Heidelberg, Germany

I was in Heidelberg this past weekend to enjoy the Schlossbeleuchtung (castle lighting) and fireworks. On the first Saturday in June and September, and the 2nd Saturday in July, the castle and old bridge are illuminated with lights and fireworks. This is to remember the times in 1689, 1693 and 1764 the castle was burned by the French. The city sits on both sides of the river Neckar, and is only a 15 minute drive from Mannheim. I highly recommend anyone visiting the area to check out Heidelberg. Here is a page with a list of all the things you can do there.

Video [YouTube] of fireworks show grand finale:


Everyone getting ready for the fireworks:


Castle burning:


Up close:


Castle during the day-time:


Being lazy by the river:


Walking down the Hauptstrasse:


Hey, they have a Hard Rock Cafe!

May update...

May is almost gone, and I realize I have not made a blog post all month. I'm getting a lot of emails from people wondering if I am still alive. Hopefully this post will confirm that.

The weather has warmed up a bit this month...and then it kept getting warmer, and warmer, and now it's steady at mid 70's F, but quite humid. My room on the 3rd floor has been heating up to over 85 degrees. I bought a fan which makes the heat seem more bearable.

I bought a car this month from an American moving back to the states. It's the most American car you could own overseas. 2003 Pontiac Grand Am. If you know me at all, you know I'm not a "car guy". This is fine for my purposes of getting around the continent. It only had 36,000 miles when I bought it. Has some minor "issues", but nothing that keeps me from getting where I need to go.

My goods finally arrived after 8 weeks and 3 days of shipping. You'd think for $4,000 they could ship it a little faster... like overnight?! I bet you could have shipped all my stuff cheaper just by sending individual boxes. At least now I have my bed to sleep on and desk to work at. It's been over 2 weeks, and I still haven't opened half of the boxes. That's the goal for this weekend. I noticed that I had no allergies in Germany before my stuff got here. Once it arrived, I have been sneezing ever since. Maybe I was better off without it.

Here's the progress I've made so far:


Check out the apartment floor plan:


Travel Tip:
I'd like to invite anyone who likes to travel into my TripAdvisor.com Traveler Network. If you do travel a lot, and haven't heard about TripAdvisor, I suggest you check it out. The candid hotel reviews/photos from other travelers can be very helpful when choosing a place to stay in a very unfamiliar place. I also like their Travel Map feature very much. It is a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to track every city you've been to in your travels. You can watch my Travel Map to see where I'm going.

My Travel Map:

My Favorite Places:

1. San Diego, CA, USA


2. New York City, NY, USA


3. London, England


4. Las Vegas, NV, USA


5. Boston, MA, USA

My Rhine River Flat

Well... not exactly. But just a brisk walk away!

Here's the house I've moved into. I'll be occupying a 240 square foot room on the 3rd floor (the two windows to the right on the roof). Hey, what's that in my window? Click the photo to have a closer look!

I was really excited to move in here because my flat-mates are really nice! I live with a girl named Daniela (she goes by Dany) and a boy named Spike (or Spikey)...

Meet Spike:

One small issue with the apartment is the toilet. I believe it is commonly referred to as the German Poo-Shelf Toilet (aka GPST). Instead of a simple bowl of water with a hole at the bottom, you have this dry porcelain platform and a small hole all the way in the front. It would make more sense to sit down backwards, but trust me, that's NOT how to use it :). The best explanation for this phenomenon was posted on this blog: "The Poo-Shelf comes from a period in German history when Germans were less interested in world domination and apparently more interested in spending quality time with their feces" . There is much discussion about it on the internet debating the pros and cons... Yeah. I'm not seeing the benefits.

Enough potty talk, and onto some more water tower pictures! I went downtown again with my camera this past Saturday and got some great shots of the Wasserturm in the sunlight. I thought it would be cool to compare the day shot next to the night one:

Now some fun stuff: I came across this really useless "tool" called The Pornolizer. You feed it a website, and it will show you what that site would look like...if it were a pr0n site. I tested it with twconnell.com [try it] and the results were rather entertaining. It's random every time you do it, so just check out this screen capture to see what I was looking at. Isn't that ridiculous!?

Ich habe die Autobahn überlebt!

Clueless as to what the post title means? You'll have to translate it yourself to find out!

After 2 1/2 weeks, I finally had my first driving experience on the Autobahn. Sure, most people would have made it a point to take a "detour" and see what the rental is made of, but I'm not most people. It takes me 2 1/2 weeks to see what the rental is made of. Now that I've done it, it's definitely something that takes getting use to. I found out the VW Golf is made of 200 KPH. And I was still getting passed! The most evil word on the Autobahn is "Stau", or "traffic jam". I was lucky enough to experience about 6 of these on my 300 mile drive from Mannheim to Halle. Stau [SHT-OW] is usually caused by road work limiting the 3 lane highway down to 1, or 2 extremely narrow lanes. Other times it is simply caused by "rubber necking"! All of this stop and go eats up a lot of gas. With gas prices the way they are, you would think there are fewer cars on the roads - Absolutely not. That brings me to...

Gassing up in Germany

Gas is about €1.40 a liter in Germany right now. To put that into perspective for you, they are paying €5.30 per gallon of gas... With today's exchange rate, you would have to fork out $8.32 for a single gallon of gasoline! I am fortunate to have a special set of pre-paid gas coupons that bring the price down to a measly $3.55/gallon (€0.56 per liter). I'm not complaining at all.

Here's the Autobahn at one of their speed controlled areas near Frankfurt.

Oh, what's that? You thought there were no speed limits on the German Autobahn system? Oh how nice that would be! Instead they have quite a few speed restrictions out there. The standard speed limit is 80mph. They drop it to 50mph at construction areas. For the most part though, they remove all speed restrictions and leave it up to you to drive at a safe and reasonable speed for the conditions (AKA: pedal to the metal!). Don't worry about me. I am driving defensively and stay within 80 to 90mph (much like on the Arizona highways).

Here's a pedestrian street in Halle on the way to the Marktplatz (marketplace)

Here's a photo taken at night of the Marktplatz in Halle. During the day this would be filled with people and vendors.

Here is something you see everywhere here, wind power!

Check out this subjective comparison of Germany and the United States to get a better idea of how these two world powers are similar and different.

Lazy Sunday

Today was my second Sunday in Mannheim. I decided to take a ride downtown and snap some more photos of the area.

This is on the way to downtown. On the right is the U.S. Army's Turley barracks. This is now a ghost town because it was closed during the BRAC agreement. It still has barbed wire fence surrounding and says U.S. Army on the front entrance, but nobody is home.


This is looking east down the River Neckar:


This is looking west down the River Neckar:


This is a water fountain.


You can see the water tower (Wasserturm) down the street:


For further information about the Mannheim area, click here.

Willkommen in Deutschland!

I'll be driving around this 2008 VW Golf until mid April.















Take a walk through downtown Mannheim with me...















Water towers in Germany look a little bit nicer than the states...




A "castle" in the downtown area...
















Take a stroll along the Rhine and Neckar Rivers...



A view out my hotel window...