Visitors! (Parents edition)

So it's August and it's the season of retired parents on travels. Andddddddd pig feet. Ok I'll spare you of another picture (i.e my dad took the picture and i don't have it anyways). So my parents spent the first half a week wandering around Berlin.

 They bought this guidebook and did some very thorough homework on all the exciting things they wanted to see and gave me advice on what i should see later. I fail as tourguide obviously.Friday morning we boarded the blazing fast ICE towards Munich.

Our quick tour of Munich consisted of all the essentials of Germany: churches, sausages, and 1.0L beers at the Hofbrauhaus (royal beer house).

Saturday we woke up bright and early to try to beat the crowd to Neuschwanstein Castle (I was thoroughly mocked by the Germans in lab for pronouncing this wrong. Ok really only just one German and one Austrian) Well it turns out we didn't beat the crowd. So we headed to our fancy hotel at the foot of the mountain. Mom decided that if there is a day to splurge on this trip, it was gonna be today. Here is the view of the castle from our hotel.

Ya, not bad huh?

Since we didn't quite beat the crowd and didn't want to wait in the massive line, we had the hotel concierge book a visit to the castle for the next morning. We then went about taking our time chilling in Schwangau for the rest of the day. We had some left over salami and bread from the day before so we took a boat out into the Alpsee and had a picnic before we visited the Hohenschwangau castle, which had a much shorter ticket queue.

So Neuschwanstein! Sorry not the best picture

I thought the castle exterior was quite magnificent but didn't find the interior quite as exciting. Maybe it was the pace of the tour and the stuff that was exhibited? Either way, quite the impressive castle. I suppose Ludwig II did kinda spend all the money in the land to build this castle and messed up the whole country... but at least he has a hell of a castle to show for it?

And finally this past weekend we made our way down to Prague for one last adventure for my parents. Aside from the numerous glasses of beer, we managed to squeeze in quite a bit of site seeing in our short time in this beautiful city. Our stroll across Bridge Charlie was probably the most exciting. There were a variety of crafts and artwork being sold. Turns out the artists had to register with the government and get a certificate of approval for their art form(?) We ended up really liking a watercolor of Bridge Charlie done by the old man. This shall be hung up in my new place in Seattle when I return!

And I also found a piece of my roots. The boyscouts of Germany were singing at the end of the bridge in an attempt to make a few bucks. They were pretty good. 

We ended the night by heading towards the Old Town Square and took some poorly lit pictures. 

So the next day began with us getting a bit lost on our quest to find the castle quarter. With a Chinese guide book in hand, questions asked in broken English, and some nice Czech lady giving directions in Czech, my dad somehow got us there. 

So it turns out the "castle quarter" is actually not a castle. It's more like a fenced off district with the massive St.Vitus Cathedral in the middle. 

There were some interesting pieces of exhibit and statues in the castle quarter. Allow me to feature a few of my favorites (definitely not representative of what was actually there, but it turned out I didn't take pictures of normal stuff).

The golden penis boy

gun sword??? I didn't realize these were real!

Cage of torture

Ok I lie, I did take some normal pictures when I went into the cathedral. The stained glass here was amazing! I thought these were much more impressive than any of the other cathedrals I have been to this summer.

 

Though my favorite part of this cathedral is this decoration on the fencing. The merge of the church and militia and ruling is so clearly demonstrated in here. It's amazing (and scary) how religion is so effective used in ruling people. 

That mostly concludes our short trip in Prague. We took a short visit to the national museum, which was under renovation so only had a small collection on exhibit in the side building. The focus of the exhibit was on the monarchies.

It was raining on our way to the station and dad took care of mom of course :)

..... wow that was long....

Visitors! (Brian and Juju edition)

So my exciting Germany trip has been populated by visitors every month. Brian started his Euro trip in Berlin in June, Julien came in July from France, and now my parents are here for 2 weeks doing a grand tour of Germany.

So basically these visits for me means a time to explore Germany as a touristy tourist which I am usually too lazy to be. So….. picture time!

Brian came first week of my Germany stay so it was a perfect time to eat some big fat chunks of pork feet!

Oh and some stupid syrup mixed with weissbeer….. my lab mate Alex would disapprove strongly.

