2007-03-23 The Louvre

Sibi: The Louvre is vraiment big, the Mona Lisa surprisingly small.

Stef: But right opposing her you can find the largest picture in the Louvre, the "Wedding to Kanaa".

Sibi: Many beautiful statues that I would like to place in my future garden. But I really don't understand the fuzz about the headless thing on the stone-boat (Stef: The Nike).

Stef: Sometimes guidebooks are really helpful. We knew exactly where to get our tickets without having to wait. Right next to the ticket-counter: more stones Sibi would like to have (but now for our living-room).

Sibi: After the first 20 pictures with biblical motives you simply tune out.

Stef: The Venus de Milo is beefier than me. Yippie!

Sibi: Note to myself - battle-tableaux have to be at least 5x7 meters.

Stef: And Napoleon appears to be larger-than-life on those paintings. Thinking of it, someone who has to crown himself is prone to megalomania.

After leaving the Louvre, we were totally spent. We planned on taking a nap and then going out, but we went to the supermarket instead and bought some typical French food that we ate on our hotel bed . By the way: Never, ever consider taking your lunch in the Louvre. It's way to pricy and really bad.

Some last remarks:

Sibi: What a pity! The photo booths in the train stations don't have a gap beneath them where you can hide your ugly pictures.

Stef: And you have to close your nose while taking them. All "separées" are probably used as toilets by the "clochards". Reminds me of the scary toilet I saw near the Eiffel tower. Entering them would be lethal. You'd have to burn your wellingtons.

Sibi: I wish the metro in Hannover would drive as often as here in Paris.

2007-03-22 Exploring Paris

Stef: Paris in March is reeeaaaallly cold. Speaking of global warming...

Sibi: The Parisians seemingly invaded Egypt sometime in the 19th century and brought back an obelisk. Perhaps they had only just invented the tanks?

Stef: In the "Gare de l'Est" there aren't any shops, at least not where we expected them to be. But the croissants by "Schmid" are excellent. I wonder whether they have relatives in Germany that could supply us with this great stuff.

Sibi: The "Quality Burger Restaurant" is probably the French version of "Kochlöffel". A good reason NOT to have one's dinner there.

Stef: On the "Champs-Elysées", you will pay up to 8 € for a Cappuccino. Do they serve it with a French Kiss or why is it so expensive?



This is the "Arc de Triomphe" at the end of the "Champs-Elysées". Guess what, the French are proud of having invaded Moscow. This is what I know about Napoleon and Moscow.

Sibi: In France, there are only French movies in the cinemas (except for 300 and TMNT).

Stef: There are no singing Gargoyles on Notre Dame. And as for the hunchback... there are only some senior-citizen-groups featuring hunchbacks.



And so I pretended to be the hunchback myself. Not so realistic, hmh?


Sibi: The only ones I can surely identify as French and non-tourists are old ladies with shopping bags and censored.

Stef: I fixed myself some French-camouflage in order to merge with the crowd: a beret, a baguette and a little tricolore for my bag!


Look out for the two French guys in front of the Eiffel tower.


Sibi: When 50 Japanese are standing in front of an elvator, be sure to follow them. Never, ever try to climb all those stairs of the station "Abbesses".

Montmartre is beautiful! We were taken aback by the view on Paris and even attended a mass at 18h where nuns sang Latin songs.

Later that evening we wanted to go to a certain restaurant I had looked up on the internet, but it wouldn't open until 20:30. What a time for dinner! We ended up in a shabby Italian restaurant. Both of us got a little sick of the food, but the guys running the restaurant where really nice. Again, nice French-men!

On our way back, we passed a RPG-shop. The boys sitting at the table reacted like any gamers react when a girl enters: awe!

2007-03-21 Paris (more)

I kind of forced Sibi to join me in writing a travel diary. It resulted in a charming dialogue... Some excerpts:

Stef: We're in Paris! Haha!
Sibi: The traffic lights aren't always green ... or red.

Explanation: Sibi is colour-blind. Twice he scolded me for passing the road in a red-phase, but actually the light was green. The traffic lights aren't vertically aligned but horizontally, so it's harder to discern the lights if you are accostumed to our light arrangement... Sure, he could have looked whether the little man was walking or standing... MEN!

Stef: The bus drivers are really nice if only you look sad and clueless enough. They even give you free subway maps.

