When this post goes live, I’ll soon be on my way to Europe again. Perhaps, I’ll travel with the very plane shown above: D-ANRT, Airbus A330-941, operated by Condor Flugdienst. In the image above, Condor’s big plane in blue stripes has just arrived from Frankfurt am Main at Vancouver International Airport.
I made the image above on 8 May 2024 with an iPhone15. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-usr.
Featured: Alter Markt, facing southwest to the former Schloss Blieskastel at upper-centre: Blieskastel, Saarland, Germany (X70).
David Oppenheimer: ✵ 1 January 1834 – 31 December 1897 ✟
As a child of the city, I learned the name of Vancouver’s 2nd mayor, David Oppenheimer, who served in the top post from 1887 to 1891. Escaping the violent revolutions spreading through Europe, David Oppenheimer and his brothers had long been immigrants from Germany, and after time in New Orleans and California, they arrived in what is now southwestern British Columbia and developed business success with their supply stores during the Gold Rush, and with wholesale trade and real estate in the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, where the national railway established its western terminus one year later in 1887. The Oppenheimers stamped their civic legacy not only with the location of the railway terminus, but also with an expansive infrastructure program including a new grand city park, fire department, extensive roadworks, a city-wide electricity grid, streetcar public transport network, and a city cemetery. On 11 April 2008, the Government of Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board designated David Oppenheimer as a National Historic Person.
There’s little doubt the Oppenheimers spent plenty of time in what are now Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona with their business interests and connections to the city’s Jewish community. These are neighbourhoods, respectively, where my parents sought closer ties with the Chinese-Canadian community, and where they bought a new house to raise their family. Decades later, I’ve flown out from Vancouver, and I’ve been on the train from Frankfurt to southwest Germany’s Saarbrücken for its proximity to the Völklingen Ironworks world heritage site. I also recently learned David Oppenheimer was from the area and born in the city of Blieskastel. I arrange to meet with a representative of Stadtarchiv Blieskastel (city archive), and I make my way to Blieskastel to see what I can learn about the Oppenheimer family.
Notices quickly went out, even saw alerts from scientists whom I follow on social media. Big solar storm detected, big aurora display expected.
The colours: reds & blue-greens for oxygen & nitrogen, respectively.
Structure: pillars, curtains, wavy strands.
Location: New Westminster, BC 🇨🇦 ; 49.2° North, 122.9° West.
Time: from about 12am to 1am PDT (7 to 8h UTC), on 11 October 2024.
I made all photos above with an iPhone15 on 11 Oct 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Seems like yesterday: ten years have disappeared in a flash. And yet, a hint of grief is as fresh, now as it was then.
Before dawn, I swear I heard his voice calling out to me. The official pronouncement: 610am, 9 August 2014. Ken Lee, dead at 82. I was afraid I had already forgotten his voice.
Northern summer will always have an air of finality, tainted by memories of frailty and inevitability: entropy at its absolute finest.
One day, I’m on the well-travelled stretch between Mannheim and Cologne, fiddling between an online ticket for an express train and an online (Deutschland-) ticket for the next regional train.
The next day, I’m in a Vancouver cemetery on a late Friday afternoon. I see only two to three other visitors out here. It is almost mid-August. Sun’s out, it’s almost 30C. Somewhere outside of this green patch of stone, metal, and flowers, life thrives and goes on. For me, I’ve come back to get “stuck”; I might as well be 8000 km away, back on the other side of the planet.
I made the photos above with an iPhone15 on 9 Aug 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Travel day 90, Europe day 89.
As I write this post, I’m in Frankfurt am Main to conclude my experiment of 90 consecutive days of journaling during my time travelling in Germany and Austria. By the time these words are unleashed, I’ll be in Vancouver with the “modern magic” of travelling west across the planet, back over the big eastern pond.
As I look forward to begin a new “experiment” (experience), I’ve created a summary page, including links to each log or entry.
Total walking distance: over 880 km.
Total number of walking steps: 1.1 million.
Daily average walking distance: just under 10 km.
Daily average number of steps: 13-thousand.
Average distance per step: 0.78 m.
Average number of steps per 1 km: 1283.
Number of World Heritage Sites newly visited: 12 in Germany, 1 in Austria.
Vienna totals in 36 days: 375 km, over 460-thousand steps.
I’ve spent a total of over 100 days in Vienna over the last three consecutive summers.
I bought online an Airalo 90-day 50-Gbyte all-data eSIM, but used only 22 Gs, with ubiquitous WiFi in all places I stayed, as well as decent WiFi on Deutsche Bahn long-distance trains. I had no issues setting up the eSIM in Vancouver and arrival in Frankfurt, and aside from some intrinsic network reach and access in Europe, I had no problems over the 90 days.
I made the photos above with an iPhone15 on 5 Aug 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Fotoeins Fotografie 