August 24

Late Post...I meant to do this Sunday night but forgot.


For the past two weeks I was filling in as the liaison from Marine Forces Europe/Africa to US Africa Command because the other guy was on leave.  Sometimes it was interesting, my desk was in the Joint Operations Center which is just like on TV with huge screens showing maps, status reports, and video feeds from the continent.   


US Africa Command (AFRICOM) is also in the Stuttgart area.  If you remember my earlier post, there are three main US bases; Panzer (where I'm usually at), Kelley (AFRICOM), and Patch (EUCOM).  Stuttgart is in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg which is in the southwest corner of Germany.  The Black Forest is also in this area, and it's about a half-hour south of Stuttgart.  The Black Forest is famous for cuckoo clocks, Black Forest cake, and the story of Hansel & Gretel.


So, right outside Kelley is a small patch of woods with lots of trails - perfect for running.  One day as I was running I noticed some trail signs and some of them were......unusual.


Here's a typical trail sign you'd expect pretty much anywhere.

Here's another one.  Just like most anywhere else there are different trails, blue trail, red trail, etc.

There are even trails for horses.

And then there's this!  A trail for witches??  But they have brooms and can fly, so they don't need a trail.  Maybe it's a warning to lookout for witches.  That's probably it.

In case you get lost, there are plenty of signs to help you track the witches.









There's also a waiting area for witches and victims...

And finally, I think this is the holding cage for witches to keep their captured children.  It looks like there's the remains of an unfortunate one still in there....



August 7

Other than the NSA, I don't think anyone is reading my blog.  But just in case I'll do a quick update.

This weekend I went to Prague in the Czech Republic.  This was a trip organized by the USO on base, and here's a bit of trivia.  In the early 1940s there were several organizations that helped provide morale services to GIs.  There was the YMCA, YWCA, and others, so I think President Roosevelt started the initiative to combine them into one organization.  That would help focus fundraising efforts and prevent duplicate services.  Uniting all the services into one organization became the United Services Organization.

When I went to the USO office they said this trip was filled up but you can always show up on the date of and see if there's space.  So 1:00 on Saturday morning I was in the parking lot on base and got lucky.  It's a long bus ride but ultimately worth it.  Once we got in the city there was a tour guide who walked us around for a few hours.   Prague is notable for a few things but the one I found most interesting was its survival during WWII.  Since Czech was 'affiliated with' (some say owned by) Germany it wasn't bombed by the Germans.  Apparently there weren't too many German garrisons in Czech because the Allies didn't bomb much either.  So Prague came out of WWII far less damaged than the rest of major European cities.  Even their subway is pretty new.  I didn't go in it but it was started in the 1970s which I think is about the time Washington DC started their metro system.

So the Czech Republic is part of the European Union but does not use Euros.  They still use the Czech Krona (or something like that).  One Euro is worth ... uh, a lot of Krona...so prices are a little hard to get used to.  I had a nice lunch at an outdoor hotel/restaurant.  Caprese salad and a bull & dumpling goulash.  The bill came to 360 which turned out to be around 22 dollars.

I'm filling in for another Marine who is going on leave, so for the next two weeks I'll be the Liaison Officer for AFRICOM.  A little bit cool since I'll get exposure to very high level discussions on fighting bad guys in Africa.  And a little bit dull since no matter what the topic, a long boring meeting is still a long boring meeting.

This is the Astrological Clock in Prague.  Very old.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock

July 24th

It's been 3 weeks since my last post - so here's a quick rundown.

Erika, Elise, & Jack came out to Germany for a 2 week visit.  We had a great time touring around mostly southern Germany.  Lots of pics posted on Instagram.

Now I'm back travelling for work.  The past few days I was back in Spain and now I'm at the navy base in Sigonella, Italy (Sicily).  Most of the people I've talked who've been here said the same thing, 'it's interesting, but crappy'.  Yes, it is.

Sunday July 3, 2016

I know I didn’t post anything last week, but there wasn’t a whole lot to post about. 

It took me five minutes after writing that last sentence to figure out what to say next.  OK, so I'll try stream-of-consciousness writing.  The coffee here is really good.  I complain about spending $60 on a stupid auto-drip coffeemaker but here they sell $2000 - $3000 machines, for home use.  Nespresso and Tassio are about the lower to mid range brands.  Look up Jura.  Coffee is good.  Café ist gut.  Die brot sind leckar. (the bread is delicious)

Another Marine who just left here had recommended Memrise which is a language app.  It’s really good because it takes maybe 5 – 10 minutes per day and goes through repetition in different ways.  Since I usually walk to work for 20 minutes I can go through a lesson a day.  Then the next lesson is a review, then a few more words & phrases, then a review, etc. 

But the weather is still cool, this morning was around 55.  It’s partly cloudy but the high is only supposed to get to the high 60s.   It’s the Fourth of July weekend and I need long pants and a light jacket.  Germany beat Italy last night in the EuroCup.  Friday night was a big win for Wales in a 3-1 victory over Belgium.  The news said Wales hasn’t made it this far in…uh…ever.  That’s what the news said, direct quote.  Really.   We get several news feeds at work, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, AFN (armed forces network – which carries a mix of US news) BBC, RT (Russian – aka Rooskys), Al Jazeera, and maybe something else.  You would think Al Jazeera would be the most slanted news source but I think they do a pretty good job of presenting information.  So here are my top 5 channels that have an obvious slant to their news:  Fox takes gold, silver, and bronze – 1,2,3.  RT gets 4^th place, and MSNBC takes 5^th.  CNN doesn’t place in my list because the majority of what they do doesn’t qualify as news.  My list, my rules!

