Visiting Lennep and Schloß Burg

Yesterday we took the train to Köln and did an outing with some German friends.  Our first stop was the tiny village of Lennep, where the old part of town is filled with slate covered houses.  Here is a typical one

The walls as well as the roofs are of slate, sort of serving as the aluminum siding (no maintenance) material of the day.

Someone got fancy decorating the side of this house. Is the man smiling or sticking his tongue out?

Typical crooked streets.

Here are our hosts, Jorg and Christof, in front of a cafe. (Of course we stopped for a coffee and to sample the local waffles)

Purely serendipitously we discovered that Wilhelm Röntgen was born in Lennep, and there is a small museum dedicated to his discovery of X-rays (called by the Germans Röntgenstrahlen or Röntgen rays).  Lots of interesting information, ranging from the fact that he won the first Nobel Prize for physics to showing one of the traps used to catch rats in his home.  And tons of information about later uses of x-ray technology, including the use of portable x-ray machines in field hospitals in WWI, where Marie Curie was a major proponent, going so far as to drive a truck with such a machine to battlefield sites.  Here is a model of what a field x-ray machine would have looked like:

The x-ray machine is the black box to the right of the stretcher/operating table.  Its main use was to find the bullet and schrapnel fragments so that doctors could remove them without destroying all the muscle tissue in that body part.

The museum was a delightful find, especially for four engineers/scientists.  I don't know if it is worth going out of the way to find it, but if you are ever in/near Lennep, don't miss it.

We then continued to near Sollingen, to Schloß Burg.  The name is confusing, as Schloß and Burg are synonyms, both meaning castle -- Schloß meaning more of a residence, and generally used for newer castles, and Burg being more of a fortification, which most older castles were.  I was told the name refers to it being a Schloß (residence) that has the appearance of a Burg (fortification).

First we went for a bit of a stroll in the woods around the area.  Nice wide paths, beautiful fall colors, and lots of up and down.

Here are the guys walking in front of me.

And lovely fall trees along the river.

We got to the Schloß by taking a short chairlift for the final stretch (we could have walked, but some folks were tired).  At the castle, there was a very extensive craft market going on, making for a weird contrast of old (post-medieval, but old) stuff and modern crafts -- from jewelry to chocolate to hats to wood items -- as you will see in these pictures.  First a view of the entire Schloß from a distance

There are a lot of buildings, the lowest ones are the associated village.

Inside we see a lovely stained glass window and an avenging angel partly hidden by a display of stuffed animals.

The inner keep with fair stalls.

View from one of the upper walkways.

View of part of the roofline.

Browsing through the craftfair was funny -- two gay guys, me and a typical American male.  Guess who was the odd one out? While none of us bought anything (I was particularly thinking about my very full suitcases, and these things were not bargains), it was great fun to be encouraged to browse.

We then went back to Köln for a nice dinner and took the train back to Duisburg.  Arrived home close to midnight, but we got an extra hour's sleep, as Europe is reverting to standard time this weekend.  Today is packing day, tomorrow we take the train to Frankfurt, where we stay at an airport hotel Monday night (we had to be out of our apartment at the end of the month, so we decided it made more sense to stay at the airport than to find a hotel locally) and Tuesday we fly home.  So this will probably be my last post for a while, at least untill something interesting happens in my life again.

Biking around Verona in the rain (with pictures)

We (by which I mean I) biked today in the rain.  Everyone else on the trip decided on another activity (reading in their room, visiting Verona, or visiting a winery where Amarone wine is made).  All were excellent choices, but I didn't want to miss a day of biking (the fact that we were having a special last night dinner, with a lot of rich food might also have had something to do with it).  So, one of our leaders, Guido, and I set out for Verona.  I started out wearing my poncho and rain booties, but early on decided that they impeded movement more than they helped, and I did most of the trip just with my yellow jacket (you know, the kind every cyclist you see on the road has).  It drizzled the first 12km or so, then rained somewhat seriously for about 8 km; just as it stopped, we stopped for coffee (you always stop for coffee in Italy) and then rode in dry weather the rest of the way to lunch.  Most folks shuttled to lunch with the intention of riding back.  It did remain dry for that part of the ride.  Jay attempted to ride, but something he ate or drank at the winery disagreed with him; he got sick and had to be taken in the van (he had to skip the final dinner and the last day's ride, but was fine after that).

