Spring Fair

Today is the last day of this year’s spring fair in my hometown. I’ve just been there, had the first ice cream of the year (I usually get it there, it’s some sort of ritual) and took a few pictures with my mobile phone.

The Ferris wheel is the symbol of the town fair here, so here it is:

And here’s the painted background … very nice art, looks way better in real life, though.

I took three pictures of the haunted house, although they’re not perfect, because I had to work against the sun.

Left side.

Right side.

The middle.

The Flying Carpet ride:

The bumper cars, they belonged to a friend of my mum once (I got free rides whenever Number One was in town).

Another wild ride that has been around since my childhood:

And one of my all-time favourites: the Taiga Jet.

Ah, the fair … a great place for a small adventure. Oh, and a good place for ice cream!

A restored plaza

Another plaza in Bruchsal has been restored since I last took pictures. The Friedrichsplatz is done now and looks like this:

An interesting and stylish face. It’s on the base of one of the sculptures by the fountain.

Those are both sculptures, but taken from the other side.

Another sculpture close to the fountain at one side of the plaza. It already has some graffiti on it, I’m afraid.

The fountain in its full glory.

This is the view of the whole plaza from the south-eastern corner.

This is a second face in a sculpture on the north-western corner of the plaza.

This is the second plaza I wanted to show to you. I would have taken more photos, but the batteries in my camera were dying already.

A new plaza

Some of you might remember the parking lot in front of the movie theatre which I have pictured before for this blog. Once upon a time it was a small park, just a few trees, some green, a few benches. Then the put asphalt over it and turned it into a parking lot – only for a little time.

The little time has taken quite long, but finally, they have rebuild the park – or rather, build a nice plaza instead of the parking lot:

This is the new plaza, with a little bistro and some statues from our partnering cities in Europe. (That’s why they call it Europaplatz now.)

An impression of the statues:

There’s a little girl on the other side of the statue. Not exactly my taste, but very nice, nevertheless.

Looks a bit like a mermaid or a siren hugging a wave, doesn’t it?

This one looks interesting from all sides, a Madonna and crystals in a mining car.

A female statue without a head. And you can hardly see the kid climbing around on it when I took the picture.

I’m not completely sure about this one, it’s some sort of cube with marble hearts in it and stripes along the side.

My personal favourite, the crow.

But there’s something even more special on the plaza: an old-fashioned British phone booth. It was standing somewhere else before and I might have taken a picture before. Now it’s repaired and restored to its former glory:

That’s one plaza done.

Impressions

Here are some springtime impressions of Bruchsal for you:

This enormous tent provides shade and protection from the rain for the customers of the café and bar that takes up most of the lower level of the building. I rather like the strange shape, but I think I didn’t post a picture before. If I did so, who cares? Still looks very good.

A case of BSE (meaning bad simple English) or, as my English textbook at school would have called it, “false friends”. You see, the word ‘will’ exists in German, too, but means ‘to want’, so the correct translation for the German motto would have been “We want to survive” and not “We will survive”. Oops…

I have photographed this walkway a number of times already, I think. That’s a springtime image, the roses have just started to bloom. Soon enough (provided it stays warm) it will look like a sea of pink when you walk there.

It’s actually just a thingy I wanted to take a picture of, at the eastern end of the Rendezvous, the plaza where all bus lines meet.

Spring in Bruchsal is wonderful – once it has arrived.

It's March for Heaven's sake!

First of all: The pictures in this post are new. I made them today with my own camera, looking out of my living room window. What I want to say: it’s the 11th of March and we have snow … again!

I have to keep the sidewalk clean this week – and I will later go out and try to remove at least some snow. It is still snowing out there, so every try to remove the snow now is, mostly, pointless.

I’ve got more pictures of this year’s snow right now than of any other year. Three years ago, in March, I was going around with a T-shirt and already worrying about how hot the summer might be. This year:

When will it all end? How much longer do we get this weather? Where’s the climate change when you need it?