On the outside, not one of the campus’s more attractive buildings, but it was looking OK this afternoon, and inside it’s actually quite pleasant, with lots of dark wood panelling etc. Mind you I still get lost in this building sometimes as it has a very confusing room layout, despite (or perhaps because of) hosting the schools of Planning and Architecture.
This is not my car. But I do sympathise with the owner, as this is taken near my house and they must live nearby (going on how often I see this car). Under such circumstances I too might have a mushroom cloud coming out of my head. Then again that’s one reason I don’t own a car.
This burst of wan and vapid sunlight is about as much as we got today. Not long after this, foul grey rain set in and did not let up all day. Winter is coming… we are in the late November doldrums of the year and as usual, I just hope to get to the end of the semester (mid-December) without any major grief.
Travelling, and working, and having a cup of tea, in Munich central station, which is so huge that you go two stops on the S-bahn train before you actually leave its awnings. I found my little corner of it for a time. A decent trip to Germany, but time to go home.
I claim that this blog is apolitical but it is hard to avoid touching on certain subjects sometimes. Why does this kind of thing still happen in a world where there are enough resources to lift everyone — and certainly, at least, everyone in a very rich country like Germany, and a very rich part of it, like Bavaria — out of poverty? We become inured to it, it becomes normalised, until we don’t even see it any more. Maybe that’s all I can say with this photo: here it is, still.
This is one of those shots that works if one gets the symmetry right — so it’s a shame both trains were not the same. But with this station, Simbach am Inn, lying right on the German/Austrian border, the one on the left goes into the first country, the one on the right, the latter. And who doesn’t love a bit of good old-fashioned Century Gothic font.
The reason I came to Germany was to come to a conference here, at the University of Passau, right in the bottom right-hand (south-east) corner of the country. The best experience I had at it was to get plugged in for ten minutes to an amazing virtual reality rig — created by students — which replicated, and rather well, the experience of being in a zero-gravity environment, specifically an abandoned space station. Once I got over the dizziness and tried to forget that my legs were relevant in this place, it was very effective. I wish I could somehow have photographed my own immersion, but that didn’t prove possible, so here’s fellow delegate Reni playing with it, after me.
And so off I go to Germany for the second time this year, after Berlin in August. Munich was not my final destination, but I passed through this afternoon while changing from plane to train. It seemed appropriate that my best chance to take a representative picture came in this beer hall, for after all, that is probably the city’s most famous product. However, being honest, I don’t particularly like Munich — a couple of previous visits have suggested to me that the place is rather overrated, I just don’t find it a very interesting or exciting city. Anyway — that’s why I was just passing through.
It’s becoming harder to crank myself up in the mornings to get the 06:32 — best train it might be, when I need to pull an early start at work, but it’s now still dark even when it deposits me in Manchester city centre, a state of affairs which will last until into February. Some places have the lights on at that time, but by no means all. This should be the last of a run of a couple of months spent only in England, but I’m off somewhere else for a few days tomorrow.
This one definitely isn’t going to win any photography awards, but what the hell, rainbows are nice to look at, particularly when the light is bright enough to produce the rare double rainbow. On which the colours are always the other way around, remember. This shot also records the other thing you need for a rainbow, beyond the light…. A sign of authenticity at least?