Just a couple of views of the scenery we saw -- when riding in the rain, one isn't particularly motivated to stop to take pictures.

Cloud covered mountains just after it stopped raining.

View of Lake Garda.  This was after lunch and was the first time I could see across the lake, as it had cleared a bit.  The lake is on the order of the size of Lake Tahoe, but long and thinner.

We had a lovely farewell dinner, with way too much wine, and did a short ride the next morning (which I posted about earlier).  It was a great trip, rain and all.

Oh, most of our Backroads trips have a "theme" to them (there was the "venture capitalist" tour and the "meeting old pals we had never met before" tour).  We decided that the theme of this trip was "Jewish" -- over half of the people on the trip were Jewish.  From places like Minneapolis and Oregon -- where you don't exactly expect there to be a huge Jewish community.   There is also a fair amount of Jewish history in these towns (remember, the original Jewish ghetto was in Venice, just down the road).

On to Verona (with pictures)

Today we biked from Mantua to Verona.  A bit of rain, but really a beautiful ride (mostly flat).

Here are a few shots along our way:

This is the Mincio River

A view from a medieval fortified town, Peschiera del Garda, where we stopped for coffee. It is along Lake Garda, a huge lake, but I didn't get a picture of the lake here. 

A good part of the day's ride was along a bike path, but it started to rain seriously while we were on it.  Luckily we were rescued by our borrowed ponchos (though we should have taken them out and tried them on beforehand -- it took us a while to figure out how to wear them correctly, and we got pretty wet).  The rain didn't last long and it wasn't particularly cold, so we were OK.

That night we were bused into Verona for a short tour, and then we went to dinner at a lovely restaurant whose name I don't remember.

This is the Adige River that runs through Verona (we will see more of it tomorrow).  The city is very pretty at night.

They have Roman arches.

And a Roman colliseum that is still used today for outdoor concerts.

The famous (perhaps infamous) "Juliet balcony", erected by Veronese who got tired of tourists asking where Juliet's balcony was.  There is a bronze statue of Juliet below.  You have to touch (rub?) her left breast to find true love.  Apparently she (in living form) appears on the balcony regularly, but not when we were there.  

This was used to publicly punish criminals.  That's a neck iron.  Not sure which sins Jay is atoning for here.

A view of the town fortifications from the river.

As you can see, the town is quite lovely -- a lot more to see than I have captured here.  We should have stayed a few extra days in Verona after the trip; poor planning on our part.

German cultural oddities

Since I didn't have that much to say about the Mantua ride, I thought I would talk a bit about things I have seen Germans do that seem odd to Americans.

It goes without saying that German pedestrians always stop for red lights (even interminable red lights with no visible traffic), but I've been struck by the way they organize their traffic lights.  Wide streets often have several lights that govern different parts of the street -- you might have as many as 4 lights to deal with to cross a multi-lane street.  Each segment will have an elevated section to wait at till you can cross to the next segment.  However, they don't all turn green at once.  It's common to get half way across (having left when the first segment turned green) and have to wait a minute or more till you can cross the rest of the way.  My favorite example has 3 lights (there are actually 4 road segments -- I have no idea why one is not considered worthy of a light; it's just as busy at the other parts), and often the first and last are green, while the middle one is red (in the picture below, apparently the far one turned red just as I snapped it.  Sorry.  The yellow boxes on the lights are used to invoke the pedestrian green -- not every segmented street has them, but on this one you really could get stranded.

I've bought a pair of eyeglasses here -- eye exam, frames, bifocals, and transitions auto-darkening lenses -- which cost me less than half of what Jay paid for a similar pair in the US this year.  Since we no longer have vision insurance, I guess I am now a medical tourist.

