupervised sprinklers and hoses in one county, and the BBC’s helpful pointers on how to save water are “to wash your teeth using a beaker”.

This weekend was my trip to Germany to meet up with Adam & Stu. It started out with me cycling to the station just after sunrise (5am) on a balmy Friday morning, sharing the road only with the rabbits. I’ve been cycling the five miles to the station a couple of days a week, and I’m quite enjoying it. But cycling to meet an international flight felt a bit odd. The train rambled through the rolling green (very gentle) hills and small red brick villages, and it wasn’t until I got to Germany and we were driving through the more substantial, forested hills on the autobahn from Frankfurt to Nuremberg that I realised that I am getting a bit sick of gentle rolling hills. Sometimes you just want jagged rock cliffs, even if they are road cuttings.

We stayed just outside Nuremberg in Fuerth, which had the best municipal park I have ever visited, and I usually make a point of visiting them. It was large, tidy and secluded. It had 2 ponds with a variety of fish and ducks, as well as a small stream turned into a children’s adventure playground. It had lots of interesting children’s play equipment, mini-golf , table tennis tables, field for games, picnic areas, flower gardens, a bike track and of course an icecream shop. Now I may be biased because almost all of my international travelling to date has been in winter, and we were wandering around the park on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon when I should have been at work. But it was a great park. Nuremberg was not so great. The old town was nice, but the noise and mess of a youth metal workers union demonstration really takes the edge off. I was hoping for a bit of modern history in Nuremberg, Adam was hoping to keep me happy and Stu was hoping to lose us before we found a museum. But the information centre was less than helpful, so we Adam and I ended up at the city museum, where the extent of the modern history was photos from before and after WW2. We found the modern history later that evening at the football stadium, which is built on the plot set aside for more nazi rally stadiums, and next to the eerily untouched original rally stadium which we had seen footage from earlier that day. It was huge, and not overly pleasant to be herded through. The other unpleasantness, from the home of the women’s football European & world champions, was that there was one filthy toilet with 4 cubicles, a flooded sink and no toilet paper for the women in our half of the stadium. If I wasn’t so angry and anxious to get out of there, I would have taken a photo for you.

The next day we left the green forested hills, with quaint villages nestled in the valleys and castles on the horizon, for the flat, dry industrialised landscape of the old east Germany. Leipzig was a bit of a revelation as we left the freeways behind to tackle driving on the right with single carriageways, trams, roundabouts and maps with roads still under construction. Not to mention the communist era apartment blocks and derelict buildings. But the centre of town had a lot of lovely old buildings and allowed us a brush with fame (the socceroos).