The Great Flower Carpet of Brussels

July 12, 2015 in Travel, Museum

Once every two years a giant flower carpet is installed in the Grand Place (main square) of Brussels, which is 75m long x 24m wide, 1800 square metres of begonias containing around a million flowers. The carpet is sketched on the ground and quicky installed by 120 volunteers in only 4 hours! And then lasts about 3 days before it starts to wilt and is packed up again. I'd seen pictures of this on postcards on previous visits to Brussels, but I was fortunate that my work trip last September aligned with the correct weekend, and I found out with just a few days to spare. I quickly booked a funny little French speaking bed & breakfast on the outskirts of Brussels as it was quite far for a day trip, and went for a visit! This year the carpet was a giant Turkish rug design to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Turkish immigration in Belgium.

Upon arriving in Brussels I spent much of the day at the Musée Royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire Militaire (Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History), quite a large and interesting museum in the slightly old fashioned and slightly worn out style typical of Belgium that I like so much! Being the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI, there was also a large and excellent exhibition about the great war.

After the museum I went to check out the flower carpet, which was as impressive as I expected, although of course it was very densely touristed and difficult to approach! I waited patiently to get to the front of the barriers at a few spots around the carpet for some different angles, and was jealous of the people with inside connections and nice viewpoints out the windows of the old guild houses surrounding the Grand Place! I stayed in town late to also see the music and light show over the carpet.

Portsmouth Historic Dockyards

February 18, 2015 in Museum, Travel

One for my Navy friends today! After our holiday to the Channel Islands and France I had a day with my parents in Weymouth before heading to Germany for work, and we visited the important Naval town of Portsmouth and the Historic Dockyards. This is part of the Portsmouth Naval Base, the oldest in the Royal Navy, in use since the 15th Century, and at one time the largest industrial site in the world! The museum part of the base is a huge tourist attraction, home to several large restored and historically important warships, and many different museums.

The main attraction is the HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line and Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar, the most decisive victory against Napoleon's navy. Nelson was shot and killed at the end of the battle, and the spot on the deck where he fell is marked by a plaque. He was then - respectfully and carefully, I am sure - stuffed into a cask of brandy and lashed to the mast for the long trip home, before he was interred in St.Paul's Cathedral, which I visited on the way home from Germany! The ship itself is very well preserved, with lots of interesting displays, and interesting to imagine working and fighting in the cramped conditions, and low ceilings. The HMS Warrior was another interesting ship, fully restored as a museum. It was the first steam powered and iron-hulled armoured warship in the Royal Navy, although did not see long service before becoming obsoleted by new mastless armoured war ships, and was turned into a floating oil jetty among other ignoble uses before eventually being restored to almost new condition.

The Mary Rose museum displays the remains of King Henry VIII's warship which was rediscovered in the Solent and salvaged at great expense in 1982. This is an extremely important archaeological find, as there was a huge number of well-preserved artefacts recovered including weapons, sailing equipment and many personal items from the crew. Even the ship's dog was recovered! Many of the items on board can be traced by the cabins they were found in, like medical equipment belonging to the barber-surgeon (yes, same guy!). Conservation of the hull has been underway since 1994, due to be completed only in 2016, by impregnating the wood with polymers and now in the final 5-year drying out period! This was a really interesting and well designed museum - the new museum opened in 2013 - and probably the best part of the dockyards for people not so interested in actual ships!

The last part of the dockyards I managed to visit was the HMS Alliance, part of the Royal Submarine Museum, which required a water taxi ride across the busy harbour. The Alliance is a WWII-era submarine and the only one of its kind still around. Supposedly this is a relatively 'comfortable' submarine designed for the huge Pacific theatre, but it was still very cramped and claustrophobic - but lots of interesting equipment to look at for engineering nerds or fans of brass valves and gauges....!

Berlin History and Art

August 26, 2014 in City, Museum, Travel

Another day of history, memorials, museums and architecture, and my last set of photos from Berlin last year. These are things I like to explore and photograph in any city, and Berlin has probably the best collection anywhere I've been so far. History in particular, as the key events are quite recent compared to more ancient cities, and the effects are still visible in spots all around the city, down to bullet holes in walls. Any corner you walk around could reveal another memorial or plaque and memories of an impressive/terrifying history.

