Weekend snow-tripping

We've had several day trips over the last few weekends, taking advantage of the snow up in the Harz Mountains since Göttingen's hardly gotten any. On the map, Göttingen is circled with yellow and the Harz mountain range is in red.  The Harz are apparently northern Germany's prime ski location.
 
With an inexpensive group ticket that includes bus fare on many local buses, we;'ve headed out to Sankt Andreasberg and to Brocken.


Our first trip to Sankt Andreasberg happened to be on a cold and wet day - it alternated rain and snow - but we were all in good spirits and it didn't bother us much.  We visited an old silver mine called Grube Samson.

 The tour was in German and about all I understood were the various numbers, but I had no idea what they were in reference to except that it took the miners about 90 minutes to climb the ladders out of the mine.

 

reproduced photo of NY canary sellers with German canaries

As you are probably aware, miners often took canaries into the mines to serve as early warning "systems" for toxic gasses.  In Germany canaries were bred intensively and for some time in the 1800s they were shipped to the US  (from what I can gather, though according to this wikipedia article the birds were considered too valuable to go into the mines) .  This explains why there's a canary museum dedicated to the Harz Roller breed at the Samson Mine.

A family makes cages for miners' canaries.

 

I was kind of enchanted by the canaries (they had live ones there, singing up a storm), and their history. It's a very small museum, only 3 or 4 rooms, but it really gave a feel for the era displayed in small details.

(to be continued with the following weekend's excursion...)

Old Year, New Year

Dear everyone, we hope you have a great 2012, that it brings contentment, joy, depth and beauty!

Devin, Merlin and I stayed up on the 31st (Dan's in China continuing research, writing, and helping his parents who have both been ill).  It was a beautiful surprise to have the weather clear enough to experience a firework-filled celebration.  From our house, which I sometimes call our Mountain Retreat (I try to remember that when I feel like complaining about the uphill walk), we can see above rooftops to the city center below.  Folks here really get into the fireworks displays and from just before midnight until after 1:00 am, it seemed the valley was just filled with showers and sparks and bright flowering bursts.  I'm sorry, I didn't take any pictures (and they'd be a paltry representation, anyway, without a zoom lens), but after all my years in towns where personal fireworks are mostly off limits, I have to say that this was a treat worth seeing.  Both girls enthusiastically endorsed being here for it again next year.

Up until the 29th of December, downtown Göttingen hosted a Christmas Market with booths filled with crafts and ornaments, winter specialties and eye candy (and real candy).  It was a relatively small market, just filling two small plazas, but we found ourselves continually entertained by just walking through the jostle and seeing what there was to see.

 

We didn't have a white Christmas (just rain and more rain), but it did snow once, sometime in December, and then promptly melted and we're still wondering if we're going to get to use our sled.  We did go ice skating, at the downtown indoor rink - it was pretty crowded and with the dim lighting, hard to take photos, but here are a few I got.  We look faster than we really are, but for a bunch of Californians, we weren't really too bad at it.  I think we can thank Sacramento's December rink for that.

Yes, that's Merlin in the maroon sweater.

And Devin, zipping by.

At least it snowed on our gingerbread houses...

and bonus points to anyone who can identify these (super extra bonus points if you know the Danish name, just because that's how I happen to call them):

not much going on, really

But I do have good photos!

No snow falling yet - other than this

but back when autumn had its last burst-of-amazing, we went walking among the golden trees.  Yes, this was a while ago, but rather than save the pics for next year and pretend they're fresh, I figured I'd better put them up!

We took the train to Bad Langansalza, a really lovely small town where it seemed the houses had so much color; at least more so than Göttingen which has a lot of white.

After wandering around for a bit we took a bus to a national park where there's an elevated walk through the treetops.  And I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves.