Merry Christmas

It is hard to believe that Christmas is already over! I had a quiet traditional Christmas day with my family which was a nice change to the the usual madness of Christmas shopping, parties and rushing people in the city...







So I found myself back in my hometown with the wonderful Eder dam which is not as big as the Hoover dam (see previous post) but still much nicer in my biased opinion ;-)




But I wasn't there for sightseeing, I was there to see my parents and the place I grew up. Unfortunately without snow... Colorado had a white Christmas this year! Better luck next time.

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas yourself which leaves me wishing us all a Happy New Year! See you all in 2008!

Back home

It is funny how some things change while other things just remain the same. Take my hometown. While my life changed nearly every minute around me the last few years it stayed the same. Just a bit colder then I remembered it ;-)




This is the castle of Waldeck close to my home town (the place where our duke used to stay before he got a more comfy palace down the road). Unfortunately we don't have snow yet even though we have -10 C (14 F) at nighttime. At least everything is white colored by the frosty temperatures I guess. Fingers crossed for Christmas!



And some things are the same all around the world. Like a nice pint of Guinness with your friends. Don't ask me why Yvonne had to order 4 of them at once... no worries though. No pints were wasted for this picture ;-)

Goodbye Ireland

Well... I had a brilliant time back in Ireland. I enjoyed every pint as it was my first pint of Guinness, I felt home in my favorite Fair City pubs and enjoyed meeting all my friends. But all good thing has an end (German saying which doesn't translate that well I guess). So I said my goodbyes to Molly Malone and Ha'Penny Bridge.



And of course to all my colleagues who organized so many night outs and lunches while I was over there. Thank you very much everyone! I had a great time over there again! And I will be back... if you like it or not ;-)

See you all in Colorado!

Trip to Howth

When I was living in Ireland I had one favorite place close enough to Dublin where I could take visitors and friends to show them the beauty of Ireland: Howth. This is a little peninsula just a short tip down the road from Dublin with impressive cliffs and some nice trails to hike.



Ironically I am the visitor now and my friend Brian took me there on Sunday. Even though we had some rough weather it was a great trip and we had lots of fun. Especially having an Irish coffee after the freezing cold. Man, I really missed Ireland!

Back on the Emerald Island

Back in Ireland... finally! I was very happy to see all my friends over there again! And obviously they were missing me too... I found this fridge magnet in my former house where I used to stay. Okay, okay... I left the picture there but I wasn't expecting that it is still there ;-)






My friends were so delighted to see me that they took me out for lunch to a brand new place in Tallaght which is serving very traditional food... Captain America! After having a traditional burger we even went back that night for some pints there.


But I wasn't only for the burgers there! Lucky enough I was able to attend two Christmas parties! The first one of my former department back in Ireland... we had a great blast coming all together for Chinese food and pints downtown.

A cold welcome

It is winter in Germany! While everyone is sitting in beer gardens in the summertime, enjoying beers in the sunshine, at wintertime everything is more less the same. Just replace beer garden with Christmas market, beer with mulled wine and sunshine with snow. And the freezing temperatures in Germany did their bit to make it even more authentic.




So the first think I did arriving in Germany was to go to our local Christmas market and join my freezing friends warming ourselves up with some mulled wine and some proper German sausages. Sweet wintertime ;-)

Goodbye USA

Torstens last week over in the states was my last week too (for this year at least) . After traveling Nevada and New Mexico, seeing fantastic sides like the New Mexico dessert, the Hoover dam, Aliens in Roswell, shows in Casinos, bats in Carlsbad, snow on the Rockies, drunken girls in Vegas, it was time to say good bye.


But Torsten had a blast after all. He was amazed by the huge distances and about all the things you can see and do over here. A good example for the distances you can see on the left... a navigation system on the New Mexican highways is a bit OTT. Driving several hundred miles in one direction is not the exception over there :-)


Four days after this journey we found ourselves back in an airplane one more time but this time heading to the old world. No worries... I'll be back though ;-) And maybe Torsten sooner then you think too :-P

Carlsbad Caverns

After half a day of hunting aliens in Roswell we needed a change. What better way of leaving this world by going into the mythical underground... and New Mexico's south is a fantastic place of doing so with the Carlsbad Caverns at the border to Texas.



Like the mythical underground this cave is keeping a surprise ready for its visitor... in this case a much nicer one then a three headed dog or Medusas... one of the biggest public accessible stalactite and stalagmite stone cave in America.



After nearly 5 hours of wandering around in this maze of astonishing stone formations we met the park rancher who sold us the tickets and who was totally surprised that we were still there. But this pictures really doesn't do the breathtaking beauty any justice.



As you can see New Mexico is not only made of desserts, cowboys, Aliens and UFOs. They have really scenic places here which are well worth seeing! With this knowledge we jumped in the car and continued our road trip.

