> A blackberry at the instant of conception….
> …you’ll find them everywhere. This used to be Schorch Lautner’s legendary gallery in the Augustinerstrasse. Long gone, both of them.
> I had a bit of time to kill one morning last week before my physiotherapy session. If it had been Tuesday, Friday or Saturday I would have been round…
> A slightly PSed “Maison de France”, the home of the Institut Francais on the Schillerplatz in Mayence. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants The rest of the…
Remember Igor Mamonov, the absentee ballet dancer? There’s a sequel. Ms jb, feeling that her friend Ingrid (Frank the Potter‘s missus) had been hard done by in missing Act 2,…
>If there’s a patch of open space in Mainz, they’ll either have covered in in cobblestones or the busy chappies from the city’s gardening department will have bagsed it and…
>So you think you’re all modern and 21st Century with your underfloor or ducted heating… Yeah right. The Romans beat you to it by about 2 millennia, mate. This is…
>I know a couple of professors. One of them is fairly new at the job, so he hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that you have to constantly wail and…
>Rosa canina or dog rose. There are various theories on the origin of the name. One goes that it was a disparaging cachet (in the context of “worthless”) compared with…
>This Euro 2008 business is getting out of hand. The local boys have barely reached the semi-finals and there are flags everywhere and excessive public enjoyment and whathaveyou. They’re also…
>They didn’t have to go to all that trouble, you know. Big festival, hundreds of thousands of people, bands, fireworks last night. Just because it’s my patronal saint’s day. What?…
>One of the 3 or 4 hairdressers in the village. (I’d hope that this is the “before” image….) “Struwwelpeter” – Shock-headed Peter or Scruffy Peter (Mark Twain’s translation) – is…
>People get carried away by this Euro 2008 business. (Some are blissfully unaware of its existence, but that’s another story…) Overnight, park benches (these are at the Vertical Village) appear…
>Holger Bergmann is my physiotherapist. He’s bloody good. He used to work in a big physiotherapy practice in Mainz-Mombach and kept my degenerating hip joint (sort of) pain-free for a…
>This is Marek, a cool young guy from the end of the road. I was pottering about in the garden the other evening and he was there in a flash,…
>Trinkhallen (drinking halls) are ubiquitous in Germany. One of the ones close to the Hauptbahnhof in Mainz definitely leaves its mark, though. Patrons flip off their bottle caps onto the…
>Or Schobbeschteschää in the local dialect. (Someone’s going to correct me on that one..) The statue of the prototypical Mainz wine drinker graces the green patch between the Schönbornerhof and…
>Mixed marriages are tricky things at the best of times, but sporting events tend to apply unusual stress to any relationship. We don’t have a problem at our place –…
>Odile Landragin is legendary in these parts for her stunning herb and aromatics garden. So legendary, in fact, that the local paper has assigned her the elevated status of Official…
> In my book, it’s OK to be a tad mistrustful of big Life Science companies. A big companies, actually. But I have a very soft spot for Boehringer-Ingelhem, with…
>… when your national football team beats the team of the country you’re living in. Which is what happened the other night when Croatia comprehensively and deservedly stuffed Germany 2:1…
>No, not the Provence. These manicured rows of lavender are squeezed in at the back of the Hauptbahnhof (Main Station) in Mainz and between a jumble of flyovers and access…
>As soon as shearing’s due to begin, the temperature drops. 29ºC on Tuesday, 22º yesterday and we’ll be lucky to see 18º today. It’s the “Schafskälte” – “literally “Sheeps’ Cold”…
>This is how much of the asparagus is grown around here. (That’d be “Spargel”, the blanched stuff that you have to peel, as opposed to the green stuff that you…
>There’s some seriously underdeveloped talent around here if this painted window at the Nieder-Olm Primary School is anything to go by. All that’s missing is a goat playing a violin…
>Big event at the moment is the European Football Championships (rest of the world read: soccer) being jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria. They don’t have a chance of winning,…
>7 year old Sophie from up the road turned up on one of her frequent visits the other week to proudly inform us that she’d won the Reading Contest for…
>There’s the Federal Horticultural Show – the Bundesgartenschau – held biannually and it’s such a huge prestige object that cities are queueing up to apply for the honour of hosting…
>Take one virulent hosta plant, a bit of tweaking in iPhoto and tghis is what you get
>Rue – Ruta graveolens – is one of those herbs that you’ll rarely find a use for. It featured prominently in Middle Eastern and Roman cuisine in ancient times, but…
>You can tell how good my dentist Klaus Höffler is by the fact that he doesn’t need to do a lot. When my old dentist retired in 1998, I spent…
Mainz Daily Photo 