I’m not a musically educated person but I think technically this band is not a brass band as they also have woodwinds. We call such formations Blaskapelle in Germany. But whatever their classification, they are part of German traditional festivities.
I used to drive a scooter, without a motor, before I got an e-bike. I enjoyed the ease with which I got around town, take it on a bus or on a tram and scoot to the next destination.
I wanted to try an e-scooter ever since they started standing around for hire.
This holiday was my chance.
We hired e-scooters to whizz around the lake where we were staying. About 7km seemed a nice little tour.
The two Lake’s Angels following me and coming towards me for the photo op.
It was really fun. We enjoyed ourselves.
Until at the furthest point from hire station my scooter stopped working.
And I pushed, and scooted, and walked and occasionally wheeled a few metres behind the two others for the last 3 km.
Pffff … I was ready to call it quits but the hire people were very nice and very apologetic and we got another hour for free on fault-free scooters. So I kept being a fan.
Last week, I admitted to being a fan of Friedrich Schiller, today I want to show off the other half of the German poetic pair, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
He was a very prolific writer – he lived a long life and wrote defining works during quite a few of the literary epochs he lived through, from the Sturm und Drang (the rebellious pro-romantic youth movement), through the classic era to post-romanticism. He was also a natural scientist of renown. He studied law and worked as a minister at the court in Weimar. His literary works comprise poems, novels, essays and plays – he wrote THE definitive German play, Faust (part I and II – of which I still know parts by heart).
He was born in Frankfurt am Main and so it is no surprise that his face is seen in lots of places in the state of Hesse and in Frankfurt in particular.
The middle picture is not from Frankfurt but I found it in Teplice in the Czech Republic.
The plaque is a quote from the poem “Song of the Spirits over the Waters” and is translated as:
“Soul of man, how like to the water! Fate of man, how like to the wind!”
The mural is a quote from the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and the translation reads:
“Death, where is your sting? Love, where is your victory?”
And finally a photo of the sculpture in front of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Wiesbaden, which I found really very weird. Just look at the face of a middle-aged Goethe on top of the body a much younger man who spends his time in the gym rather than be the bon vivant which Goethe was according to all that we know.
I’d rather end this post with another view of the Goethe and Schiller, the two friends.
Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are the two poets and authors who were on the forefront of establishing the reputation of Germany as the “country of poets and thinkers”. Schiller was born in Marbach in Swabia. He fell foul of the repression of the small country of Württemberg so he fled to neighbouring Baden where he had his debut play premiered in Mannheim.
So in Mannheim I found the youngest statue of Schiller, showing him when he was about 23 – and his big success “The Robbers” premiered.
The Frankfurt statue of Schiller shows him a few years older.
He lived his last years in Weimar where his contemporary Wolfgang von Goethe was established as a politician and the reigning literature god.
Goethe supported him somewhat and the two collaborated during the years they spent together in Weimar.
He died early , only 36 years old.
A male blackbird caught his worm.
A female blackbird caught her worm.
A fieldfare caught its worm – the sexes look the same. Which, I guess, makes no difference whatsoever to the worm.
Some towns explain the choice of street names on the signs.
I’ve shown the signs for this square in Frankfurt before. It has changed names often in its history and the signs document this:
A whole field of phacelia is not that uncommon, apparently it is used to let the soil recover after crops that have depleted the field of nutrients.
Bees and butterflies find this violet flower very attractive.
These are not new photos, most of them are from last autumn. I looked at them for a collage for the Sunday colour collage challenge called Värikollaasit in which I participate. And I really thought these flowers needed to be showcased a bit more. For me, cosmos spell homesickness to the South African highveld where they abound in autumn. They are not native to South Africa but came there with contaminated horsefeed during the Boer War.
They look best either from far – just pink and dark and light pink shades over the Highveld, which I cannot have here in Germany – or from close up.
pictures imperfect blog 