Roswell revealed

Our next trip took us to Roswell, New Mexico. As everybody knows there are still rumors lingering around that in 1947 an UFO crashed in this little dessert town, so 'Mulder' Ekki and 'Scully' Torsten started their investigations.
Interesting enough is the whole town alien mad and even the street lights have a familiar shape...



But we wanted some hard evidence instead so we drove 20 miles out of town to find the 'historic' crash side. As you can imagine after 60th years there is not much left, especially as everybody is claiming that the military did a fairly good job cleaning the mess up. So Torsten and I had to continue our investigation and finally we found the evidence we were looking for...



in the international UFO museum and research center! Here we found 'real' aliens... and some plastic copies of extraterrestrials. Torsten was not that easily convinced but after having a 'chocolate covered alien' in the 'not of this world' coffee we came to the conclusion that there is so much more then only one crashed UFO. Actually they have three crash sides and the latest scientific research shows that there were two UFOs crashing in mid air! I hope at least one of them had an insurance for earth ;-)

The 2000th visitor

Well.. we hit the magic number already mid November but this might be a good time to combine this post with some other news:

First of all, thank you very much for being such loyal readers of my blog! I am very happy that there are still so many people out there who are interested about what I am doing in the new world. This blog is for you ;-)

I am also introducing some new 'features' to this web page most of you might already tried them out but it is worth mentioning them here. The RSS feed is a very easy way to see new posts directly from your browser. Simply click on the little RSS icon in your browser when on my page or use this link. Also my facebook page has a RSS viewer installed which keeps you up to date when you are on my profile. On the right menu I also introduced a 'visitors and friends' picture which I will change biweekly, lucky enough I had already a bunch of visitors... thank you again. And some new link topics were introduced on the right view too. With all this new features I am hoping you will enjoy your stay on my blog even more!

So what is next? Well next month I'll be in Europe and of course I keep you up to date about my journey through the "old world". I hope that I can keep up the post rate but I'll be very busy over there, so please keep that in mind.

Alright then... leaves me only with one more thing... to wish you all a...

Merry Christmas

Frohe Weihnachten

Joyeux Noël

Feliz Navidad

Buon Natale

Vrolijk kerstfeest

Linksmu Kaledu

メリークリスマス

Viva Las Vegas... again

So, what did we do in Vegas over Thanksgiving weekend? I guess I could write lots of posts about the amazing time, the tasty buffets and the many drinks we had... but I try to cut short. We stayed in the Luxor hotel which is this giant hollow pyramid I was so fascinated of on my last trip to Vegas. Our room was on the 25th floor with a fantastic view of the Strip and the Excalibur which is this medieval castle Torsten is starring at in the picture on the right.

We also did lots of fun rides and saw some shows like Stomp and a lookalike show. And finally I was able to meet the king in person! It took me quite a while to find him but finally I was successful.

Of course we also gambled a bit and saw lots of casinos like the Venetian, Paris, Rio and lots more.


And I also found time to shoot some big guns. Nevada seems to be one of the few states were you can legally own a machine gun! So I went to the shooting range and tossed some bullets around with a 9mm handgun and a M16 army assault riffle. Las Vegas is really an awesome place ;-)

Fourth visitor

The long weekend last week was a quite busy time... not only did we have Thanksgiving weekend which is a travelers worst nightmare but also my friend Torsten from Nuremberg showed up. He is over here for two weeks and we will fly back to Germany next week together. But till then we had lots of things to see and survive...


Like this small snow storm on Wednesday which made driving a mess and in particular driving to the airport more exciting then it should be. Fortunately the ground is not frozen yet and in the late afternoon the roads were clearing up already.



But our first destination wasn't the beautiful Rockies or other Coloradan sights... with him I went straight to Las Vegas again! Find out in the next post if we made it back or if we even lost our return tickets in Sin City Vegas!

Another Night at the Museum

My last visit of a Denver museum is quite a while ago so I was more then delighted to see the adds for a Titanic exhibition at the Denver Nature and Science museum in the local newspaper. What I didn't expect was how popular the Titanic still is... taking in consideration that this boat is on the ground of the ocean for quite a while now and watching Leonardo slipping of the ice shelf was entertaining for some, it is already a decade ago too.

So you can imagine how surprised we were when we arrived at the museum and saw the words "Sold out" at the door. Various signs in different sizes and colors made clear that they were not joking... it really was sold out. And this picture on the right shows you how close we got to the exhibition: Christine, a German friend of mine, with a model of the Titanic. Pay attention to the front pole and the flag flying on top of it. I didn't know that the Titanic was an American ship... but that's the reason why we go to museums I guess... to learn something new ;-)

Even though this one exhibition was sold out we were able to see the other ones. The beast of the past millennia seem to be not that popular right now. So I was maybe the only one trying to pet and feed one of these sad and lonely fellas. No worries though... while the hype around the Titanic is maybe lasting for the last 80 years you guys had all the centuries before that. Let's speak in a few hundred years again ;-)

Beau Jo's and more

At the weekend I went once again up the mountains but this time to a place called Idaho Springs. A lovely place a bit of the usual tourist trails and well worth visiting. I was very surprised to find an Irish gift shop up there which really remembered me of Carrolls in Dublin, with Celtic music playing in the background and all that. It felt a bit like home ;-)







The main reason of going up there was of course not the scenic landscape or the new discovered Irish gift shop but a true Coloradan tradition... Beau Jo's, mountain pies and pizzas. Here in Colorado Springs you find the first and original Beau Jo's restaurant. What is so special about their pizza you might ask... well it is simply the crust which is quite big (like a mountain). To eat it the proper way you put lots of honey on the crust. Sounds interesting but believe me... it tastes fantastic!

