Dresden

We visited Dresden, Germany on our way home this year. It is one of our all-time favorite cities. We also visited a colleague we worked with in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A friend from our German exchange program days also came down and visited us. This is a picture of the "Blaues Wunder" (Blue Wonder) bridge built in 1893. It connected the two most expensive residential districts in all of Europe and was considered a technological wonder of the day.


We had our "3-B" supper under the bridge: Bier, Bratwurst und Brot. The river boat is part of the tourist fleet on the Elbe River.


This is the Hotel Artushof where we stayed in Dresden. It is part of the city that survived the WW II bombing. Very quiet neighborhood!


This is the "Fuerstenzug", the most famous alley in Europe! It is all made of Meissen tiles and shows the history of the Electors of Saxony. This is, indeed, an alleyway and is always swarming with tourists.


Here we are next to the river. The weather was unbelievably pleasant after the heat and humidity of Karachi!


This is the Frauenkirche, better known as "die Glocke" (the bell). It was destroyed in the war, but the Germans used GPS to mark every individual stone at the site and rebuilt the entire thing to the original specifications. The random dark spots are where they used the original, fire- and age-blackened sandstone blocks. The lighter stone is new.


This is a Czech band playing in Germany doing Dixieland jazz. Dresden has a large, annual Dixieland festival! These guys were good, but it just didn't sound like New Orleans!


Here is a scene from a downtown beerfest. Notice the church in the background?

Easter in Karachi

We attended Easter Sunrise services by the International Church of Karachi. Our church doesn't actually own a building so we meet at various places around the city. The service for Easter was at the Beach Luxury Hotel owned by the Avari family (Nice family! All three of their children attend our school.)


We didn't want to have to get up veeeeerrrrrryyy early to get across town to the sunrise service, so our neighbors from school decided to spend the night with us at the hotel. This is what it looked like out our window looking toward the downtown part of Karachi (20 million people! Seattle is less than one million. Seattle metropolitan area is about 3 million.)


This is looking out our hotel window to the port. This hotel was built just after Partition (breakup of India into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and used to be THE fanciest place in the entire city.

We are home for the summer. We will be going to Copenhagen late July for an Esperanto convention and then going back to work in August.

If you would like to visit, please phone or email!

The Hague International Model United Nations

During the last week in January, we took 12 students from our school to The Hague International Model United Nations (THIMUN). They practice lobbying each other, representing the interests of different countries and trying to solve the problems of the world; just like the UN.
The first place we actually went was Rotterdam to ride the Pancake Boat. Yes, it is a boat on which everyone eats ... pancakes. You can put all kinds of stuff on them or in them. Don't think just syrup and butter!


The views of the harbor were rather cloudy that day. The last week in January is statistically the coldest week fo the entire year. It was cold. The "Rotterdam", a former cruise liner, is now permanently moored here as a floating hotel. We think we know where all those cruise liners are going to wind up when the cruising craze dies down a bit.



We saw some really serious bikes in Holland.

Even the parking for bicycles is a serious business in Holland.

We went on a short tour of the city of Leiden. It is famous since it has everything everyone expects to see in Amsterdam without all the big city crowds and noise.

This convention is actually world famous. Maybe not in America, though.

This is what the stage looked like at the convention closing ceremony. About 3500 students, but not all of them on stage.

We had a pretty good time. We brought back a bunch of cheese and finished the last of it for supper tonight (3 March). In about two weeks, we will go spend about ten days in Thailand. We will post about that adventure when we get back!

Winter travels

We visited Alonda's sister in Chicago. Compared to Karachi, it was extremely cold!


The city had the requisite Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree in Daley Plaza.


In spite of the cold, the Christmas Market was actually pretty crowded. We talked to some people who said that the previous week it had been completely deserted. Too cold even for Chicagoans!


We went down to Ft Worth area to visit Alonda's dad and sister. We didn't have time to go see Jim's brother. We did, however, get to see some real, actual, genuine, for-sure Texas Longhorns. This is the four o'clock "cattle drive" for the tourists.

We guess they like the singing ...

Happy New Year to you all!

Christmas and New Year

Merry Christmas to you all from Santa (Jim in the suit) and Alonda!
Jim was asked to be one of the Santas at the American Women's Club Christmas Bazaar at a local hotel. He has already been asked to come back for next year.
We will be visiting relatives in Texas for the holidays and are flying out tomorrow night.
Happy Holidays!

Switzerland

In October, we went to Switzerland. We decided the best way to see it was by train. Jim didn't want to drive and we didn't want to ride a bus tour. They have panoramic cars on the tourist trains and even if you are on a regular train, it is still wonderful. You can relax, walk around, have coffee, nap, read or look at the beautiful scenery.

Neat, clean, comfortable and colorful.

