Strange World

Since it has been just a little over a year since I moved to Germany, I have been thinking a lot about how this big move has changed things in my life. Today's thought is mostly about people. In the last year, it goes without saying that I have seen much less of my family and friends back in the US. The interesting thing I realized today is that I probably have seen my good German friend Alex less this year that I have been in Germany than I did when I lived in Colorado. Really! You see, I made frequent business trips to Duisburg because I was working on the same project as Alex. Alex was also working on a different project for a group in Colorado, so he came there often, sometimes for several weeks at a time. During those times, we each made sure the other wasn't bored in a hotel room somewhere and a strong friendship developed. Now that I've moved to Germany, and we're both working on other projects, our paths rarely cross in work-related ways anymore. I'm living in a city >4 hours by train away from him, so it is closer than the 10+ travel hours from the US, but still not close enough to just drop by. So, that's kind of strange, but we still keep in touch. On the other hand, I have built up other relationships that I never would have anticipated. For example, thanks to modern internet-based communication tools (blogs, Flickr, ???), and an interesting intertwining of my friends and Jeannette's family and friends, I am now communicating with a friend that I haven't heard from since high school.

OK, since I have nearly bordered on waxing philosophical about this strange web of acquaintances, I hope you can understand why I chose the spider web photo for my first one to share today. Let me explain a little more about this picture. Recently I got it in my head that it would be interesting to take pictures of the bridges in Heilbronn, of which there are many. Yeah, I am easily entertained.



Many of these bridges are named after people, like so many things in places I have lived. Why is that? Who are they? (I know who Phoebe Sudlow was, but I never looked up Ben White.) And I have this weird fascination with taking pictures of signs, so my task mutated into taking pictures of the signs naming the bridges. Really! And this morning I was up early and started this task. I am not joking, see:



OK, it isn't just the sign I am interested in, but the interesting stuff behind it as well. That's the nice thing about bridges, they tend to have interesting stuff to photograph around them. The hard part is trying not to get hit by cars and trains while getting the shot.

If you are interested in more of these bridge pictures, take a look of the whole set on Flickr.

As you can see from the photo above, it was a beautiful, misty morning. As I was standing on the Neue Böckinger Brücke, I noticed there were spiderwebs everywhere, and they were all covered with dew, which made them quite beautiful. And, to make that spiderweb even more interesting, when I shifted the focus of my camera from it to the activity behind it, this is what I saw.



Really! The small orange blob in the spiderweb picture is the orange buoy behind the Excelsior. Strange world, isn't it?