And off goes Brian and Cassie to explore Germany

And Juju came with an offering of Canailles. Too bad he didn’t bring a bottle of Bordeaux Wine. Owell, I am in my quest to regain some appreciation for sweets so it’s all good.

And well July is also a good time for some more pig feet, so… more pig feet!

Okok, I didn’t only eat German food and call it being a touristy tourist. Juju had a guide book from Lonely Planet which had some good suggestions on where to go.  We started off with a visit to Schloss Charlottenburg, the palace dedicated to Sophie Charlotte, mother of Friedrich the Great, the king of Prussia, conveniently located about 10 minutes from my apartment by foot.

Sorry no pictures allowed inside as I found out after being stopped. Sad. 

so small break and bought some picnic food at a local farmers market for lunch. Delicious Pesto Rosso and Organic bread. 

Then we went to the DDR Museum and learned about the fun life of Eastern Germany under Soviet control.

Natural Beauty

Gourmet food

Then we went to visit the hip area of Neukolln and Keurzberg. We weren't hip enough to appreciate it I think so we ended up just eating food. So we visited the most famous Currywurst store, Curry36. It was quite delicious. The sausages were a bit different from the normal ones. Just realized that picture just looks like a plate of fries with ketchup... I promise there were sausages in it.

Finally we visited the Berlin Zoo. Alrighty non Germans, try pronouncing Zoologischer Garten. Ya.... freaken took me 2 months to learn this word.

So Juju had a few more days of wandering around but I had work so we just ate dinner and stuff. We weren't very exciting so no pictures. 

Germany's first Makerfaire!

This weekend happened to be the first Makerfaire in Germany and I got to tag along with Stefanie to go check it out! Super thrilled. Still not entirely sure what the occasion was, I think it was a trip organized to broaden the perspective of those students who are into hardware hacking? The event was in Hannover, about 2.5 hour drive from Berlin.

So I finally got to experience the famous speed limitless Autobahn. I was really impressed actually. Not particularly by the fact that Stefanie got us there in ~2 hours averaging 100mph the whole way, but by how well the lack of speed limit worked. Everyone on the road averaged about 80-100 mph. Even with a big speed difference, people were very good about using the lanes and letting people faster pass. I thought it was most impressive when a Ferrari zooms by at 140 mph and the cars just peacefully got of the way so the Ferrari could continue at the speed without any breaking. People were also very good about following rules when it comes to temporary speed limiting due to constructions. I guess they know that the moment the "forget about the limit now" sign shows up they can go zoom zoom again.

So back to the Makerfaire! It was a bit small, about 80 booths (though half were repeats) but was still pretty entertaining. Saw alot of 3D printers and robots obviously. As expected the print resolution is still abysmally low but at least now its multicolored. I am really curious about how the maker community will respond to the laser sintering patent running out in 2014. For those of you who don't know: http://www.tested.com/tech/3d-printing/456856-laser-sintering-3d-printing-patents-expiring-2014/

The robot was actually really cool. It was a huge thing driven with pneumatics and played the guitar. It was straight up intimidating but quite awesome. 

There was also a robotic cooker. It was basically a pressure cooker with a cutter and mixer. It made a hell of a risotto I give it that. I was quite impressed. 

It seemed like a big theme was about exploring how to incorporate engineering into the learning environment. There were alot of showing of programs for gradeschoolers building hardware hacks which was pretty cool. There was a hover craft, some wearable input device, and starwars robots. 

There was also some focus on trying to market 3D printers to families with young kids. The cutest attempt I thought was a monkey puppet that mimicked the user by recording the kid's movement with a kinect. Funny thing was when an adult tried to use it, it didn't work because he was too tall and the kinect couldn't see him. 

And of course there was a cosplayer maker

My favorite part of the makerfaire was actually about the food. Or rather the container for the food. We ordered some grilled potatoes that ended up being served in a bowled made of waffles! It was brilliant. You eat the potatoes and then eat the waffle bowl with the left over sauce. Apparently they also do this for fries at the beach, but in a waffle cone. Cool stuff.

Overall it was alot of fun and thank you Stefanie for driving and not getting us killed on the Autobahn :)