My other odd experience was also medically related.  One of the things in my stolen purse was my NSAIDs -- I take Aleve, which generically is Naproxen.  So I needed to get more.  In Germany, anything remotely medical has to be bought at an Apothek, where you talk to a human, as all the merchandise is in the storeroom.  Even something as simple as aspirin or antiseptic creme.  So I find on the internet that it is called Naproxen in Germany, but I went to the Apothek on Saturday, when most everything closes at 1 or 2pm (and I had other shopping to do first).  Apparently, naproxen is primarily used in Germany for menstrual cramps (the internal literature was all about that), so they looked at me a bit funny.  The first place wanted to sell me some special product (nothing in it but naproxen) that would cost 7 Euros for 10 pills.  I passed.  The next two were closed, and the last one I tried that day didn't have any at all.  I survived on ibuprofen from Jay's stash for the weekend (nothing is open on Sundays, certainly not an Apothek; I have no idea what sick people do) and went hunting again on Monday.  What I found wasn't cheap (7 Euros for 20 pills), but better than the first.  However, apparently US naproxen is coated with something to make it go down without predisolving, and the German stuff isn't.  It's very nasty tasting stuff (somewhat like old aspirin, before there were coated aspirins).  I have to say, I thought it started to work faster, but that could be my imagination.

My other Apothek experience was after I cut my finger with my microplane grater (yes, I should know better).  It bled a LOT, and I ran out of bandaids.  Even bandaids have to be bought at the apothek.  I also wanted an antibiotic creme, like Bacitracin.  They knew what that was, but I would need a prescription to get some!  Instead they could sell me an antiseptic creme.  Not really knowing the difference, I let them suggest something.  It was called "Jod"  (I think a generic name).  A tube of bright purple stuff (the older among you know where this is going).  Hurt like hell when I put it on (and it stains).  So I looked up Jod in my translation dictionary -- this was iodine creme (Jod == Iod).  Worse than putting nothing on it.

Mantua (with pictures)

Our third day went from Parma to Mantua (for all but the first and last day, the mileage was 35-45 miles).  We took a bus to the world heritage village of Sabbioneta.  This was a planned community, built in the 16th century.  It was more or less abandoned in the 20th century, so it has no war damage.  It's now being restored. We biked through the town and then visited the Teatro all'antica, the first purpose-built indoor theatre.  The scenery is a reconstruction, but the rest is original.

After leaving Sabbioneta we found the Po River, and biked along it for the rest of the day, making for a very flat day.  This was our sunniest day. At one point we crossed this "pontoon" bridge, where the pontoons are boats.

We had to navigate traffic in Mantua, but survived the Italian drivers.  We took a guided tour of the town.  The guide was a sub, so not our greatest experience.  She could make interesting things boring (and when I looked up Mantua for this post, I found we missed some of the most interesting sites.)  Mantua is also a world heritage site. The picture below is of the Rotunda of San Lorenzo, the oldest church in the town, probably built on a Roman ruin.  It dates from the 11th century.

Dinner was on our own.  We chose a simple pasta restaurant (what else) with typically delicious food.

Parma (with pictures)

The first two nights of our trip were spent at a castle (Antico Borgo di Tabiano) outside Parma.  We took a bus from Mestre (outside Venice) for 3 hours and then did a 20km ride to our hotel.  The climb at the end turned out to be the steepest of the week (in part because the next day, we had to take a detour that would have been a 16% grade and we all, even me, decided to skip that).  Here are some pictures from where we were staying and of our visit to a parmesan cheese farm.

View from the castle/fortress yard (we were staying in the buildings whose roofs you see).

Walking to the fortress. A rich family lives there, at least part time, and we got to visit several rooms (which were cold and drafty as you'd expect a castle to be)

View of the fortress from below.

Random view as we biked.

I think this is the only picture of me in the entire set.  It was supposed to be a still but Jay got it into video mode.  Sorry.

