Surreal Georgia

Squares - Photo Challenge

I know, it was meant in a different way, but I want to interpretate it like this:

Our village square just in front of my house with a playground

Church square in Arolsen, a little town nearby with beautiful baroque houses

The central square of Rhoden with sort of medevial flair

Korbach, this was the place where turneys took place in the Middle Ages. It looks as if the knights are just gone.

Square in Duisburg, a town near the river Rhine (therefore the fish!)

Square inside a big shopping mall

Very modern sqare in another town in the Ruhr Valley, in Oberhausen

Main square in Kassel, which was once a baroque square with luxurious houses, but has got a totally different face after war destroyed nearly every house at the circular Königsplatz (King's Square) 65 years ago.

 

************************************************************************************************

Regular participants are:

Ree

Lisa 

Taia

and me. Feel free to join us!

Slow - Photo Challenge

In the neighbor valley there are a few very little villages with only about 100 inhabitants. If you go there it is sometimes as if time would go slowlier there. You can find street scenes that might be in the 60ies like this one here:

It reminds me of the days I was a little child and this woman could be my grandmother. It's the typical way elderly women used to dress at that time. My granny also always wore a black or very dark apron like this woman. And she refused to wear other colors than black, grey, dark blue or brown.

But it's today, more than 40 years  later...

************************************************************************************************

Regular participants are:

Ree

Lisa 

Taia

and me. Feel free to join us!

 

Beautiful Homeland Waldeck

Enjoy some videos from where I live:

 

First of all my hometown

 

 

Lake Diemel nearby

 

 

Arolsen, the beautiful town of our Duke of Waldeck. It was the birthplace of the grandmother (Queen Emma) of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Therefore a lot of people from the Netherlands use to visit our small country.

Quiet (Photo Challenge)

 

Quiet? What could be more quiet than a cemetery? A cemetery that is usually under water!

We have got a huge artificial lake her, the Edersee, which came into being in 1914. It buried three villages. In one of them my great great grandfather once lived as a teacher. When people moved away before the flood came they sealed the old cemeteries with concrete plates. Sometimes when the water is extremely low you can visit the ruins of the villages and also see the graves there.

This was a door which once led to the valley of the river Eder. It's usually under water.

Remains of an old cellar. The houses are gone long ago. 

Look here, where I took this picture. In the background it is Anna coming along:

 

The water was extremely low then. All you see is normally seaground.

Way from the cemetery to the boats.

I made a short film with my camera:

 

 

And this is how the cemetery looks like. Each grae has got a number on it, so you still know who was buried there. Sometimes relatives bring flowers.

Some graves were still under water.

We were scared by bubbles coming out of the graves. Well, we thought that it would be decaying corpses, which are the reason therefore. But a friend told us that it were just bacteriae and algae who would cause these bubbles. Look yourself!

  

 

*****************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

 

Beauty (Photo Challenge)

This topic isn't easy for me. What is beauty? For me it is not what most people think it would be, like a model or an actor or maybe Miss World. Just the opposite. For me most of these "beautiful people" aren't beautiful, but boring and empty. I am often scared about the way young people perceive other people. They can describe a person only by very superficial and outwardly qualities. I am scared about how few they notice of a personality. And what many of them take for beauty looks in my eyes a lot like Barbie and Ken. And Barbie and Ken are in my eyes everything else, but not beautiful.

Barbie is handicapped: She has crippled feet and hands, a crippled lower body and an overdeveloped breast. This breast is so oversized that it causes severe back pain. Barbie has got a much too long neck and the worst of all: She suffers from microcephalia. Look, she hasn't got any space in her skull for a brain. There is only the forehead. The rest is severely underdeveloped and can fulfill only one purpose: holding the hair. Also her brain skull is crippled. Nobody has got such a small nose! So how can Barbie be beautiful and a role model for beauty!? Don't get me wrong, for me handicapped people can be very, very beautiful, but not Barbie. And it's the same with Ken. If this is the role model for women, I must say that this is a very sexist role model. No thank you! A lot of us women are different, thank goodness! And they are all much more beautiful than Barbie with their wrinkles, their birth marks, their extra fat on the hips, their cellulite...., because they are able and honest persons.

