Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Last Day

Friday, August 14th, 2015

After a lovely breakfast, we left Wipperfeld mid-morning for the train to Frankfurt (via Köln): 

 
It was speedy and very comfortable, and it only took a little over an hour to arrive. It was now early afternoon and since our return flight is very early there wasn’t much to do aside from preparing for our return. 

 
We went into town for a bit of shopping but we were all very tired and it was an early night. 

 
Tomorrow we’ll say goodbye to Germany and return home to the U.S.

We’ve seen a great deal of Germany these past two weeks, and it’s always been exciting or historic or funny or beautiful. Best of all was seeing dads homeland and meeting the family I’ve known about forever for the first time! This is a trip that will stay with me for the rest of my life 🙂

Köln

Thursday, August 13th, 2015

It’s the morning of the next day and we’re in Cologne. We arrived yesterday after a pleasant trip from Hamburg.

As soon as you exit the main station here you’re faced with this: 

 
That’s the famous Köln Cathedral, which has stood for over 700 years and survived the bombs of WW2. I had to climb it!

There are some 533 steps, mostly in a (poorly ventilated) spiral staircase that looks like this: 

 
It took me about 13 minutes to get to the top, but it was an extremely tiring climb since the steps are tall and since it was very warm in the staircase. It was certainly more difficult than The Eiffel Tower (which has more steps). Here’s me immediately after reaching the top: 

 
Interior view of the tallest spire: 

 
View of the city from the outside portion: 

 
The viewing platforms actually look like a prison, I’m told due to suicides. There is graffiti everywhere as well. This is one major attraction that is not quite as pretty close up as the others we have visited: 

 
After checking into our hotel (which doesn’t have air conditioning!) it was time for some brief shopping at the 4711 store, which actually has a fountain of the cologne you can dip your hand in! 

 
And then K, J and I did a whirlwind tour of a Chocolate Museum… 

 

 

Before we met three of my cousins (and their husbands) for dinner and drinks, which was great. Probably because of how tired I was I forgot to take photos so here’s another of the Dom as we headed back to our hotel near midnight: 

 

Frankfurt

Saturday, August 1st, 2015

The trip was uneventful, and almost comfortable compared to some of my previous voyages. Despite a late departure from NYC we arrived more or less on time and rendezvoused with Bernard as planned at Frankfurt airport. We were in Deutschland! 

 
That’s our hotel. It’s in a great location and quite comfortable. The beds had gummis on them! After a brief respite it was time to explore the city… 

 
Frankfurt was bombed to hell back in WW2 and almost completely leveled but has been rebuilt into the financial hub of the EU, and as you can see they celebrate this! The CBD is a mix of skyscrapers and old-style buildings with an abundance of shopping and eateries. 

 
We followed the main pedestrian shopping district to a historic church for a gander. It was warm but not hot and the streets were packed with people. 

   
As usual, I lit a candle for mum and dad 🙂

  
We headed down to the river and found a large and wonderful fair going on, filled with amusements and rides and an incredible concentration of food and drink! 

   
Quite some time was spent here enjoying the sights and sounds and tastes! My companions all tried the local specialty ‘apfelwine‘, which is apparently ‘too wine-y’ 🙂 

 
I could go in for ages about how impressive this fair was but I’m still a little jet lagged! Suffice to say it was a lucky find. One end was capped with s gigantic Ferris Wheel: 

 
Which we all rode: 

 
It was great 🙂

By now (around 6pm) we were all getting droopy and headed back to the hotel to tackle our jetlag-induced exhaustion. Bernard and I grabbed some traditional food to snarf down before an early bed: 

 
There’s so many different types of sausage (and bread, and pretzel, and beer) that it’s hard to choose. That’s rindwurst and was delicious – ever so slightly spicy with a crispy skin. I’d eat it again in a heartbeat!

Tomorrow we’re meeting dad to complete the quintet! Stay tuned…

Blast From The Past

Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

A few weeks ago, I visited Notre Dame in Paris. It was a spectacular place, and I remember it fondly.

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On that trip I purchased the following papercraft kit of this very same cathedral:

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This was originally intended as a gift for my brother, but as these things tend to happen, I decided it would be mine! Here’s the contents once opened:

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The fact all the pieces are pre-cut and pre-scored is a big plus, since craft kits of this type that require you to cut the pieces out of a book are massive pains in the butt (which I know from personal experience). Even so, the kit was a bit tricky to put together, mostly because of the complexity of the curved surfaces (especially the steeple). Here it is completed:

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Impressive isn’t it! It’s about 20 cm long and stands about 15 cm high, and is quite sturdy and a decent recreation of the original building. For a model made of paper, I was quite impressed.

