Note: This post was written in March 14-15 and posted after our return.
When I think about L beck, the first thing that strikes me is the feeling of history underfoot. It struck me most when we set foot inside the
Marienkirche. I had never quite felt a wave of a feeling of stepping back in time like that before. The stones on the floor were uneven and imperfect. L beck has had a wet and snowy winter, so the city had spread sand everywhere: sidewalks and roads. Walking into any grand church, I could hear the sound of sand under the shoes of everyone nearby, and feel it under my own shoes. I think I will long associate with L beck the feeling of walking into a grand old church, looking up at the top of the old building at seemingly impossible heights, while feeling the grit of sand and uneven stone beneath my feet.
Marienkirche isn t perfect, like some American churches I ve been in, such as the Basilica of Notre Dame. It doesn t have a lot of gold, either, and both of these attributes are wonderful. Look at a column of bricks, and you can see that each brick isn t exactly like its neighbor, and the entire column isn t perfectly straight. Lots of things in L beck are so old that they aren t perfectly straight, and it made me think that our American notion of always having to fix such things might be somewhat off sometimes.
Look up, and you see the frescos from the 1300s, revealed after many years after the building was struck by an allied bombing raid in 1942. This heavily damaged the building and knocked down plaster from the walls and ceiling, revealing the old artwork. Many parts of Marienkirche were lost as a result of the bombing, which perhaps adds to its slightly sparse and ancient feel. The church bells were sadly melted and crashed to the ground due to the bombing, and have been left exactly where they fell as a memorial.
Look down, and you see the uneven floor, and the concrete slabs above where important people were buried under the floor an attribute common to many of the churches we visited. It was common to see dates of graves from the 1600s and 1700s, though in some places it would go as far back as the 900s.
The main part of the church has no heating or cooling, and visiting it on a day just a bit above freezing adds to the feeling of, well, old. Marienkirche has to be my favorite sight in L beck.
Walking around the city, I get a similar feel. Many streets and sidewalks are made of stone. The streets that weren t damaged in the war have rows of beautiful old facades. Walk down many streets, and every so often I d see a little tunnel ( just wide enough for a coffin ) that goes under the street-facing houses to a nice little inner courtyard. These are open to the public, but tend to be very quiet and somewhat private. In the courtyard are smaller houses, which would have originally been used by the less wealthy.
We also saw the L beck Dom (cathedral), which had a small museum about the destruction due to the Royal Air Force bombing in 1942. It was very sad to see the
photo of the Dom in ruins, still smoking, even now.
I can only imagine what it must have felt like to residents of L beck to wake up to see many of their priceless centuries-old landmarks and places of worship so horribly destroyed and all of this for
little strategic purpose really focused on the morale of the enemy civil population . It s sad that the allies would do such a short-sighted and terrible thing. Europeans have long had to live with the legacy of war upon war, while we Americans have rarely had to see the consequences of war up close. I think it would be good for more of us to visit these sites and come up face to face with what a bomb can do, and then perhaps we will be more judicious with them in the future.
Shifting gears now to where we stayed: Andreas & Sigrid, with whom we stayed, have a beautiful 500-year-old house, with lots of original wood beams exposed, and some very old paintings on the walls and ceilings. Nearby were excellent bakeries and a chocolate shop. Terah and I visited it today and bought some very good chocolate.
And this brings me to the second thing I ll remember: Andreas & Sigrid s children, Lukas and Rahel. Now, Terah knows no German, I know only a little bit, and the children know no English. So it was a bit slow getting to know each other to start out, but we managed to work around the communication barrier and had a great time. Terah played board games with Rahel, while with me, she kept inventing games to play: hiding somewhere, saying Hallo! , and laughing at how many unsuccessful attempts I might make to find her. I showed Lukas the camera on my Droid, which he used a lot, though a racing game on Terah s iPod Touch was more exciting. They both enjoyed looking at videos of American trains a bit, but especially pictures of our house and yard with Jacob and Oliver. They tried to teach me the German words for things, and also made futile attempts to correct my pronunciation!