So Germany won last night.  The games start at 9:00 and are usually over by 11.  Europeans use the 24 hour clock so that would be a start time of 21:00 and ending around 23:00.  I was woken up a little after midnight by all the shouting, screaming, and carousing of my neighbors.  Like a scene out of a movie I heard a group of drunk German guys stumble down the street absolutely murdering some patriotic-drinking song. 

I went to the Porsche museum last Sunday.  Porsche and Mercedes are both based in the Stuttgart area, the Mercedes factory is here in Boblingen, a few blocks behind the train station.  Here’s a picture of the valet parking for the Porsche museum.  Crazy Germans….

Ferdinand Porsche designed and built utilitarian vehicles also.  This first of its kind firetruck was built in 1912 and was STILL IN USE up until the 1970s.

This is not a firetruck

June Nineteenth

...done on June twentieth...

I went back to Spain last week.  Flights from Stuttgart to Seville (which is the closest airport to where the base is) go either early or late.  The last time I went I took the late flight and of course I finally made it to base around 10 or 11 pm.  So this time I took the early flight which got me to Seville around 1? maybe 2?  So I took the bus into downtown Seville to look around for a bit before heading to base.  I had just under 2 hours so I wandered around the old section of the city and saw some beautiful sights.

There are a few 'normal' sized streets but most are narrow alleyways where cars are still allowed so it makes for some interesting vehicle/pedestrian interaction.  Just by sort of following the crowds I found the Seville Cathedral - Catedral de Seville de Santa Maria.  Originally built as a mosque by the Moslem Moors it became a Catholic cathedral when they were pushed out.  I only walked around the outside but next time I'll go in and find the tomb of Christopher Columbus.

The week on base was great except for some minor stomach bug I picked up.  Muchas Gracias.

Then Friday night I drove back to Seville and walked around a bit more.  I made it to the Plaza de Espana which was built for the Spanish-American Exposition in the 1920s.  

Incredible sights & I can't wait to go back.  In the meanwhile, I'll leave you with this....

Late addition....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOtQpCAigq0

June Twelfth

Big event this week was my USO trip to Verdun, France yesterday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun

Once again up really early to get to the bus on base but at least I had plenty of room to recline and sleep a bit.  Verdun is almost due west of Stuttgart, about 5 hours away.  So, Verdun was the site of one of the most costly battles of WWI.  Lasting 10 months, from February until December 1916 and covering about 500 sq miles of contested land, the battle caused almost 750,000 casualties of which one third died, and completely erased several villages around the main city.

I thought this trip was going to be a battlefield tour but it was more of a museum tour.  The first stop was a the Memorial Verdun which opened in the late 1980s and was just re-dedicated two weeks ago by French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkle on the 100th anniversary of the battle. This was a fantastic museum with three floors of exhibits and multimedia displays but we only had an hour to spend there.  Still, that was enough to see some pretty cool exhibits.  One of the biggest problems both the Germans and the French faced was the mud caused by the constant turnover of the ground from moving troops, vehicles, and explosions.  Here's a display of a field kitchen on a simulated mud field that, to my surprise, visitors are invited to walk on.  Interesting but it doesn't quite have the same feel of mud that sucks the boots off your feet.

Our next stop was at another memorial, the Douamont Ossuary, which is, as I found out, a building designed to be the final resting place for human remains, as opposed to an in-ground resting place (cemetery).  This ossuary was designed and built to resemble a medieval sword plunged into the ground.


In this photo (not mine) the left wing is the chapel and the right wing has work/administrative spaces.  On the back side of the building are small windows at ground level and through these windows are the bones of an estimated 130,000 soldiers.

Up in the tower is a view of the cemetery (which is only representative) and the battlefield which is now a forest.

This same view one hundred years ago would have shown nothing but churned dirt.  On the road up to the ossuary some of the land was cleared of trees to show what it was like.  Even though there's grass & weeds the gigantic mounds of dirt are still present.  Imagine giant snow moguls, except made of dirt and everywhere as far as you can see.  Also on the road is a path down to a memorial where one of the villages was.  Having been destroyed by artillery and taken several times alternately by the Germans and French there was nothing left and no one to rebuild it for - so just a memorial.

The final stop was in Verdun itself where we had some lunch and then a visit to the Citadel.  Being an old city, Verdun had walls and city gates.  These fortifications were improved over the centuries, including a fortress built in the mid 1800s into the base of a small mountain, very similar to the Maginot Line.  In fact, one of the participants in the battle was a young sergeant who later became a Member of Parliament and the head of the French Ministry of War in the late 1920s; Andre Maginot.

Lots more to see but we only had one day.  Au revoir!

June 5th

Not much happened this past week.

Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, not a lot of mattress sales here in Europe.  But I did see some posts on FB from some fellow Marines about a guy many of us met in Iraq.  Kael Weston was the sole State Department representative in Al Anbar province when I was there in 2005.  Kael was, and still is!, a wonderful, honest, smart and decent person.  He wrote an op-ed in the NYT last week that is not just a great read but a hidden, perhaps unintentional - perhaps not, indictment of the many elected and appointed officials who don't have the same firm grasp of their accountable actions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/the-graves-of-the-marines-i-lost.html?_r=0

And he's just come out with a book on his views of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  I'm gonna buy it.

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/229068/the-mirror-test-by-j-kael-weston/9780385351126/


And that's enough serious talk, here's some easier stuff I discovered:

When the CRAY2 supercomputer came out in 1985 it was the size of a large home appliance and weighed almost 3 tons (5,500 lbs).  The iPhone 4 I finally ditched last year because it wasn't fast enough had the same processing power as the CRAY.  The iPhone 4 weighed one-third of a pound.

The average man shaves about one pound of facial hair per year.

Lastly, there's a funny poster in my office about what Marines do, so I made my own version.