But I thought I could improve on the kit with a little modification of my own…

…such as by making a few additions:

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That’s five fireworks, 4 small guys and one ‘Mini Californian Rocket Fountain’ (from which I had snapped the stick to raise it from the ground). I put my considerable pyromantic skills to work and filled the empty space inside the Notre Dame model with these five bundles of fun:

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If all went well, this would faithfully reproduce the great fire (that never actually happened) that caused irreparable damage to Notre Dame in 17XX (that never actually happened). A quick trip outside, and here’s the completed modified kit sitting peacefully on our ‘fireworks launching log’ waiting for the flame…

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Three fuses. Five fireworks. Could I light them all and get to safety in time? What would actually happen? Would it fizzle out? Burn? Be spectacular? There was only one way to find out:

OMG! Just… omg! Here’s the aftermath:

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My Notre Dame papercraft model: it lived fast, died young, and went out in a blaze of glory. What more could it have wanted?

Another Robot Dinosaur

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

It was time once again to reach to my giant pile of unmade plastic model kits and remove another for assembly. The lucky kit this time was:

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Another ZOID! I’d bought this kit about a year ago after falling in love with the design, but I was a bit daunted due to it’s size (easily the biggest model kit box I’d ever seen). But I’m no amateur! Here’s what I found inside:

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That so many pieces right there, somewhere over 700 divided amongst an astonishing 47 different runners in at least 9 different colours! This would be a fun build…

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There’s an in-progress shot. I used the same old tools I always have, only this time kept a bottle of glue handy just in case. In theory I wouldn’t need it since this was a snap-together kit. The ipad you can see played mostly Amiga or ZX Spectrum longplays off Youtube while I assembled, which was done in approximately 2-3 hour sections over a period of about 6 weeks. As with most kits of this type assembly is done in sections: head, breast, torso, legs and lastly weapons.

Here’s the completed head:

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Menacing isn’t it! The mouth opens and closes, the spines on the crest and lower gun are posable and the entire upper half of the head opens to reveal the cockpit (the driver looks out through the green glass eyes). Very quickly I learned that this was no beginners kit and I needed to take things slowly, and a few steps during the head construction were technically difficult. The whole thing took maybe 90 minutes and contained an amazing 71 individual pieces!

The breast and torso were next, and a real pain at times. The kit is designed to a very high level of precision, and there is little ‘wiggle room’ for the sections when they all come together. Joints are quite tight, and some even lock together when you put the pieces in. This means you need to pay very close attention during assembly since it can be challenging to take pieces apart if you make a mistake.

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I managed to avoid any major problems during assembly, but if you look closely at the completed breast section above, you’ll see two flexible pipes protruding out the back. These would eventually connect to the torso section once they are combined, but (since the instructions are all worded in Japanese) I did not notice they had to be trimmed from their original length to precisely 87 mm and had to do a bit of disassembly to fix this after the fact 🙂

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The front and rear legs are both made in pairs (left and right being reflections of each other) and were the most fun parts of the kit to assemble. Each are highly articulated and at the same time look very stocky. Each of the two legs shown in the above picture have 45 pieces in them.

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This particular ZOID is (apparently) a heavy weapons platform (almost literally) and the weapons are the last part of the assembly. From the left you see some sort of beam weapon (let’s call it a ‘linear wave motion cannon’), some sort of mass driver projectile weapon and a conventional chain gun. The mount on the lower right connects the weapons platform electronically to the cockpit. Often in kits like this the weapons are a bit of an afterthought, each consisting of a few pieces and mostly secondary to (and in some cases not even attached to) the main figure.

Not so here! Weapon assembly is a full quarter of the instructions, and they are just as complex and have just as many parts as the main kit sections. The wave motion cannon for instance (big grey thing, lower left) is articulated in three places, and contains an amazing 37 pieces.

Here is ‘Dark Horn Harry Special’ once he is all finished and assembled:

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Another shot showing scale:

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All told I’d say it took me about 10-12 hours to assemble, and was one of the most finicky and difficult kits of its type I have ever made. 99.9% of the joints were snapped-together; I only ever used one single tiny drop of glue. Perhaps due to the challenge – and certainly the design – I immensely enjoyed making this kit, and think he looks great on my bookshelf where he will now live.

Next though I think I’ll move onto something a bit easier. Didn’t I have a HG Gundam somewhere in that big pile of unmade models…