On the second day we visited a cheese farm (organic parmesano-reggiano) where the cows are raised, milked, the cheese is made, aged and in part sold (they also make fantastic gelato from the leftovers -- some of the milk going into parmesan is skim).  Our guide, who spoke limited English, was a real character.  She yelled at people who were chatting during her lecture.  But she was very passionate (and gave us lots of free samples of both cheese and gelato).

Our guide, Saverio, translates what happens as the milk is being heated.

You can get a better view of the vat size in this pic.  Each vat makes 2  80lb wheels.

The wheels are soaked in a salt brine for a couple of weeks. 

Then they are stored in a climate controlled room.  They get "dusted" by a robot every couple of weeks to keep the dirt off. The darker the wheel the older the cheese.  It isn't "real" parmesana-reggiano unless it is aged 24 months (and meets some other tests), but this place ages some of their cheese for 36 months; we tasted some of that, and it was lovely.

We are bringing home a kilo of 3 year old parmesan, so if we invite you to dinner in the next six months, you may want to request pasta :-)

Venice (10 days ago)

OK, now that I can post with pictures, here are the things I saw in Venice that seemed worth sharing.  These are mostly commentary on things we saw involving ordinary Venetians.  We skipped pretty much all the famous sights this trip just to see "ordinary Venice" and actually liked it more than "famous Venice".  I highly recommend staying in Cannaregio -- it's where many regular folks live, has some lovely shopping streets that are not filled with tourists (not empty of tourists, but...  We got really claustrophic when part of our walk took us over the Rialto bridge to the tourist shopping havens; it was wall to wall people, and as you can see, that wasn't true in Cannaregio)

Just a random bridge across a canal which serves as a kind of street.  That's Jay's new hat, bought in one of the sidewalk markets. See how high up the building the water comes (and it wasn't high water at the time)

OK, gondoliers are pretty touristy, but this was at 10am. This is a slightly bigger "canal street".  It has a walking path on both sides.

There are many streets this narrow.

Walked by a random small church (nothing famous) and looked in the open door.  This is what we saw.

Vege market on a slightly larger canal.  This is where real people shop.

View of another vege/random stuff market.

We also had dinner at Covino again this trip.  This is a modern interpretation of classic Veneziano food.  As before, it was excellent.  It's a 3 course, fixed price meal Sorry, I was so busy enjoying the food that I forgot to take pictures.  The meal started with prosecco made by the owner's father and ended with cookies made by his mother.  Really.

I can post pictures again!

OK, that last post proves I can post pictures again (using my laptop -- at some point I will try to find out why it won't work with my tablet or phone).  I'll try to catch up with more detailed descriptions of our biking and Venice trip over the next few days.

Do travel hassles come in threes?

If so, am I done yet?

We returned to Duisburg on Friday, starting the day with a 20km bike ride through the Valpolicella area

After cleaning up, we took a 2.5 hour bus ride to the Venice airport, causing Jay a lot of stress that we would miss our 4:30 flight (in actuality, we got there before they were accepting luggage drop off).  Then a two hour flight, a short train ride back to Duisburg, where, upon alighting -- wait for it -- my purse was stolen out of my backpack.  The usual press of people, but one of them had a different goal than just getting off the train quickly (and I was slowed down by my suitcase).  One of my fellow passengers noticed and alerted me (after the theft), but was not able to catch the thief, who was apparently a teenaged girl (Rule #47: be especially careful on trains on weekend evenings).  I was extremely lucky.  The only thing of any value in the purse was a coin purse with maybe 10 Euros in coins in it.  I had my wallet, passport and phone in my pants pockets.  This must have been one pissed teenager when she opened the purse.  Unfortunately, she got my apartment key and my umbrella.  I now have a new umbrella, but Germans are rather strict about not losing apartment keys.  That will be a discussion for Monday with the "housemaster".