Explanation: Arriving at the airport, we tried to find the right bus that would bring us down-town. We were really late, so many of the buses had already left. We jumped into a bus ready to leave, not sure whether it would get us where we wanted to go. Fortunately, it did. My French, which I didn't use since 11th grade, was good enough to communicate with the bus driver. Nonetheless, he thought me helpless and repeated everything 3x. When the bus arrived at the final station, he even led us to the right Metro-station. Nice french-men = rare, but they exist!

2007-03-21 It's very nice to go travelling...

... to PARIS, London or Rome... Paris, city of lovers. On Christmas, we received this trip from my family. Neither Sibi nor I had ever been there. This is us at the airport before our flight. As the drinks that you may take on board are limited to 100ml, we had to refill our supplies.

This is where I stop for today. More on Paris in the next posts...

2007-03-11 Visiting Pinneberg

My nephew Pascal actually smiling. Normally he has to wear glasses, but his sister keeps tearing them off. That's why his face is already scarred. The girls will like it when he's older.

Jessica wasn't in a good mood on this day. She kept crying the whole time and was shy with us.

Uncle Alex baring his teeth. You gotta show the younglings who's the boss.

2007-02-03 Going out in Hannover

FINALLY I'm through with those Boltenhagen-pictures and I can sleep again peacefully at night. No more phone-calls in the dark of the night "UPDATE YOUR BLOG", no more anonymous posts "UPDATE YOUR BLOG", no more voices in the bathroom telling me to clean the toilet... oh, that's another story.

Here are two pictures of us gone clubbing. We wanted to go to "Der Turm" for some mead, but there are only a few tables at this place (being a tower, after all, with only a few levels and limited space) and it's always hard to get one as they won't take reservations. So we ended up going to the "Sausalitos", a place I started to hate despite the excellent frozen margaritas. The music was WAY to loud and the clientele... no comment.

Peter and Basti.

Stef and Sibi.

2007-01-06 Bye, bye Boltenhagen

2007-01-05 At the coast

I told you we spent our holidays at the coast, but you haven't seen the sea very much. Neither did we :)

We walked at the cliff line this day which is about 30m high. My guess. No comparison to the bluff on the "Isle of Wight" we had to walk on in the 10th grade. You can't have everything: a fair price AND a spectacular landscape.

This is our try to re-enact the scene from "North by Northwest". Mwahahaha.

A "Waldgeist" called Jan.

A self-timer is a really nice invention as soon as you leave civilization. There were no other tourists to take a picture of us, so I placed the camera on a pillar... the first time it dropped into the mud as soon as I ran into position, taking a picture of the gray sky. This is the second try. At least everyone is smiling due to my mistake :)

My mom used to tell me that if I kiss a swan, it will transform into a prince. When I was about 6, I tried to at least hug one, but those animals are very snappish. By now I found my prince, so I quit kissing swans some time ago and moved on to hissing at them. Revenge, sweet revenge.

2007-01-04 In Lübeck

Another Hansestadt. But this one's more interesting. Lübeck is where the world's best marzipan is produced. I love marzipan. If I had it my way, I could eat marzipan every day. But it's way to expensive, at least the one I reeeeaaaalllyyy like.


The Holstentor. And my new hat. Sibi bought it for me at a dubious Thai-shop. Why dubious? I don't know, just a feeling. Loads of junk, some stuff surely produced with the help of child-labor. But not my hat... nooo. Noooo.

2007-01-03 In Wismar

More action... I wanted to add another picture of us on the couch, but noooo, I'll leave that to your imagination. This is us doing some sight-seeing in Weimar. Weimar is a so called "Hansestadt". Fancy some information on the Hanse? I could give you a smattering I conserved from way back when I was in primary school, but no... check rather this.

Kaffeetanten... is there a better word than this in English? We went into a really frumpish coffeehouse and had some cake. Cake *drivel*

So cute.

After so much walking around, the two "Bastis" fell asleep. Aw again.

2007-01-01

Hey, it's us... at the beach. Right before jumping into the cold water with the other weirdos. Just kidding. Neither of us was willing to risk their health in this freeeezing cold.

Waiting for some mulled wine. We drank some downtown, but it was really, really unenjoyable. Remember when Bart Simpson spent his time in France? This wine was surely produced by the two guys he stayed at. "Hand over the anti-freeze!"

Lazy as I am... or busy... or simply uncreative... whatever... I haven't updated my blog for a while. This is about to change. Watch out!

In Memoriam

Von den Sternen kommen wir,
zu den Sternen gehen wir.
Das Leben ist nur eine Reise in die Fremde.