The big thing I did today was to book an overseas trip for the first time since 2019. The next ISO Photography standards meeting is in Cologne in Germany, at the end of June, and we are finally having a face-to-face meeting again. My wife and I are both keen to travel, since we missed the chance to take our planned 25th wedding anniversary trip last year. So today we booked flights.
We decided to fly into Frankfurt as it’s the easiest access to Cologne, and then back home out of Amsterdam, after spending some time after the meeting touring around and visiting the Netherlands for the first time. We’ve arranged to leave Scully with friends while we’re away. She’s stayed with them before and they have a dog who is Scully’s friend, so that will be good.
Now I need to find and book hotels and train connections and stuff like that, as well as figuring out exactly where in the Netherlands we want to visit. Amsterdam obviously, but we want to visit a smaller town or two and see some things a little quieter than the main tourist attractions.
Also there’ll be handling COVID requirements for travel, which we’ll need to work out. Looks like we need proof of negative test results both before leaving Australia and before leaving Amsterdam to return to Australia. I’ll also need to see if we need a test before crossing the land border from Germany into the Netherlands. But I’ll work that out between now and departure.
And I took this photo of Scully on our walk today:
New content today:
Answering rerun commentary #2284 ; you should have a look at a Robert Sheckley short story called “Shall we have a little talk ?” (see for instance : https://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/09/shall_we_have_a.html) ; the end of the story describes such a language… And thanks again for all those years of fun (this is my first comment, as usually I don’t have much to add to your good work)
Germany and Denmark are both in the EU. I don’t think anyone is stopping at their common border, any more.
Denmark?
I would recommend visiting Leiden whilst in the Netherlands. I lived there for 6 months when I was doing a degree project placement at ESA in Noordwijk. In fact if you go to the Netherlands, you should definitely plan a trip to the ESA ESTEC (European Space TEchnology Centre) visitor centre in Noordwijk. An easy bus ride from Leiden train station, which is itselfon the main line from Amsterdam
Haarlem is also really nice and close to Amsterdam. Leiden is a very old university city, also well worth visiting. I can also recommend any book by my favorite author Maarten t’ Hart – one can learn a lot about the netherlands reading his books. As for Cologne – well as a german I think I am qualified to say it is one of the more ugly cities of germany if you substract the dome ;). However there is also lots of stuff to see, the roman germanic museum is well worth a visit, they have a huge roman mosaic found in the place where the museum was erected and a lot of other roman findings from the near surrounding. When you dig in cologne it is not unusual to find something from the romans.
I’ve been to Cologne several times and know what it’s like. I think I’ve visited most of the museums there by now – I do like the Roman stuff.