Because of the lost key, we decided to file a police report.  There is a police station as part of the train station, so we didn't have to hunt one down at 9pm, and we learned a lot about German bureaucracy.  It was clear they weren't going to look for my purse or the thief (whom I couldn't describe), but they understood that I needed a piece of paper to take to my landlord about the stolen key.  So much information to provide -- addresses both here and in the US, even my birth name was required (it's not even on my passport).  I now have more experience with German police reports than American ones (though I have been burglarized twice, I don't remember the police asking me for more than my name and the particulars of the breakin)

Yesterday was a full day of laundry and shopping, but today, after a lazy brunch, we went for a walk in the local woods.  We came upon the same wild pig/boar habitat that we saw last year (these were wild pigs found roaming through town that were caught and given a couple of acres to live on in the woods.)  Here are two babies at play

And this must be a yearling:

The grandpa boar picture didn't come out (he moved too fast).

And finally, if anyone knows what kind of mushrooms these are, I'd love to know.

Into each life some rain must fall.

Today it rained. We were given four options: visit a winery, visit Verona, stay at the hotel or bike. Most folks, including Jay, went for the winery tour; I was the only one who decided to bike. So one leader and I went out to brave the elements. We had about 12 km of drizzle, followed by about 8 km of serious rain, then about 12 km of dry weather to the lunch spot near Lake Garda. It was actually a very nice ride. About half the group decided to ride back to the hotel after lunch, and the weather held off. Tomorrow, our sendoff day, is supposed to be sunny.

Tonight is our farewell dinner here at the hotel, and tomorrow we return to Germany after a short bike ride. The trip has been great, and I hope to post lots of pictures after I solve my technical problems.

Trials and tribulations

Not all is roses. I have a cold, which I almost never get. And my back is so sore I can hardly walk ( no problem biking though). I think the problem is overly tight quads,caused by not stretching. Hope my Pilates teacher isn't reading this. Still having fun on the bike, though

Mantua to verona

Rode all the way from Mantua to Verona today. About 50 miles. The morning 30 were along a lovely bike path, though we did have about 6 km of serious rain. Jay vanned back to the hotel, but I soldiered on, with no more rain. It's raining now and may be tomorrow too, so not sure what tomorrow's plan is.

Oh we put our borrowed rain ponchos to good use. Other than problems seeing the directions on the Garmin while covering my hands, it worked well

Parma to Mantua

Biked about 40 miles (all flat) from an hour outside Parma -- the town of Sabbioneta, a 16 the century walled city, to Mantua, mostly following the Po river. Tonight we explore Mantua. Tomorrow we head to Verona.

Blog problems

I don't seem to be able to create posts with photos. I've been taking pictures, but I may be under radio silence till I get back to Duisburg Saturday and can straighten this out with something better than a phone.

Starting a vacation off on the right foot.

It's been an interesting beginning to our vacation.  So far today:

  - our flight to Venice was delayed by 3 hours
  - we arrived in a pouring rain storm and had to walk about half a mile to the water taxi and our pants and shoes got totally drenched
  - we learned that Jay's suitcase is not waterproof (maybe I should take a picture of all the stuff draped over furniture in our room)
  - we managed to find mediocre food in Italy; perhaps the first bad meal I have ever had in this country.

I had forgotten how curly my hair gets in really wet weather. I have ringlets.  Really.

I suppose the saving grace is that it can't possibly be worse tomorrow.

Exercising in a New Environment

Since we travelled to Germany I haven't gotten a chance to exercise at all.  And it's making me cranky. Mostly when I am here I go walking in the nearby woods, and I planned (still plan) to do that on this trip.  It hasn't rained, so that's not my excuse.  But my days have been so full of errand running and German lessons/homework that there hasn't been time for real exercise (hopefully, my Pilates teacher isn't reading this :-) I have gotten my 10,000 steps a day in, as my fitbit buddies know, sometimes even more than 20,000 steps; I do a lot of walking to handle my daily shopping or even just traipsing up and down our hallway to deal with the stupid dryer, but none of that is with an elevated heart rate.  Our bike trip next week will change that, assuming I haven't lost so much muscle strength to be able to handle the hills.  And then back to the quiet life here; maybe things will be settled enough that I can get my hiking in during our final 10 days.  This feels abnormal to me, but, believe me, "the days are just full" getting the practicalities of life taken care of.

