Friday, February 16, 2018

German Karnival

Cologne:  I'm so glad I missed this!  German Fasching Fest - or their equivalent Mardi-Gras:  it's said to the second largest after Rio... it was yesterday - yeah!  Nothing like sharing space with crowded, drunken germans looking at a float parade - ha!

But their parade floats do make some audacious political statements:

last year:
this year:

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Walking through Koln today was wonderful... not too many people and easy directions all the way to the big Cathedral.  It is poignant to look at the WWII pictures of 70 years ago and the utter bombing destruction around the Cathedral... quite a miracle that there were no errant bombs and the two domes
were still standing after everything around it was leveled... even sadder that 70 years later we continue to the same thing:  witness Alepo... etc.   But i digress.

Once again tho, finding my way back from the train station once again eluded me... round and round i walked with limpy leggy asking people who had no clue where a street a couple blocks from them was.  

It is nice to be back in Germany...  i was here every year since 1992 doing business and teaching in Austria and a short gig with TU Munich.  The last three years' hiatus was good to reset my ground-hog day repetitiveness.  I don't miss the air travel at all... but it's a heck of a price to pay for a few weeks of enjoyment.  At least in Barcelona yesterday the airport security was so, so much more benign and efficient than our TSA.  i still don't understand the craziness of how we can allow a 90% failure rate by OIG at our airports... we truly are apathetic and nothing has changed in 4 years (first discovered?) and the press is fast asleep at the wheel... or maybe we just assume its (as some idiot? says)  'fake news?  we wish... 

Ok... back on a more upbeat blog here, since I'm not doing airports for another 2+ weeks.  It was so cool to see the first ICE bullet train pull in today. I
remember watching the speedometer go up over 280 last time I was on one... and on Saturday I get to watch it again... wheeeee.  If you've ever been on one, you know about the first time you pass another high speed train going in the opposite direction within a couple meters of each other... it's almost like a sonic boom!

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