Berliner Dom and the Pope's Last Revenge

I started the day with an early morning trip via the Brandenburger Tor to the Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten. Early enough that the people dressed in historical uniforms or cartoon characters hadn't even shown up yet to start scamming tourists. The Soviet Memorial is particularly interesting/crazy once you see the photo at the bottom of this post - the Soviets had captured German soldiers start building it in the ruins of the city pretty much as soon as the war ended, before any sort of reconstruction, almost a penal exercise. The old rumour (supposedly disproven) was that it was built from stone from the destroyed Reich Chancellery. They even built it right in the middle of the street which was to be the 'Avenue of Splendours' in Albert Speer's grand plan for 'World Capital Germania'.

Early morning at the Brandenburger Tor without crowds and tourist traps

Tools, coins and occasional flowers on the Soviet Memorial

The memorial is still in use and regularly visited by Russians, who appear to leave spanners, hammers and coins behind in addition to the usual flowers. After visiting the memorial I made my way back to the Musuem Island to tick the Bode Museum and Altes Nationalgalerie off my list and finish the Island. The Bode musuem is another one focussed on both old and ancient sculptures - still not my favourite, but interesting enough and free to view since I cunningly bought the weekly pass! The building itself was fantastic though, very grand foyers and a dome at the far end. And I even found the sculptures more interesting than I expected and spent quite a while there.

After the Bode it was time for a quick Bratwurst mit Brötchen (sausage inna bun) behind the Berliner Dom, dodge the pigeons flying around, and off to the Altes Nationalgalerie to finish my seventh and final Museuminsel museum. Apart from a couple impressive sculptures in the foyer it is mostly a painting collection, and much more enjoyable than I expected since it was hardly mentioned in my tourist guide. Some really nice historical paintings from the German Imperial era... supposedly from the 'neoclassical' and 'romantic' movements, although I'm just an amateur art appreciator and haven't figured those terms out very well yet. Either way, I really enjoyed it, one of my favourites on the island.

Princess Luisa and Frederike of Prussia at the Alte Nationalgalerie

With half an hour to closing time, there was time enough to quickly sneak back into the Pergamon Museum, which I saw on my previous trip but not this time. Might as well, with nothing else planned, and quickly look at the massive and impressive altar, and try get a better picture of the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon. I took plenty of photos to try and stitch together, but I'm still struggling with the software! Stitching hasn't really been my thing so far, but maybe I'll figure it out one day. But that's it for my second trip to Berlin. Really love this city, and I would come back anytime - although I've persuaded myself that next trip I will check out Munich for the first time instead! Hope they still have Currywurst there :)

Mural from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon at the Pergamon Museum

Construction in 1945. Ruined Reichstag at the top right. Photo by Hein Gorny.

Walking along the last preserved section of the Berlin Wall

Back to the Berlin Wall

August 20, 2014 in City, Museum, Travel

Seems I already went back on my word of 2 months ago and forgot to keep posting and catching up on photos from my last trip to Germany! Not many more left to go now, but since I'm in Europe again for the last three weeks I've taken many thousands more photos, and getting increasingly far behind in my photo publishing! Tempting to forget about these photos as a lost cause now, but well if I don't publish them, they'll never see the light of day! Maybe this batch today isn't the most exciting, but there are one or two still to come from the last trip that I'm quite proud of. Even worse, I still haven't posted about the last Horse and Rider portrait session I did with Tiffany, or the video work I've been doing with Sven for the Bokeh-Monster, or even my winter road trip and snowstorm in the deep south! One day I intend to stop procrastinating...

Preserved wall with Fernsehturm on the skyline

This day in Berlin, like a lot of my days in Berlin, was a day of museums and memorials. Maybe that's not what everyone else does in Berlin, but there are enough of both to keep me busy for weeks. I started with an early morning U-Bahn ride to the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial) at the site of the infamous Bernauer Straße crossing, where many people escaped to freedom in the early days of the wall when it looked much less imposing than it became. At the very start, they just bricked up the first floor doors and windows of every house along the street - leading to plenty of footage of people jumping down from higher stories to freedom in the West. That didn't last long.

The complete section of the wall above was preserved by rapid action of the government the day before German Unification in 1990, declaring it a historical monument while walls were being torn down all over the city. The wall itself was much more than a simple wall, as can be seen here - it was continuously developed and 'improved' over the years into quite a fortification, with tall concrete climb-proof barriers, razor wire, electrical signal fences, steel spiked floors, dog patrol lanes, sand floors to show footprints, flood lights, and tall towers with machine gunners inside. The memorial itself stretches much further down the street, including foundations of buildings torn down to fit the wall in, an earthen church where the Church of Reconciliation famously stood in no-man's land between the two sides of the wall until it was destroyed in 1985, photos and memorials of the 138+ people killed crossing the wall, and video displays of people escaping to freedom in the early days. Overall the memorial was really good, a lot more to see there than just a piece of wall left behind. Definitely recommended in Berlin.

