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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Hambugers
Sunday. 7.9.06 1:26 pm
Yesterday I went with some family friends to Hamburg. We had a lovely time and went on a double-decker bus tour of the city. The audio guide was ridiculous, as many of those things are, and niether matched the buildings we were going by nor told us anything particularly insightful. I did, however, learn a lot about the history of the city with respect to its involvement in the Hanseatic league and its large scale distruction during the WWII. It was also burnt almost completely to the ground in 1862, and suffered two years of the black death back in the days when the black death was around.
The Hanseatic League was a league of kingdoms and independent cities that banded together to form a free-trade league way back in the day. This association brough unprecedented wealth to the city and it grew in size and reputation. The harbor in Hamburg is GIGANTIC, with the craned necks of the container-movers dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see. It was much to my surprise, then, when I remembered that Hamburg isn't even located on the sea! It is instead located on the river Elbe and the river Alster. The river Elbe is so wide and deep that it provides the container ships a shipping lane that goes right into the heart of Germany. The placement of this harbor was also a convenient way to cut out the Dutch and Belgium merchants, whose harbors at Amsterdam, Bruges, and Antwerp were the only other gateways into the Northern European market. Fittingly, this caused quite a quarrel to develop between the Hamburgers and the Dutch (the Dutch being a major world power at the time, especially as merchants) and they had many conflicts and disagreements, until finally the Dutch granted Hamburg recognition as an independently governed state and Hamburg forgave the Dutch a large debt in return. Right near the harbor is the warehouse district, which is actually quite beautiful as it is built on a series of canals so that goods could be brought directly to the harbor. This system of canals and its location at the confluence of two rivers makes Hamburg the city with the most bridges in the world. It is sometimes called the Venice of Northern Europe. I like it because all of the warehouses are red brick and most of the bridges are made of iron- it reflects exactly the time this part of the city was built (the 1800s, during the industrial revolution) and the mindset of the people who live here (totally northern European, business centered, practical, austere in some respects)
When Germany came together as a state, Hamburg was able to keep its status as an independently governing city, but soon this became a problem, as Hamburg had kept its membership with the Hanseatic League and was thus a duty-free port that neither collected tariffs nor passed them on to their confederation leaders. After some tension, a compromise was reached, and the city of Hamburg became a taxable part of the German Empire while the port remained a free and duty-free port, allowing it to still compete quite well with the Dutch ports. This is when the warehouse district was rebuilt after the fire in 1862 in the style that we see it today. People wanted to put as much as they could on the port itself, since it was a duty-free zone, so many buildings rest on thousands of pine and oak pillars instead of solid rock.

From its entry into the Hanseatic League until WWI could be called a golden era in Hamburg's history (which was a long time) After WWI (still called The Great War on the audio guide), Hamburg fell into a deep depression because part of the Treaty of Versailles stated that the great port city, the Gateway to the World as it was called by then, had to give up its entire merchant fleet as part of its "disarmament" and retribution to the winning French. Sometimes you hear about things in the Treaty of Versailles and you have no trouble reasoning out why Germany started World War II. In WWII it lost 40% of its inhabitants.

Anyway, we made our way around the city, saw the train station (called one of the most beautiful in the world) and the gigantic statue of Bismarck, unifier of the German states, which looks like something out of a science fiction novel the way it towers over the city. We went to a place called the Tower Bar, which sits at the top of a hotel by the port and looks out over the city. Only from here can you truly see the extent of the harbor, it is amazing. The Wagners bought me an expensive drink, I chose one called "the Orangina" with Orangina, something like peach snapps, orange juice, triple-sec, and gin. Anne said that I had to be careful not to fly away. How was I to know it would be so strong! Drinking with your parents friends has to be the most delicate operations in the world, so I tried to take it slowly, but I hadn't eaten for many hours and the drink was big and strong.

Properly soused, we weaved down the stairwell and took pictures of Kaiser Bismarck as we searched for a place to sit and watch the football match. My two companions, being french, were against whomever was playing Germany, which tonight was the Portuguese. We had very little hope of finding in this large German city a place that would be very receptive to such leanings. I was for Germany, of course, but in the spirit of companionship, I agreed to cheer for Portugal if we could find a safe place. They joked that we could simply go to a Portuguese restaurant and we pretended to look about for one of this description. I haven't ever even seen a Portuguese restaurant in all my life, so we were pretty much joking, but the joke went on all evening.

We decided to go down a street we'd seen on the bus tour which seemed to have restaurants, but we took a bit a wrong turn and went down a hill and into a neighborhood, running right into a restaurant... called the Bienvenuto. In short, a Portuguese restaurant. A look around confirm that in fact we had stumbled into an entire block of Portuguese restaurants, so filled with fans of Portugal that they spilled out of the building and we couldn't find a seat. We were positively dazed by the number of Portguese restaurants surrounding us, but we tried to find a place to eat and there was nothing to be done, they were all full. We finally settled into a Spanish restaurant a block away because Anne asked and she speaks Spanish and looks Portuguese, and she always gets what she wants. We had delicious tapas and JJ had squid and I had the most gigantic breaded friend pork chop I've ever seen. Portugal lost, of course, as does everyone I ever cheer for, so I ended up backhandedly getting Germany to win. ;) We walked home and the whole night was filled with the sounds of horns blaring and people shouting and running about, celebrating Germany's win. To this JJ said, "aw, how sad, they are going to their small final, so sad for them" and pointed to his socks that looked like the French flag, which looked totally ridiculous with his brown loafers, which I imagine was the point.

In the main square was a lake that a man had made at somepoint for unknown reasons by damming the Alster, in the lake people sailed sailboats and peddled peddleboats. There were swans and a huge fountain up to 100ft high which looked just like the "spectacular fountain" that Phillip A and Kaitlyn and I modeled for our Modelling class. I think I'll find a picture and sent it to them. I tried to take one but we were driving by much too quickly.

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