A Bavarian Farmhouse

Life's A Beach & Then You Fry! One of the best Christmas presents I ever received - besides an X-Box, was this Body Shop Towel that my kids gave me in 1992 or 1993. That towel is has travelled to almost as many places as Camera Teddy and if you look carefully in the photograph you may observe that Camera Teddy is in fact in my right pocket. I have searched the Internet for a replacement but no luck so far. Not that I lost the towel - in true H2G2T2 I left it behind in Scotland when I moved and our Jordan tells me a) she has it, and b) no she's not giving me it back!

Yes Picasa works now!

Blogger Beta doesn't work with Picasa. Are We There Yet? That's good. No honest. Perhaps you could have mentioned this minor inconvenience when you hard-sold the beta version to everyone. You could have said to us at the start of the message: This Does Not Work With Picasa! Seriously, how dumb is that?

Welcome to Bangkok This charming house is where Stevie and Katrin and their kids are resident in Bangkok. It is a quite remarkable place of quiet and sanctitude compared to the madding crowd just a few hundred metres away, on the main road where almost all of BKK's 48 million cars go past every day. It is surprising to experience the contrast that occurs when you leave your copy of The Nation on the porch table with your empty coffee cup and walk for just five minutes along the road to Rama IV Road and the Night Bazaar at Suan Lum. 

I think I have been to the Commando's Memorial four times and each time it has changed or at least I imagine it has. I am sure the last time I was here the pathways weren't so well constructed and a bit of landscaping has taken place. I guess it has had a bit of post neo-independence money. It looks good and the view all around is quite spectacular. My generation regarded it as old- fashioned or right wing to feel any sense of pride about our military, but I have re-habilitated my family's military history and have nothing but respect for the people this statue commemorates and the sacrifices they made. Of many favourite spots in the highlands this is one of them.The snow gate is another but I didn't take a photo of it - so hardly worth a mention!  

Now this is the summit.  

It's official. I can actually claim to have stood on top of a mountain. Well of course there are no real mountains in Scotland so this is bit of an achievement, me at the top of the Jenner in Berchtesgaden. This is not actually the summit it's a few metres before the summit. For an officials summit type picture see the other snaps. 

This little porcelain antique looks so 1930's.  

Market place. A wider view. 

This mural is dedicated to the memory of the soldiers who fought in World War One. It is interesting to see a public display like this as many of the WWI war memorials are hidden or stuck away in some forgotten corner.

One of the small drinking fountains in the market place.  

The main market place of Berchtesgaden  

In Berchtesgaden Bavaria in my opinion is one of the most beautiful places on earth. This weekend in celebration of my 50th birthday Susi thought it would be a good idea to take me to Berchtesgaden where I could spend a marvellous weekend having a look at what Hitler got for his 50th birthday. The Eagle's Nest or rather Obersalzberg is a villa that overlooks the ginger-bread house town of Berchestgaden. A rock fall prevented us or anyone else from visiting the mountain retreat. Luckily, however there are more things in Berchtesgaden than a famous mountain retreats. Here you can see The Red October parked in the drive of the picturesque pension where we stayed for a very reasonable 50 euros per night.

The Meteorite Crater at Steinheim. This is a view of the town of Steinheim which is situated in the middle of the crater and around the base of the Kloster Berg - which is the remains of the shatter column which resulted when the meteorite struck the earth and produce an upward surge of material - similar to what happens when you drop a pebble into some water. Behind the Kloster Berg it is easy to see what remains of the crater wall in the distance. The crater is about 3.5 kilometres wide. 

The Red October This is our new Toyota Hi Lux Double Cab Sol. 

Schiller Platz This sort of architecture is part of what my old Fife college chum Russell Farquaharson would have included in his QOL equation. The best measure of any strategy was how much it improved your overall Quality Of Life, and this sort of thing is everywhere which means QOL score of here is off the scale good old Russell ... who still lives in Scotland. Schiller is of course the German Bard. 