We took this picture of the train you see from the same train. It was going around some very sharp turns and then went down the middle of the street like a streetcar. There was a small river, a road and steep alps on both sides so there just wasn't any room for train tracks.

When people think of Switzerland, they think of beautiful, small villages with church steeples. Yes, it looks exactly like that!

An it looks exactly like this, too. There were clocks everywhere. We were told that John Locke (or was it Calvin?) told the newly converted Protestants in Geneva that making jewelry was bad, but that it was OK to have a nice looking watch. The Swiss watch industry was born!

If you don't think of villages in Switzerland, you think of the snow-capped Alps.

Or maybe you think of the beautiful green forests on the lower slopes. We were there in the fall, so got to see some of the changing colors.

We were surprised to see so many fields of grapes. Swiss wine may not be famous, but they seem to actually make a lot of it.

We spent the entire trip trying to get a decent picture of a cow with a cowbell. This was the best we could do! The train was moving all the time and when it was stopped, there were no cows. Almost all the cattle and a lot of the other stock had bells.

This was Saas-Fee. You may have never heard of it. Everyone has heard of Zermatt, but this was quieter and had a lot fewer tourists. In fact, half the place was shut down for holiday for the staffs of the hotels and restaurants. When the new winter starts, they get busy and it doesn't stop until about October.

This is the view from our hotel room.

And this is what the hotels look like. No real high-rise places.

We went up the local cable car. An amazing number of Swiss towns and villages have one (or more!) cable cars leading up to their local skiing areas.

This is the view back down from the top. The busses go inside the barn to let you out. The winters are quite harsh and they don't shove you out in the snow. It is also common for the busses to have back racks and trailers for all the ski gear.

People were still going up and skiing and snow-boarding! It probably hadn't snowed here in at least four months.

Here is one of the results of all that snow. These are avalanche barriers and the Swiss government has a looooong term project to prevent avalanches.

This is a close-up of the barriers.

There are a lot of hikers and bikers. They are up high and they are down low. The yellow signs were at the top of the cable car and gave directions and distances for all those hikers and bikers.

Jim playing tourist in Interlaken.

Jim playing tourist in Italy. We always stop for gelatto when we go to Italy. Part of our trip went through a small part of Italy (Tirano). Notice how narrow the road is and how wide our bus was. We have the little Tuk-Tuk cars here in Karachi, but they don't have white-wall tires.

Our "train" for part of the trip was a boat. You buy a train ticket, but you still ride the paddle-wheeler.

This is what we will most remember about Switzerland: clean and green!

Touring in Pakistan

We finally got to go to a new city! Earlier this May, we visited friends we worked with in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. We flew up in the morning, did Sunday Brunch at the Islamabaad Club and did a tour around the city. Islamabaad is the capital of Pakistan and has the third largest mosque in the world. Faisal Mosque was a gift to Pakistan from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Unlike the number one and two largest mosques in the world (Mecca and Medina), we got to go inside and visit.

This shows part of the open area of the mosque. The white paths are white marble and are very nice. Since you have to walk around in socks or barefooted, knowing where the cool, white marble walkways are is important.

This is part of the interior domed area. It is basically just a large, open area for prayer and was nicely decorated.

Here we are at a local lake / National Park. Alonda was wearing the traditional Pakistani shawaal kamiz (spelling varies!).

This is the seat of government for the country. There is a large lake behind it (we visited it, too) and the row of white buildings are the two houses of Congress, the President's House and the Supreme Court building. They are all next to each other along Constitution Avenue.

Here is another view looking down at Faisal Mosque from the hill. The mosque is quite unusual in that it has so many corners. The vast majority of mosques are built in a domed / rounded form.

At the large lake behind the government building, we saw lots of people out for a ride on the lake.

In March, we had a couple of visitors from the US and we showed them a few things here in Karachi. We took them to the local Pakistani Air Force Museum. Jim was the only person who had to pay the RS 25 fee (about $.30). Everyone else was over 60 and got in for free.

You can see from this general view that there was a lot to see. The museum has been recently renovated and was very green and clean.

This is one of the old "eggbeater" choppers. It was unique in that it has no tail rotor. The two rotors go in opposite directions!

This is an old Starfighter. They had a lot of problems with these in the 1970's. The tail was too small and the plane would have directional stability problems and crash.

We rode the simulator ride. These are getting more popular with the kids.

This is the inside of the hanger. Air Force Museums always have lots of planes.

Another place we visited was the Chaukhandi Tombs. They are several hundred years old, but not all the graves are ancient. There were some very recent burials.

Some of the tombs have quite intricate carvings on them.

Not all the tombs are pretty.

Here is more detail of the carvings.

We hope you enjoyed our travels and we plan on seeing some more of Pakistan when we come back for next school year. School starts in August!