mindlog

shades of ages

gewandhaus, leipzig

blue alps

taken at the tegernsee in direction south (to austria).

pharmacy museum heidelberg

last year I hat the opportunity to visit a very nice, small museum located at the castle of heidelberg – the german pharmacy museum with many interesting and funny exhibits. this is a small selection of some pictures I made there, if you ever happen to visit the city I recommend to take a look at it… it’s full of herbs, old style pharmacy pots, interesting instruments, reconstructions of laboratories, and gives you a good overview over the history of medicine and its drugs.

venice in springtime

I expected venice to be less full in springtime than in summer – I was wrong. it feels like 50% of the german population over 65 decided to spend their eastern in veneto’s capital. at least the weather wasn’t that bad and the food quite good. here some not-so-usual pictures because I guess you can find tons of pictures of places like piazza di san marco or ponte di rialto all over the internet.

praha – hlavní město české republiky

prague is a place austrians have a somehow historical obligation to see at least once in life for the reason of the history alone the austro-hungarian empire shared with the “zlaté město”, the golden city. so in summer 2010 we decided to take 1-week-look at the metropolis at the vltava (= moldau), a city full of the charm of hundreds and hundreds of years of turbulent and changeful history. some impressions:

this last one here should be quite famous from a james bond-movie where a sniper uses this monument on top of the czech national bank just around the corner from náměstí republiky to take cover and aim at people sitting in the obecní dům at the other side of the street.

not only recent, “famous” places like this one can be found in prague, you can more find an interesting place at every corner. whether it is the old city hall, half bombed down in the second world war, the church with the mummified hand of a thief, the famous, astronomical clock, the jewish cemetery, the wenzel square or one of the many many very good restaurants (where you should always double-check your bill and compare it with the prices on the czech-language menu) and if you look for paths apart from the big streams of tourists prague is haunted by most of the year you can always find nice and interesting places as well, the city is just more than the sum of all it’s attractions.

we chose to not stay at a hotel or a boarding house but rather look for an apartement for rent and found a quite decent, modern one which wasn’t that expensive after all. so I’d recommend you, if you are travelling in a group, to look for offers like this, which are, in my opinion much more comfortable than any hotel or similar can get.

stairway to…?

stairs in prague 1 (prague castle); somehow reminds me of the nabataeans

water from above, water from below

neue residenz / roofs of the city @rain; bamberg, germany

at the harbour / the last few meters of the river inn @high tide / roofs; passau, germany

breakthrough

a backyard in prague 1

a different kind of jaw

everyone knows, at least partially, how our digestive system works. perfectly adapted to the human nutritional strategy different structures like our teeth, jaw bone, musculi masseter, temporalis,… not to mention anything that is needed for deglutition, work together to do what most people simply know as “eating”.

so with a different nutritional strategy comes a need for a different digestive system, some similar to the human one, some pretty exotic. sea urchins, being grazers, have a structure called aristotele’s latern – from the mechanic viewpoint a pretty fascinating structure which can lower down the animals teeth through contraction of a complex muscular system. and even with this special sea urchin being (obviously) dead, the structure has still been resilient with some soft pressure applied.

aristotele’s latern

towel day – remembering douglas adams

don’t panic!
in remembrance of douglas adams, one of the greatest writers in recent histroy who died in 2001 – join people all over the world for towel day and celebrate the greatness of towels by carrying one with you for the whole day. you never know what you can use it for.

fig.1: a towel