For me beauty is totatally different from mainstream. For me it comes from the soul and from experiences people made and how they coped with them. It comes from being grown up and maturing, it comes from being an honest person.

Here are people who are very, very beautiful to me:

 

 

Granny

 

 

Grandpa

 

 

Papa

 

 

For me the most beautiful picture of my father is this one, because it shows my father's soul. He is the small man on the left side. He was the boss of more than 1000 workers in a steel mill, but never was a cocky person but stayed the boy from the country with a deep understanding for the problems and needs of the workers who they committed to him. These men next to him are also beautiful to me. I know each of them, all honest and rooted to the soil. They became friends to us. This kind of working world is sadly gone long ago.

My dogs were all beautiful to me.

My parents - the last picture of them together. Beautiful.

 

Of course also things can be beautiful, but in a very different kind of meaning, when they are functional and esthetic at the same time or full of good  memories. Nature is beautiful.

 

Well, I think I'm very sad today. I miss my father and I must stop now and do something different, painting another room, because I'm starting to cry and it hurts so badly, more than I can stand. Work always prevents me from thinking and remembering. So I'm working all the day. I think you got an idea now why I am working round the clock. I'm still grieving.

 

*****************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

 

 

Unusual View (Photo Challenge) - Around The Castle Of Arolsen

Unusual view - um, this topic is my own fault. I messed around with the camera looking through one of the huge glass crystals of our living room luster:

The colors are fine, but I was not content with myself.

 

No bread in the house any more, We had to go and get some and so we went to Arolsen and made a lot of photos around the castle there. It was the castle where Queen Emma of the Netherlands was born, the grandmother of Queen Beatrix. OK, this is sort of yellow press and not really interesting. But I hope you enjoy the pics.

 

 The castle from an unusual point of view (you have to walk through the bushes to get there).

 Some moss on a pillar of the fence around the castle

 Looking through a snowberry shrub. At us this kind of shrub is called "cap bomb shrub", because the little white berries usually go bang when you treadle them.

 

 

 Moss and oak leaves

 Roofs of the castle 

 And moss again

Angel on the nearby old cemetery

 

 Very unusual tombstone.

 

*****************************************************************************************

 

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

 

Old Postcard

I just found this old postcard from the 1970ies in my archives and I thought it would be interesting. Do you see our house!?

Black And White (Photo Challenge)

Part 1:

 

 

I think, this is a quite normal interpretation of today's topic: Some branches and the sky behind them. Because of the contrast between dark wood in the foreground and the bright sky the picture hasn't got any colors, seems as if it were a black and white photography. The blurry part is a little snowflake that fell on the camera lens.

But I were not Georgia if I wouldn't go crazy sometimes:

 

 

Part 2:

When going through my photo archives I found a lot of old pics I never published before and It would have been a pity not to show them, because you always see my "new old house" in the background.

The house before WW II; my grandparents still were farming. You see the barn door and above it the granary window. There were stables in the annex on the left side.

In front of the house in the late 1930ies. It was my great grandfather's 70th birthday.

1: grandfather Fritz, 2: my father Georg, 3: father's elder brother Fritz, 4: grandma Anna and her mother Karoline (left of her), 5: great grandfather Fritz

The little boy with the white apron is my uncle Karl and behind him the girl is his sister Luise. They are the only ones on the pic who are still alive.

 

This must have been shortly before May 1943, when my father's brother died. He (left side) and my father (right side) are sitting at the back seat of the horse carriage. On the stairs there are standing my grandfather (closest to the carriage) and my great grandfather (near the sign at the door). The man in a suit must be my grandmother's youngest brother Georg. The woman must be his wife Karoline. My granny was probably in the kitchen, preparing dinner.

 

 Village feast at the same time: They played a lot of music and went around in the village. In the evening there was dance.

