Saturday, August 06, 2011

Luisenpark

IMG_8413 About 20 minutes from our house lies Mannheim, a somewhat maligned city that has tons to offer. Most folks around here love to shop there but would never (ever) live there. It’s true that Mannheim is a bit more blue color than many of its neighbors, but it has a dynamism many of the other lack almost entirely.

Regardless, Mannheim is home to a gorgeous urban park call Luisenpark. For a few Euros, you can enter this sprawling botanical garden, spending the day seeing the sites, drinking some cold Hefes and scarfing ice cream. I’ve blogged about it before, but this spring it was especially beautiful. As Jack White so famously said, the message “bears repeating”.

The spring offers as grand an abundance and variety of flowers as I’ve seen anywhere. I think the pictures make that point much better than I ever could.IMG_8422IMG_8441 IMG_8469 IMG_8495 There’s also a very nice Chinese Garden with a beautiful pagoda with its own tea terrace and water feature, including a fountain.IMG_8585The park also has a large population of almost prehistoric looking storks. Their nests are enormous, as are they.  This guy came up to about my stomach, and I ain’t exactly short.IMG_8596 IMG_8518

Competing interests…

As times and technology change, so do our habits. I’ve spent much more time updating Facebook in the last few months than I have this blog. While I like the selective exposure of Facebook, I’m beginning to miss the narrative and plot that a blog affords. Since I have some time off this summer, I’m going to make an attempt to get caught up a bit.

One of the few benefits of compulsive photography is the ability to remind oneself in high definition of one’s activities well after the fact. The older I get, the shorter the increment of this “well after”. I now measure it in a single-digit number of days.

Anyway, I wonder if anyone still read this.