Flying back home from Frankfurt, Germany, today. Met these two locals who are coming to the US on holy pilgrimage. They are headed to Lambeau for a Packers game. Cheeseheads are a worldwide fraternity.
Go Pack go!
Big Birds
Here we go again. Yes, those are passenger 747s out there, a whole row of them. Germany’s Lufthansa is the world’s largest operator of these old birds.
Did you know that the original 747(-100) was introduced in 1969? Boeing manufactured more than 1,500 of these big boys. American carriers abandoned the jumbo line in 2017.
Only a few dozen are still used as passenger planes. The rest have been scrapped, converted into freighters, or, as in the case of the Stockholm airport, converted into a hotel (Check out their “Jumbo Stay”). I can’t imagine that. Who can sleep on a 747?
This will Grow Hair on your Chest
Laugenstange kümmelbraten and kraut before 8:00 am will put hair on your chest. These folk in Frankfurt make pretty fair coffee too.
I pity the person sitting next to me on the next flight.
Paul and the beasts
Was the Apostle Paul ever in a Roman amphitheater?
Roman amphitheater
We visit the Roman Amphitheater at Trier, Germany, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Fragments of a Roman past
The Roman Germanic Museum in Köln (Cologne) has some fascinating artifacts.
Cologne (Köln) in the biblical period
The history of Cologne goes back to the New Testament age.
Galli Guys
The Romans knew about a people and a land called Gaul.
Constantine's Throne Room
The brilliance of Roman engineering is on display in the throne room of Constantine the Great.
G'morgen from Trier
Mark arrivers in Trier.and stops for a German-style breakfast.
Happy endings and not so happy endings
A Bad Kohlgrub arrival
We did but we didn't do Oberammergau
Steeple climb
The awful happened.
Work on the Köln (Cologne) Cathedral sputtered and stalled. After 300 years of labor, this “structure of hope” outpaced its resources. It was unfinished, unfunded, and unroofed in places. The 25-meter wooden Domkran was idle atop of the South Steeple, an arm with no muscle. To make matters worse, the archives (read: building plans) were lost to French revolutionaries in 1794. The vision of a grand cathedral, conceived in the middle of the 13th century, was all but lost.
Structures of hope
Josephus knew about it and them
For those who are curious about the landscape of the biblical world, the Rhine River may seem to be a stretch, a reach, a foul ball. The Rhine (Grk Ρήνος, Lat Rhenus) is an unlikely entry in a Bible dictionary or atlas. It is unrecognized in the biblical text. And yet, this waterway and those who peopled its banks were known in the New Testament world, more by reputation than experience.
This is us/them
I sat with Moriah and Peter in a 160-year-old restaurant in Köln known as Brauerei zur Malzmühle. While we chewed crispy pork knuckle, grilled pork belly, and raw minced pork (do you smell a theme here?), a local family settled into a stained wooden table adjacent to ours. Somehow we stood out as foreigners and became a subject of their whispered conversation.
Go with the Flow
We walked the asphalt trail. The earth smelled wet and looked smudgy. The sky was indecisive. In one moment the rain dropped and veered, its trajectory altered by gusts of wind. A moment later, the muslin drapes of the sky were pulled back and sunlight shot through. It ricocheted off the wet sheen and illuminated the droplets clinging to leafless branches of the trees (that undoubtedly provided marvelous colors or welcome shade along the riverbank in other seasons of the year). These droplets transformed into diamonds for an instant, then the drapes curled and closed. The dance was over as suddenly as it started.
