I am sitting outside our villa on Thompson Bay looking over Gage Roads to the mainland, it's sunny, warm and the water displays all kinds of hues of blue. Pity these yachts are polluting the view...
I am still a bit overheated from this morning's effort, but all things considered, very happy.
3:32, down from 3:38 two years ago and with that, the fifth PB for the year. I think I deserve a break.
Yes, it was probably mad to do yet another marathon three weeks from the last one, but since I had no aspirations, all I wanted to do is finish without doing any damage.
The left thigh had given me a bit of a funny muscular pain over the past three weeks, so I was guarded about that. Otherwise I told myself to go out there and just push myself as much as I felt comfortable at the time.
Predictably, I set myself up not to be able to do an even or let alone a negative split.
Despite the hills I did the first half in 1:42 and then the second in 1:50. Not really impressive, but quite ok in the circumstances.
Taking just six minutes longer than in Berlin is actually not bad considering the hills here and also the fact that in the three weeks since Berlin I managed to put on 3kgs weight (not pretty, I know).
Which brings me to the next topic: what happened since Berlin.
Before I go there, I will put on a post about Berlin separately with the pictures. They are at home at present.
This is going to turn into a bit of a travel blog with the odd run thrown in. I should add that we generally don't go for fancy accommodation and have in the past backpacked through Europe with the kids staying at youth hostels and deliberately not in the "better" areas, using only public transport and cooking our own meals as much as possible. Also, the kids have had only so much of the required attention span to survive museums, so the usual "things to look at" have never been high on our list. This has allowed us to see more of how people live or have lived in the places we have visited.
So, a couple of days after the Berlin Marathon we took the train to the famed Dresden.
It's pretty alright, but considering that apart from a few rocks and the fortress everything was either bombed to bits in WWII or worse, removed during the cold war and replaced with usually asbestos-infested atrocities, the beautiful old buildings are actually brand-spanking new (ok, the opera is 20 years old).
And with the money the poor people in the West are required to pour into the East, they are building even more old buildings.
What is obvious is that during the generation that part of Germany lived the "real-existing socialism" (euphemism for those in power getting in all and the rest of the population being treated like mushrooms), the people lost all relationship to that part of their history and they are having trouble identifying with it at the same time as having to deal with the ogling tourists.
I somehow got the impression that the socialist experience made many people into zombies and the twenty years since the "Wende" have not (yet, hopefully) removed the scars.
Maybe I am a bit harsh and I am aware that the tourist guides claim that the Saxons are a bit reserved. That may be so if they have to speak English, but not the impression I got when speaking German.
Anyway, the point is: we won't go back to Dresden to see Dresden again. It's like Legoland for adults.
I must say though that I went for a couple of runs whilst we were there up and down the edge of the Elbe and through the old parts of town and that was very enjoyable.
Especially since the only persons out and about were locals going about their daily chores.
Likewise, the surrounding countryside is awesome and there is plenty of decent hiking to be done.
We went to look at the fortress which is great example of the development of fortifications over the centuries. Because of the city's location they just missed out on the further improvements developed by the French in the 18th century (if anyone is interested, go to Solothurn in Switzerland, where part of the Vauban-designed fortifications are still in existence).
We also visited the DDR-Museum in a suburb of Dresden. Generally I should say that the suburbs are reasonably well in order and apart from factories, resemble West-German towns pretty much.
Anyway, the DDR-Museum: spread over four floors (soon five) there are various facets of life in the GDR. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies in Switzerland, both Anna and I found that a lot of things were pretty much the same as we knew them (furniture, electrical goods etc - with the exception of cars and other powered equipment such as motorbikes and lawnmowers, much of which was out of reach of ordinary persons, so they built them themselves - I have a good example in a picture) - the trouble being of course that in the GDR the things shown were standard at the time the wall fell, ie some twenty years after we had grown up with them.
There were also plenty of explanations on how certain things were run in everyday life, how the people were controlled and so on. Well worth a visit.
Next on the itinerary was Prague: compared to Dresden these guys are just so lucky that they were outside the range of the American bombers. Yes, apparently the communists let pretty much everything fall into disrepair, but now there is hardly a building that has not been restored to its former glory.
And, boy, are these guys proud of who they are and what they are. Having said that, some people still seem to find the concept of tourists coming and invading their city a bit strange and overwhelming, but generally they take those hordes in their stride and milk them for what it's worth. A bit like Venice, both in terms of tourist numbers and locals' attitude to them, just with a bit less water surrounding them.
