I know already!

Yes, I do know that it's been too long, again, since the last blog. I would like to say it's been because I'm too busy but the opposite is true. I have continued looking for work but also been spending time working in Daniel and Gillian's basement. That is now finished, inhabited and looking good.

The job search is also just about over, I have picked up some work to do from home but am very hopeful that a more regular job is just around the corner...

Last Saturday we met up with David and Becca Munro and their children Georgia and Daisy. David is the eldest son of our very good friends in Christ, Tony and Jenny Munro from the UK. David lives near Toronto and was in Ottawa visiting other friends and experiencing Winterlude festival on the Rideau Canal etc. By the time we met them they were feeling chilly and tired so we headed directly to the museum of Civilisation for coffee and doughnuts! Gillian, Daniel and Sarah were also along for the ride.


Becca with Sarah


David and Georgia





Daisy

Christmas 2008

For Christmas day and Boxing day 2008 Daniel, Gillian, Mike, Natalie as well as Madisyn and Sarah of course spent a couple of days at our house. Although too small to open their own presents we were there to help them. After all the excitement of their first Christmas they swapped notes whilst sharing a chair although Sarah looked decidedly tired by it all at one point.

Enjoy the slideshow.......

Happy families

If there is one, the advantage of Mike being away (sorry Nat) is that Natalie, Madisyn and Keira came to stay in Ottawa for a few days. It was great to be able to spend almost four days with them and for Gill to bring Sarah over a couple of days so we could all have a bonding party.

The pictures say it all but we look forward to doing it again before too long...

..and finally

Yes, I've not yet left the planet. We arrived back in Canada on August 21st and have since been busy bonding with Madisyn and Sarah as well as getting the house organised, renovated (after all, it'll soon be a year old!), getting the car registered in Canada and looking for work as well as probably a few more excuses.
I'll try to update more often and include a picture or two next time.

Underground / overground

At work it happened that one person's hobby is learning and extolling the delights and history of the 'Berlin Underworld'. There is quite a vast assortment of air raid shelters, stores and goodness knows what hidden beneath the cobbles. I got the opportunity to visit some of the bunkers and pass on the photos to you!

Electrified steel beams put across the interconnecting subway tunnels during the Berlin separation to stop people escaping to West Berlin;

Underground dorms and ladies loos (hooks on wall above show where curtains once hung);

Map of one of the bunkers;

For more bunker info see http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Nearby ('S' bahn station Nordbahnhof) is a section of Berlin wall complete with the hinterland ('behind') wall and a dividing strip in between. The main wall was on the West Berlin side and the hinterland wall on the East Berlin (Communist) side. Anyone caught attempting to cross from East to West would be shot and killed.

One stretch of 'The Wall', at the end is a large reflecting stainless stell plate to give the impression that the wall just went right on....

At a break in the wall (since re-unification!) is a cross to commerate those who died in the conflicts. In the background is an old cemetry, some coffins were reburied in the cemetry as the dividing strip was also once a put of it. Also in the picture are sections of the wall, now removed.

The Church of Reconciliation stands on the site of a former church that ended up caught in the divided zone and was pulled down to give the wall guards a clear line of sight to shoot would be escapees.

Berlin also has some remains of Flak towers that basically housed anti-aircraft guns. these towers are largely demolished/covered with large mounds of rubble, now well wooded. Consequently there was not much to take pictures of although in the adjoining park is a quite nice rose garden......

For more flak tower info see..... http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Sachsenhausen Camp

Sachsenhausen Camp is a concentration camp on Berlin's northern fringes and I eventually got to visit today. It has long been on my 'to-do' list so I was glad to take the train up and cycle over to it. It was very interesting, though sad to think what men can do to men, there must surely be something demonic about the perpetrators.

Here are the pictures...


Gate A - the entrance into the camp (any guesses about gate Z?). The camp side of the gate has a balcony with machine guns mounted and trained permanently on the prisoners.



Through the actual gate into the camp - with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI, roughly translated as 'work will make you free'.



In case you do not work hard enough (and therefore 'don't feel free'), don't try to get free through the gravel 'shoot-at-will' zone, barbed wire, electric fence, dog patrol and concrete wall.


Roll call ground where prisoners were forced to stand or crouch, hands behind heads, for hours on end in all weathers. Move and you get beaten (and if you'll lucky, not killed). On the post war concrete wall are the outlines of more prisoner huts that used to stand there but are long since demolished.



Prisoner hut



Execution squad firing range also with 4 simple gallows in the beam across the top.




Cremation ovens - largely destroyed by the Communists. These ovens are in the part of the grounds called 'camp Z'. the implication being that you walk in through gate a but can only leave through camp Z via the execution methods and cremation ovens. A-Z, the full circle. :-(




Mortuary



Memorial

Rhine

In Germany, the first of May (Thursday in 2008) is the Labour day holiday so we took the Friday of work as well and visited the Rhine valley. We stayed at the Hotel Hillen in Bacharach and visited Sankt (St.) Goar, Boppard, Loreley and more places along both sides of the river.

I will try to add more text later but for now here is a sample of some pictures and videos.