My German Teacher

Today I want to sing the praises of my German teacher, Monika.  First and foremost, she's a great teacher (I met her first at a language school, but she now gives me private lessons).  She taught German, English and economics to adults most of her life.  She is now mostly retired.  We are of similar ages, so we have a lot of topics we can talk about.  But she also pushes my grammatical knowledge.  She drives from about 40 minutes away (each way) to give me a lesson.   But even more, she's done a lot for me, ranging from helping me figure out the washing machine (It's not me, it didn't make sense to her either, but she helped me understand what it was trying to tell me, even if it didn't really work correctly) to taking home the chicken I bought that we didn't eat right before our trip to Helsinki and putting it in her freezer to keep it from spoiling for me.  She also told me about a sale on "houseshoes" (slipper like things to keep your feet warm in a German house) at Aldi -- the parent company of Trader Joe's, but more like a cross between Walmart and Costco, and lent me a rain jacket to take to Italy because I lost mine in the Frankfurt airport.  When we stop going to Germany, I am going to really miss her.

We leave for Venice tomorrow, starting a Backroads bike trip from Parma to Verona on Sunday.  I'm going to try something different in the way of blogging -- taking pictures on my phone and posting them with a short commentary.  That might help me keep current, rather than leave the entire trip till I return (as usually happens).  Or it might not work.  But I'll try.

A rant on web ads, or what sent Robin over the edge to installing an ad blocker

(What's the point of having a blog if you can't use it to rant about what's annoying you?)

OK, I, of all people, understand why websites have ads.  After all, I worked in search ads for Google for almost 4 years.  I even see ads as a good thing, not just for the web site owner, who is making a living from them, but also for the site visitor, who may get information from an ad that meets some need they have. So I have been really reluctant to install an ad blocker, as I think a web without ads will certainly be more expensive and might be less enjoyable than one with ads.

That's all well and good, till the ads (those image and video based ads that seem to be everywhere these days) make my browser so slow that it locks up.  I definitely experienced slowdowns back in the US, but there is something about our internet setup here that has me rebooting my computer a couple of times a day, as it is completely locked up.  So I did what I never expected to do -- installed an ad blocker.  It was easier than I thought (at least with Chrome), and using my computer has been a joy today, rather than the device I was working hard not to throw across the room.

What is it with these people?  Do they not use their own site?  Or only do it with the fastest internet speed possible?  and never use it when they have 3 other resource hogging sites in other tabs?  Or do they not care?  And while we are at it, why is it, on the german-english translation sites I use, that 90% of the ads are for some seminar put on by either McKinsey or BCG?  Do I look like someone who is interested in executive training?  (Obviously these advertisers are not reading my blog.) Maybe these sites assume that the majority of their users are executives (more likely executive wannabes) who are being posted to Germany or Austria?  Highly resource intensive ads for something I'm singularly uninterested in -- what a great way of encouraging me to come back to your website.

While I am at it, here are some titles for rants I have all prepared, but I won't bore you with:

• guess how much money I am going to give to the Democratic Party if they continue to call me every single night in the middle of the night?  (Yes, I have my phone ringer off)
• if the Guesthouse insists on having a clothes dryer that leaves the clothes damper than "ironing damp", could they at least provide enough places to hang up the wet stuff?
• why is there a hearing-aid store every .25 miles, but it's over a mile to the nearest laundromat?
• why can't the meat in the US be either as high quality as it is here or as cheap? (I know better than to ask for both)

Long Weekend in Helsinki

Just got back from our visit to the German Ambassador to Helsinki.  Lots to report.