Because Prague was more of an afterthought in our travel plans, although we had been talking about going there for the last twenty years, we only had two nights there.
That meant we only got a bit of a taste of what there is to experience.
We did not spend enough time in the Castle, but spent considerable time around the Jewish quarter. Inasmuch as it has not been left in its original state (synagogues and the cemetery) it was rebuilt at the end of the 19th century and resembles Zurich pretty much. No surprises given that many of the ostentatious buildings in Zurich (eg Bahnhofstrasse) were built at around the same time.
Unfortunately, we did not go into the Jewish quarter on the day we arrived, but went the next, which was a Saturday, so the synagogues and the cemetery were obviously closed. I'm still kicking myself for not working this out earlier.
We were staying at a hotel next to the Wallenstein Palace at the bottom of the castle (if anyone wants to know, Hotel Waldstein, can be recommended, we won't hesitate to go back there next time), a bit away from the main tourist drags, but close to the castle and still no more than ten minutes into the old town across Charles Bridge.
As during the day the bridge is crowded, I headed off for a run on our last day early in the morning, hoping for a picture without any tourists. A couple of tired cops walking the beat, two or three couples walking home or kissing each other good-bye at the tram stop and the compulsory couple of blokes dragging themselves home was all I encountered. So I got my picture although it was still dark and hence, you won't be able to see much.
Still, happy with that I ran up to the castle once, twice (there were the dozing cops again) and a third time for a decent hill work-out (obviously planning ahead for Rottnest).
We will be back and I will do more hill training. It's steep but can be recommended, just be careful on the way down, cobblestones can be tricky.
Then it was off to Nuremberg. We had been here during our last backpacking adventure five years ago when we stayed at the youth hostel in the former imperial stables of the castle. This time we opted for a hotel in the middle of the old town, not sure why, probably because Anna did not fancy the climb up to the castle again.
It's a great, warm city. Yes, except for the castle itself the old town was pretty much flattened by the Yanks (who had (had?) a reputation for not being very selective in their targeting and flattening anything that moved or did not move - quite different from the British who had this thing called aiming device in their planes). But, rather than wiping everything connected with pre-1945 from the earth, the West-Germans have had this need to on one hand appreciate their past and on the other understand what went wrong after WWI. Which is quite different to the East, where everything not destroyed in WWII was flattened with the Soviet equivalent of a D9 and anything to do with the past was evil anyway.
Sometimes the Germans are a bit tedious with their "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" (getting over the past), but on the other hand, they are committed to not letting "it" happen again. No wonder Bush gets such a bad rap there.
Nuremberg in fact is a good example of how to go about it. Apart from rebuilding the old town in part as it was prior to the bombings, the city had to contend with Hitler's megalomanic idea of creating the world's biggest stadium (for 400,000 people, yes, 400,000!), convention stadium, rally complex (as in people rallies), all known as the Reichsparteigelände. Only a small part had been completed, but what is left is enough to get an idea of how the individuals were made into just little specks of dust.
I went for a run early one morning (it was still dark) towards the Reichsparteigelände and suddenly the sky in front of me turned pitch-black. It took me a moment to realise that I had reached the Convention Centre in the darkness. I was quite taken aback as the building is huge as it is, some 30m or so high, but when finished should have been double that height.
This is in fact the only building that was half-way finished and now houses the Dokuzentrum Reichsparteigelände, which I suppose is a better name than museum. An absolute must-see in terms of understanding what went on and making the threat of totalitarianism. Which could bring us back to Bush (but then I'd have to go into Naomi Wolf's book Letter to a Patriot).
On the way back I did some more hill work, predictably up to the imperial castle.
Then it was off to our last stop Zurich, where we stayed at Anna's parents' place. They live just underneath the peak of the "house-mountain" of Zurich, the Uetliberg. From their place it's about 300m as the crow flies to the top and almost exactly 350m vertically.
Whenever I'm there, I just have to run up there and did so twice, obviously taking a longer way, at least going up. It's about 5.5ks which I managed to do in 35 minutes (10m altitude per minute, not bad for an old codger). The way down was about 1k and took me only 10 minutes, but was very steep and quite slippery, so I fell and strained a muscle in my arm.
So, that's that.
I am pleased to say that it is now just past 4:30 and apart from two yachts, all the other ones have left, giving me an almost uninterrupted view. Excellent! We're not going back till tomorrow morning.
More when I have the pictures at my fingertips (if you have actually managed to read to this point....).