When we were leaving today, Rahel came over and gave me a kiss on the hand, then the same to Terah s hand, then a little kiss on one of our suitcases. It was touching and sweet.
This was one of those experiences no guidebook prepared me for, and no tour bus would have provided. It is something neat to make friends with children despite the large language barrier.
On to the rest of the visit
We had arrived a little late into Hamburg. After getting our bags and some Euros at an ATM, the next step was to find the bus to L beck. No signs for it were evident, so I found an information desk. The person at the desk was carrying on a conversation in German with the person ahead of me in line. I figured an information desk person in a busy airport would speak English, and was all ready to ask Sprechen Sie Englisch? , but when I walked up, he got a polite smile, and said, Good morning! How can I help? Guess I m obvious.
He directed me to the bus, gave me a brochure about it, and told me what time it would leave. Terah and I found the spot to wait, and for a moment I stepped inside the airport terminal. Terah won t let me forget that someone came up to her and asked a question in German, whereas I was spoken to in English. Anyhow, we found the bus, managed to communicate with the driver that doesn t speak English, and sat next to the friendly person that was talking to Terah. He turned out to be a violin player from Munich, and we had a great conversation for the next hour he asking questions about the USA, us asking questions about Germany and Munich. At one point, he commented, You two are so open minded and you re also Americans! He sounded surprised. We exchanged email addresses at the train station.
Andreas found us there, and we walked through the city to his house, with him pointing out the sights along the way. L beck is a beautiful city, and though it was damaged in World War II, much of the really old parts still remain. The famous
Holstentor Gate has a museum inside, which was fascinating to visit.
On Sunday, we went to church with the family we were staying with, Andreas helpfully translating for us. There I met a British Python programmer, which was fun. His wife is a social worker, which was fun for Terah.
Monday it was time to get on the train to Berlin. We again walked through a cold and rainy city to the Hauptbahnhof, ready to head to Berlin. There we got on a train to Hamburg, then an ICE train to Berlin. Despite having just a few minutes for a connection in Hamburg, it all went perfectly smoothly. The train left Leipzig about 10 seconds late the clock inside turned over to the minute, then the doors closed and we were off. Impressive.
Note: the rest of my photos from L beck are
available on Flickr.
Dmitrijs Ledkovs:
In just under a month, Belgium will face Estonia in a Fed Cup World
Group Playoff tie. The winning team will participate in the world
group next year, which, in theory, opens the possibility of winning. So
this is an important encounter. When team captain Sabine Appelmans
announced the Belgian selection, it was described by the
Belgian press as the 'dream team' Clijsters, Henin, Wickmayer
and Flipkens, aka the four best Belgian female Tennis
professionals. That, combined with the possibility of a World Group
promotion, seems to excite much of the country, to the extent that
10000 tickets have been sold in no time. Yes, I'll be there too.
But one man seems unhappy. Marc Wickmayer, father of Yanina, will say
to everyone who wants to hear it, that 'Appelmans needs to choose'; that
he's 'tired of the hypocrisy', and so on. His arguments: Clijsters and
Henin have not been part of the Fed Cup selection in two years, and his
daughter should not be the fourth wheel on the wagon after having been
much of the reason why Belgium is playing these playoffs.
Sigh.
Let's check some facts, shall we?
The following article was contributed by John Cass. Note that John's
instructions will also work on other NAS machines running Debian, such
as QNAP devices.
I had a problem upgrading my Debian kernel to 2.6.32 on the D-Link
DNS-323. The upgrade looked like it worked but on reboot I had a hung
machine. I tried taking the disk out, putting it in my main machine and
remaking the links in /boot to the previous kernel and
initrd.img but it turns out that on the DNS-323 both kernel and
initrd are actually stored in flash memory (the /boot disk
files are where they are built and a useful archive but are not used
during the boot process).
So I was stuck, and had to make a serial cable in order to find out what
was going on. The instructions 
Ubuntu always gets a lot of coverage in blogs, and the recent 
Note: I wrote most of this before 
I was finding a solution to not use a bunch of 
Regarding my 
As a complete outsider and with my obvious bias as a Debian Developer: how can anybody call 