Beau Jos webpage

Goodbye Chicago

After all my mumbling about how expensive the whiskey was on top of the John Hancock building I searched the streets of Chicago for a real bargain... and I found it. Well not really a bargain but $10 for the first hour seems to be the standard rate downtown. If you thought Dublin or Munich is expensive with parking think again! Anyway... I was glad that I didn't rent a car over there ;-)



On the main square in the Millennium Park it looked like an alien visitor found an easier and cheaper way to park its vehicle. But as I counldn't spot any meter maid trying to put a ticket on that thing I guessed this was art. To be fair now it is a quite nice 'thing' which apparently was donated by the artist but cost the city of Chicago one million Dollar to polish. If you ask me it was well worth it!



On my way back to the hotel I stumbled over what I thought to be the owner of the vehicle in the park... but it was only a mail box decorated for a exhibition about a quite familiar topic which escapes me now ;-)





And of course I had one of the world famous Chicago Hot Dogs which was cheap and really delicious! This concludes my amazing journey to Chicago and I am surely back in one stage with more time for the fine selection of museums!

Merry Christmas, Flu!

A few days after Halloween I had my flu shot. Not very exciting news but I was really amazed about how this all happened. My health insurance had organized a vaccination day at a local hospital so I drove over to get my shot. Arriving there I wondered why all car parks were closed down and they were sending me once around the building... just to discover that they had set up a flu shot drive-through. Basically you drove in, showed your insurance card and your arm, got your shot, and could leave the hospital in a matter of minutes! I thought that is a great invention! The best and quickest flu shot I got so far :-)

You might wonder now what that has to do with Christmas... well, Halloween wasn't really over but you could already buy Christmas stuff in the shops while listening to Jiggle Bells playing in the background. Like this little bear or Star Wars (!) decoration for your Christmas tree. I guess this would go well with the Transformers, Power Rangers or Pirates of the Caribbean Christmas decoration! Truly amazing ... I am looking forward to Christmas already ;-)

John Hancock Tower

After having this amazing view of Chicago from the Sears Tower I went for an evening drink to the Hancock Tower which is 'only' 60 floors high but because of it's architecture with the external steal skeleton it is at least as popular as the Sears tower. And it has one big advantage over the Sears tower...

... it has a bar on the top floor! And what was the drink of my choice? Of course the only Irish whiskey they had up there... a good Old Bushmills. And at the same time it was my most expensive drink so far... $12? I can buy a whole bottle of it in the liqueur store next door ;-)





But to be honest it was totally worth it! As the tourist guide already said, the best view of the Chicago skyline you get from the John Hancock building, and he was right. Especially at night this view of Chicago is just astonishing.

Sears Tower

The first thing which comes to your mind thinking of Chicago might be Al Capone but the second thing has to be The Sears Tower. This gigantic Skyscraper was the tallest building in the world till 1998 and even though it is at third place now it is still impressive taking the elevator to the 110 floor, approximately 440 meters of the ground.

Thinking of walking the whole distance left me shivering so I took one of the available elevators instead. Amazing enough it takes less then a minute for the ride upwards! The Skydeck is well worth a visit and offers a nice view on downtown Chicago. And it is true... people from up there are looking like ants... or better cars are looking like ants while it is very hard to spot any people at all ;-)







And the proof that I really made it!

After visiting the highest building in America for breakfast I went for a good-night-drink to the third highest building in Chicago that evening. Find out what I had and how much it was in my next post :-)

Happy Halloween

In Europe it is getting more and more common to celebrate the day of the living death... or burning pumpkins... or kids claiming their share of candy... or simply Halloween. Over here it is a completely different ballgame! Part of the tradition is not only decorating houses and buildings but also the entire office. On the right you can see our teams decoration... themed "Death by a Million Bugs", quite suiting for a testing department ;-)


As the employee's children are calling over to the company for trick-or-treat there is a kind of build off going on between the different departments each year. Unfortunately IT department won this year... with setting up a whole tunnel of horror for the kids. Fair play!

Till next year... the title is yours... till next year!!!



And of course lots of employees are dressing up for this special event... like this nearly perfect Elvis here. We still try to find out who it was! The only lead we have is that he had a quite strong German accent :-)

I hope you had a fantastic Halloween!