A weekend in Limerick, Ireland

When we lived in Sweden 25 years ago, we made friends with an Irish family who had kids pretty much the same ages as ours. We've visited each other back and forth over the years, and last weekend we flew Ryan Air to Shannon, the airport close to Limerick, where they live. (Travelling on Ryan Air is story in itself. I have never experienced anything like that airline -- they hawk something about every five minutes of the trip, and make you stand outside in lines waiting to climb stairs onto the plane. Anything to save or make money.)

On Saturday morning Dave and Lindy went to the Limerick farmer's market in the rain.

Then in the afternoon we went into town to see an art museum. The Shannon River runs through the middle of Limerick, and the town has a castle and a cathedral, both of which you can see in the next photo, along with kayakers enjoying a place in the river that has a bit of turbulence.

On Sunday we went for a drive up the Shannon River. A few miles up the river from Limerick, the river widens into a big lake, which is a natural lake, made possible by the shallow slope of the river. The sun came out when we stopped at an overlook, so you can see the first photo with gray skies and no light, and then bright skies.

We drove on to a little village on the lake that I think is called Ballyvaughan. Kevin's last name is Ryan (no relation to Ryan Air, mercifully), and one of his Ryan cousins once owned a pub in the village, and it's still named after her. Kevin's father was born near the village. The village is complete with the ruin of a castle of some sort, so common all over Ireland. And lots of ducks and a few swans.

One of the pleasures of being at Lindy and Kevin's home was their back yard. A bit more than a year ago, they had a bunch of landscaping done. It was lovely, with a curving path going around the edges of the flower bed.

England: Ely Cathedral

We went to Sunday morning worship in Ely Cathedral. (Note to Americans -- it's pronounced Eel-ee.) We had rented a car for the weekend to explore East Anglia, and the drive from Cambridge to Ely is only about 20 minutes. Ely is a small town with a HUGE cathedral, visible from a couple dozen miles away. The pleasure of attending worship in a place like that is that during the service, I continually found new details to look at. I'll begin by posting photos of the exterior, then the interior. Lots of amazing ceilings in the interior.

Germany: Potsdam

While we were in Berlin, Mike insisted that we visit Potsdam. From his house, it's a 45 minute train ride. Right near the train station in Potsdam, we rented bicycles and spent the day riding around a very charming city. The first stop was Sansouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great of Prussia, built in 1745. The grounds of Sansouci actually contain several palaces. In fact, Potsdam must have the highest number of palaces in any single small city. I'll post photos of all the palaces we saw in one day below, but before I do that, I want to mention the other claim to fame of Potsdam.

On 16 July 1945, the "big three" leaders met in Potsdam to hammer out post war issues. Germany had surrendered only eight weeks before. Below is a photo of the leaders who met there: British former prime minister Winston Churchill, American president Harry S. Truman and Soviet prime minister Joseph Stalin. After you see the big three, you can see the house where they met and the beautiful garden there. The hose is Cecilienhof, the home of a Germany prince.

Now the palaces. The first six photos are of the palaces on the grounds of Sansouci (which means "no worries" in French. You can really see the influence of Versailles at Sansouci. It was as if every king in Europe had to try to top Versailles.) The additional palaces are scattered around Potsdam.

The downtown of Potsdam was charming, with a few pedestrian streets. Mixed in were some other palace-like buildings, adding to the sense the Potsdam has an amazing number of extravagant buildings.

Berlin

Our son, Mike, lives in Berlin and works for Transparency International, an NGO that focuses on corruption. We visited him in late September. He lives in what used to be West Berlin, about a block from a section of the wall that has been kept as a memorial. His apartment is on the top floor, to the right of the central stairwell. No elevator, and that building has really high ceilings, so each flight of stairs is really, really long.

Several of the buildings around Mike's building aren't as tall as his, so he has a nice sense of space as you look out of his windows. The reward of climbing all those stairs.

In that last photo, you can see a church spire behind the tree. There were lovely bells ringing often from that spire. At least they were lovely at first, but when a set of bells rang at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, I wondered how the neighbors felt. And indeed, without my asking Mike, he gave a pretty passionate speech about how invasive he found those bells, particularly the early morning bells on Sunday morning. It made me think about the way the church appears to outsiders in so many ways.

Dave and Mike climbed up a tower near the Tiergarten, the central park in Berlin, and got a good overview of the city.

Berlin is a mix of old and new, as you can see from the photo below. The juxtaposition of old and new is visible in many parts of the city, really in almost every block.

The Brandenburg Gate, photo above, is the iconic place in Berlin. Graphics of the gate appear everywhere as a logo for the city. I wish I'd taken a photo of those graphics because I liked them. One of the most moving things we saw were little metal tiles on the ground in front of apartment buildings to remember Jews who used to live there. The little squares are maybe 5 inches across. The first one below, for example, says "Here lived Erich Marcuse, born 1905, deported 1943 to Auchschwitz, died 21 February 1945 at Dachau." The three below (perhaps a family) were next to each other, but they weren't the only ones we saw. History is so immediate in Berlin, particularly WWII and the division of the city into East and West, which ended in 1989.

To end on a lighter note, Dave loved the poster below and wants it to be a picture of him in years to come.