 

The house in 1959 with the new Veranda in front of it. My father colored the pic with some crayons.

 

Great grandfather inside the house. We still have the sofa, the cupboard and most of the pictures.

 

 

 It is currently in the cellar of my other house and waiting to move back to where it belongs. This pic was taken one year ago.

 

Part 3:

No photo, but it is black and white and it says: Have a wonderful week!

If you want to make your own, you can get it here:
http://goqr.me/[Insert%20text%20here]

 

 *****************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

Favorite Place (Photo Challenge)

 

 

You might ask: Is this really your favorite place!? Yes, it is one of my favorte places outside. If you walk along the cart track behind our house, which is confined by apple trees on both sides, you come to this hill with mighty and old beeches on it. Their branches reach to the ground so that you can sit under those beeches as if you were in a hut made of the leafs of the tree. And when you are sitting there you can overlook a wide area.

 

 

You can see the apple tree alley and our small village...

 

 

... or the rolling hills beyond the valley of the river Diemel....

 

 

... or the old, old volcano, the "Desenberg", how it is called and the small town Warburg at the horizon. Nature here is breathtaking, much more beautful than these pictures can show.

I have been loving this place since I was a little kid. Once, when I was 11 or 12 I was there with my friend Elke during a holiday vacation at my grandparents' house (Yes, at that time it wasn't my house, but the house of my grandparents. I sometimes can't believe it myself). We carved our names into the wood of the biggest of these beeches and you can still see our names there. This place was our hideaway and we used to stay there for hours every day. When the church bells were ringing we had to come home, which was at noon and at six o' clock in the evenings. Sweet memories...

 

 

I took a closer look for you, Lisa. This is our house (red arrow) and in the center of the picture you see this old volcano. It hasn't been active for a long period of time, since Tertiary to be precise. But geologists found out that there is still magma below the surface and that it can erupt at every time. Well, at every time means perhaps in 10000 years. Geolgists count in different periods of time than we usually do. - The volcano belongs to a system of volcanos which reaches until about Frankfurt south of us. I once wrote an article about the geology and archeology of this area, which you can read here. We also have volcanos near Cologne, which are still active but have been also quiet over a long period of time like the Desenberg. Read my article about them here. - On top of the Desenberg-volcano there is an old Medevial castle, which once belonged to the Knights of Spiegel, who are ancestors of nearly all famous and reigning European noble families with their kings and queens or dukes and duchesses. They lived there in the 14th century. Today the castle is a ruin and looks like this:

 

 

My favorite place inside the house is currently this: The veranda. Well, at the moment it's to cold to sit there, but I'm looking forward to the spring sun I can enjoy here sitting in the chair.

 

 

The third favorite place is of course my cozy bed! And hopefully it will look in our new old house like it looked like in the other house soon.

 

 

Another favorite place is an old graveyeard. But at this time of the year it is too cold to go there, so here is picture I took in summer:

 

 

These are the remains of a Medevial ghost town. When people moved away only the church and the graveyard remained. It's a quiet and idyllic place where you can sit and hear the birds sing for hours without a single person coming along.

 

******************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

Traffic Signs (Photo Challenge)

OK, I'm Queen Scatterbrain when there are special topics in our Challenge. But I can't stop my brain getting connotations which might be unusual. I'm an urban geographer and my daughter is studying town planning. So traffic signs are not only traffic signs but represent models like the car friendly town by Sir Colin Buchanan or the German architect Hans Reichow. Your cities in the USA are very car friendly, so are our cities. It's an old concept with many, many problems. I think you all experienced these problems yourself. European and German town planners are retreating from this principle and try to find new concepts for town renewal. Car friendly towns are "human unfriendly" and urban life does not take part between these oversized highways which are cutting up neighborhoods and avoid communication and street life. Well, it's a topic that could fill hundreds of books, but these few sentences are enough for a photo challenge.

I thought it would be nice coming with me and looking through the car window as if you were the driver. Come with me and look how a typical German car friendly town looks like. And of course you will see traffic signs!

I must confess, that I did these pictures not today, but last October. But I'm ill today and can't go outside. So I hope it counts.

Here we start!

 

This is my home village: Notice the traffic signs! Check! The yellow sign says: Here is a village, you aren't allowed to drive faster than 50 km/h. The sign with the red and white stripes says: Dangerous bend!

 

At first we drive on normal state roads, which use to have two lanes. In the background you see the outline of an old volcano which is dominating the landscape.

Then we use the autobahn, which usually has at least 4 lanes, but sometimes also up to 8 lanes. This here is near an expressway interchange, so there are more lanes. On the autobahn you are allowed to drive as fast as you want. On my opinion there should be a speed limit!

If you are tired and need a break you can stop at one of the motor houses. But I can't suggest it, because the restaurant is very expensive and very bad. You only get fast food. Even using the toilets is expensive. Not to talk about fuel...

Big ring roads take you from the autobahn to the next city. The lanes are often divided with concrete obstacles and the crossing traffic drives upon road bridges.

This is an underground station. Notice the traffic sign: 70! You are allowed to drive 70 km/h. In towns it is usually only 50 km/h, but on these big roads you mostly can drive faster. The bridge is only for pedestrians who had to cross the road to get the underground.

Sometimes these urban highways are so wide, that pedestrians can't cross them. This is another pedestrian bridge. 

When you are closer to the city the ring roads cross each other and there are very ugly intersections. In the outskirts of the town there are big business parks like this here, where people can also go shopping. More and more people do their shopping here, because it takes too long to drive into the city and find a free parking lot there.

Here we are in the old quarters which were constructed at about 1880 to 1920. The old houses are mostly not in good condition, there are no gardens and only few green plants. It's loud and dusty. The shops which were formerly in the first floor are mostly abandoned or there are shops for poor people or special ethnic groups of the population (Turkish, African, Russian,...shops). These are quarters for the lower classes.

This is shortly before we arrive at the border to the old Medevial town. Here are parking garages (blue sign with P on it), hotels and a lot of office buildings.

Here you see the pedestrian zone in the city. This was the area of the medevial town, but during WW II most of the old buildings were destroyed and so you find a lot of new ones like the "Kaufhof", a department store, which was constructed in the 60ies. An imporant principle of the car freindly town is, that other kinds of traffic like pedestrians and bikerider are banned on special lanes and special zones, so that the cars can drive with high speed. Outside these pedestrian zone the pedestrians and bikeriders had to wait very long at the crosswalks until they are allowed to cross a 6 lane road in 15 seconds! As a pedestrian you aren't allowed to be old or sick! You have to hurry, because the cars have to drive. And where there are no crosswalks there are tunnels, which are stinking after human excrements or bridges, which are pretty steep for old people for example or those who are hampered.

This is also a residential quarter for lower classes, mostly of German origin. There are six apartments in each apartment building and blocks of garages. Well, it's pretty dreary. The road collects the traffic from the smaller residential streets and has got usually two lanes and parking lots beside it.

There are also multi-storing buildings at the smaller residential streets. These tenants don't have garages, but only parking lots. The lawn is not planned for playing on it or sitting outside, it's just lawn. Most of the apartments have balconies. It's not desirable to live here. It's a bit like in a battery farm.

This is a small shopping center in one of these quarters. It consists of a supermarket, a hairdresser, another supermarket with very cheap food and a bakery. People can get there what they need daily.

More outside the town there are endless quarters with homes of different age. This quarter is constructed in the 80ies. These quarters look different, which depends on the different age of the houses. But I think this is the same in the USA. These are the quarters for the middle classes.

I prefer to leave the town. I love the country. - The sign on the left side says: You are now allowed to pass again. Outside of towns and villages you are allowed to drive 100 km/h, which is pretty fast.  

 

Oh, we also have got Mac Donalds (Do you see the sign?) 

 Night is coming!

Home again in our small village.

*****************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/