The Lustgarten at night. And because i needed another square photo to fit this spot.

The rest of the day was filled with museum visiting as I attempt to cross more off the list, particularly the remaining ones on the famous Museuminsel 'Museum Island'. This time I covered the Museum for Photography with it's excellent Helmut Newton galleries, and the Altes ('Old') Musuem on the island. This is housed in a very impressive Neoclassical building by the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, built 1823-1830 next to the Berliner Dom. I enjoyed the museum, but its collection is mostly of ancient sculptures, which isn't my preferred source of culture :)

Cork Tree plantation at the Canberra Arboretum

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

January 31, 2014 in Travel, Landscape, Museum

We spent Christmas 2013 in Canberra visiting my family, which we've done several times since they moved there from NZ. Canberra isn't really a big tourist destination, and after visiting half a dozen times I'm not really sure what to visit anymore. The National Museums are very good however and worth repeat trips.

The only really new activity we did this time was a couple of visits to the Canberra Arboretum, which is a giant tree plantation on 250-hectares of land that was completely burnt out in the 2001 and 2003 bushfires. I've seen the site driving past on previous trips while it was being planted, but it only opened in February 2013 and is proving to be a new drawcard for tourists and locals. The very large site includes plantations of 100 different blocks of different trees and 100 gardens, as well as long walking, biking and horse riding tracks.

The Arboretum was actually quite nice to walk around, despite the lack of shade provided by mostly baby trees from the hot Canberra sun. There are also two plantations of older trees spared by the fires, including these Himalayan Cedars and Cork Oaks planted under direction from Walter Burleigh Griffin, the original city planner of Canberra, and namesake of the big lake surrounding the centre of town. The Cork Oaks were particularly interesting as they are still regularly harvested for their bark (which makes cork, duh), giving dark lower and pale upper trunks.

One thing that I do most times I go to Canberra is to visit the Australian War Memorial Museum, which is an impressive monumental building with a very good collection of military hardware and stories from both World Wars, as well as Australia's other engagements. The WWII aircraft are my favourites, including some of my favourite planes like the P40 Warhawk, and a massive Lancaster bomber named 'G for George' with associated sound and light show every hour! We were at the museum for closing time, where they perform the Last Post ceremony every day including a story about one of the 102,000 names inscribed on the roll of honour.

Wide Brown Land and the Black Mountain Tower in the background

Zeche Zollverein - Down the Mines

November 24, 2013 in Travel

Just got home from my month-long trip to Germany this week, now into the long process of catching up on my backlog of editing and posting photos! I'm a pretty amateur blogger... living up to the 'blave' name well! These pictures are from inside the buildings of the Zeche Zollverein mine complex - from a guided tour of the main mine shaft (Shaft XII) building and from the Ruhr Museum which was built into the lowest levels of the large Coal Washing Plant.

Zeche Zollverein coal mine - air flow ('luft') control valve

I'm not usually keen on guided tours - since I prefer to take my time and explore around by myself and find interesting things to photograph - but as usual the most interesting places are only accessible by tour, at extra charge of course. The mine shaft itself is not accessible for the tour - but I have it on good authority that they do special trips down there for VIPs and important industrial groups, which would have been really interesting! But the mine shaft buildings themselves were quite cool, and of course you get the full tourist information spiel on coal mining, conditions for the mine workers, history of the mines etc etc etc.

The best trivia I got from the tour was the 'cost of water' for the mines in the Ruhr region - even though the mines shut down 20 years ago, they still have to turn the pumps on for an hour every day to keep pumping out the infiltrating water. If they stop doing this, after a year the weight of water will compress the ground (riddled with tunnels) and lower the Ruhr enough to redirect the Rhine and flood the whole (densely populated) region. So they must keep paying to pump of thousands of tonnes of water.. forever!

Illuminated staircase down the the Ruhr Museum

I also visited the new Ruhr Museum, which was built into the basement floors of the Coal Washing Plant building (shown from the outside last post). It's not huge, but made for one of the most impressive museum settings I've visited. There were all sorts of informative displays of the history and modern development of the Ruhr region, but as usual I found the ancient history much more interesting. This part was also in the lowest floor, with lots of dramatically lit displays inside concrete coal bunkers. The bronze age armour and weapon displays were particularly impressive in this setting! But my favourite part was probably the giant orange-lit staircase descending to the lower floors.

The Great Flower Carpet of Brussels

Portsmouth Historic Dockyards

Berlin History and Art

Back to the Berlin Wall

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

Zeche Zollverein - Down the Mines

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