May in Stuttgart. Spent a marvellous weekend driving the Red October through to see our friend Sonja, who lives in Stuttgart. It is one of the very wealthy parts of Germany and most of the houses on the hill cost an absolute fortune. This is the state buildings Neues Schloss which is at one end of the charming park in the city. Stuttgart is a fine place for shopping and Saturn is a great place to find geeky things like wifi lan cards and stuff. 

Snowed recently. Just before we had to fly over to Scotland, it snowed for about three days and this is the result of just one day. While we were concerned about this delaying our flights it was only a few hours before the airports were operating as normal. When we did leave it was raining so there were no snow related transport difficulties despite the fact that we are in the middle of a council workers strike in Ulm. We landed in Edinburgh, where it was characteristically bone-chilingly cold and soul-destroying. However it was lovely and warm in my daughter's appartment. On Sunday my daughter seemed be doing a great deal of phoning (she's a travel agent and they work on a Sunday in Scotland). "It's snowing," she told me and I was just about to say "call that snow?" when I saw someone go past the window on skis. A fairly normal site in the South German winter, but rather unusual, to say the least for Scotland. I transpired that for the first time in ab

Ulm Is disappearing under a mountain of trash. I don't quite remember how long our version of the 1979 Winter of Discontent has been going on, but if it continues much longer, the roads authority will have to designate some of the mountains of garbage bags as roundabouts. Although I am happy to attribute the current situation to the regular leaderless nature of German national and local politics, I suspect the looming local authority elections have something to do with it as well. Once the electionis over. I often wonder if the left here has any grasp of economics, and I might remind you that I am coming from the left in Scotland ( which is considerably more left than anything described as left here!), who know that no strike has ever been of benefit to those who struck. Most strikes end with the strikers in a considerable personal and financial crisis. During the Miners strike 1984/85 I was the Stirling Labour Party constituency secretary and had first hand experience of how much

The German Platter Toilet Bowl. It is not unusual for people to dismiss the platter toilet as an invention which allows the Germans to indulge in their allegedly stereotypical habit of examing their own stool. I use to think this but I no longer believe it is the case, as it is my (second-hand!) observation that they never do this and in fact are so keen on hygiene and cleaning and healthy, wholesome activities that I doubt the thought of looking at their stool ever enters their head. I am convinced that this is another fine example of sophisticated German Engineering. Firstly the platter provides a much lower velocity of impact for the stool and this has the advantage of reducing smear and sticking. Secondly the wide platter allows the water to flow over the total surface area of the pan. Thirdly because the water wells up behind any substantial deposit, it floats it free and clean of the platter. Fourthly the platter makes a smaller cistern of water move faster and shift more mat

I just went out for a bag of chips and when I came back three years later… Get us a portion of chips pleas Joanne. The Bistro 2006 Well, it was as if I hadn’t left. The only the thing that had change were the regulars. The old regulars were still there and the new regulars were the sorts of punters I would never have let in the door. Amongst the staff were the people who had never left, Sue is still in the kitchen, Janet is still the manager and Ronnie, although I missed him, is still behind the bar. Kirsty is back behind the bar, wee David is a new addition to the bar staff, Joanne is in the kitchen and Pat has been promoted to Kitchen Toto. The downstairs now has the added attraction of a pool table and a football machine, which Joanne a) suggested I would never have agreed to (correct) and b) it didn’t have any effect on the numbers of regulars who remained regulars. Still crazy after all these years All of the characteristic pictures have been taken down and Janet told me

ON PATROL WITH THE KEHRWOCHE POLICE. Or how the Schwaben Journal Almost Caused a War. If you have the misfortune to live with very kind neighbours who undergo the daily trials of OCD and a have an inordinate fondness for the clearest products of the former Soviet Union, you could very well find this in your mail box. It says: " This is not old paper and therefore cannot be regarded as part of the official criteria of the weekly cleaning orders" This isn't ours, our downstair neighbour got one too and he has written on it "If this isn't junk mail - what is?" I found the same thing written on my copy of the local free magazine -The Schwaben Journal - it is just like those dreadful local authority publications from Scotland and you might be surprised to discover that the German version manages to be more worthless and pointless than our home grown stuff. However I have asked Susi to call them and to remove our name from their mailing list on the grounds that