First staying at an embassy is an interesting experience.  This one is a compound with both the embassy proper and the official residence.  They are two distinct buildings, but one floor of the residence is a huge reception area, complete with commercial kitchen, where the ambassador can hold official functions.  The private floor is a very large apartment.  There was enough space devoted to hallways alone to make another apartment.  Our friends have a lot of art, especially from their time in Nigeria, which filled the hallway walls.  Maybe that's true of most ambassadors, so the apartment may have been designed with that in mind.  The buildings were designed by a famous Finnish architect, and are impressive -- lots of light coming in.  They are in a gated compound that fronts on the Baltic Sea (with its own boat dock) on a small island called Kuusisaari that is a mix of embassies and private homes that are mostly weekend homes.

Our friends were excellent hosts.  I had never been in Finland before, and after this weekend, I feel I know a lot about it.  We arrived Saturday morning, and got a driving tour of downtown Helsinki, seeing the most important buildings from outside and walking around the old city.  We spent some time at the harbor market, where many diffrent kinds of things were for sale, but that day they seemed to be specializing in preserved fish, mostly herring, I think.  Here is a bit of a view of that market, with the Helsinki Skywheel (from which you can sip champagne and which I understand has at least one cabin that is a sauna) and a relatively small (by Helsinki standards) ferry -- it's that three story boat, which is probably just taking people to local islands, not to Estonia or St. Petersburg.

After we returned, we had to try out the embassy's sauna, which was wonderful.  They had it at 190F, which is not particularly hot for a Finnish sauna, but certainly had us exhausted after 15 minutes.  Wimps that we are, we cooled off with a cool shower, but there was also a cold pool for the adventurous (like the ambassador's husband). 

Apparently saunas in the past were used for political discussions and decision making at the highest levels (a house and very large sauna building belonging to an earlier leader of Finland were pointed out to us, and we were told that most of the discussions that led to the current government were carried out in that sauna).  However, Finns prefer to sauna in the nude, but that's not done in mixed company, at least outside the family, making it difficult for a female ambassador to make use of this custom (not sure how common women in political power are in Finland.  They pride themselves on their egalitarian society, that doesn't seem to extend to full participation of women in the upper levels of business or politics.)

The evenings were spend mostly catching up on each others lives, though a football/soccer game was enjoyed by the others (the ambassador has a German TV connection) one night.  

On Sunday we went to a small museum on the island, called the Didrichsen Museum.  They have some interesting things in their permanent collection -- Munches, Warhols, Moores, a Picasso -- but we mostly saw items from a South African artist named Lionel Smit. He had both paintings and sculptures, but it was the sculptures that captured my imagination.

Very interesting interaction between abstract and figurative elements.  Plus it was a nice walk (we walked all the way around the small island)

Next we went to Hvitträsk.  This is a compound some ways outside Helsinki, where three Finnish architects, one of whom was Eliel Saarinen, whom crossword puzzle lovers should know, built houses (in an art deco/arts and crafts/Jugendstil style) for their architectural practice and for their families to live in.  Shortly after they moved in, Saarinen's wife left him for another of the architects and Saarinen immediately married the other architect's sister (cold winters make for lots of intrigue, I guess).   Here is the part Saarinen built

Monday the ambassador had to go to work (ahh, the joys of being retired), so we wandered around downtown Helsinki.  We discovered the way NOT to do sightseeing in Helsinki.  All the museums in Helsinki are closed on Mondays (and many on Tuesdays) and the public buildings you would want to see from the outside were almost all covered with scaffolding.  But there was still enough to keep us busy for 5 hours or so.

We started with the Rock Church, a protestant church built out of rocks (there are a lot of them lying around in Helsinki) in the 1960s.  Here are views of the altar and the organ (the acoustics were fantastic)

It's not obvious from these photos, but the roof is glass supported by the beams that you see.  On the cloudy day we were there it was amazingly light-filled.

Another of our stops was at the Sibelius monument, Finland's most famous musician.  The monument makes you think of organ pipes.  This is the best view I got of it.  Yes, that's Jay standing in the middle of it.

The next morning we had to get up at 5:30am to make our flight, and today has been a day of doing laundry (in the world's smallest washer and wimpiest dryer -- possibly the subject of another post) and catching up on email and German homework.