The PENguin Blog

While discussing plans for the Nürnberg penshow, my friend Gerhard Brandl mentioned the blue night, which has been going on in Nürnberg for ten years now. As it turned out our friends Ekke and Gudrun had never been, so following the pen show all four of us set out with approximately 130,000 others to the old town of Nürnberg to experience this great cultural event that literally lights the city in blue, opens museums and other institutions all night, and this year featured more than 250 installations loosely grouped around the concept of “a canopy of stars” in conjunction with the International Year of Astronomy. If you seek further information (in Deutsch), check the website http://www.blauenacht.nuernberg.de/ So, after a light supper, we headed into town to see what we could see. Well, it was an incredible event, what we back in the ‘60s would have called a “happening,” but throughout the city. We visited a half dozen installations, including one in a disused bomb shelter, stopped ...

In truth, this visit is only to a small degree about the city. We are here, in about equal importance, to renew an old friendship and for me to attend the second Nürnberger Schreibgeräte-Sammlerbörse held at the Ofenwerk, Zentrum für mobile Klassik-Autos on Saturday, May 23. The other reason for our visit takes Sharon and me back 35 years to the early 1970s when I worked in a reproductive biology lab and became most friendly with a German physician who was training there as a Ford fellow. Despite our different ages and backgrounds we became fast friends but after he returned to Germany in 1974, we lost touch. Long story short, Ekkehard got in touch with me a couple of years ago via the internet and we renewed our friendship. For a time, in fact, it seemed that he and his wife would visit us in the Bay Area, but we got to Nürnberg first. We arrived Thursday afternoon and Ekke met us at the airport, all of us wondering if we would recognise one another. We spent the rest of the da...

On Sunday we left Edinburgh, headed for Northumberland and (we thought) York. Now, if someone says England and tourism, your first thoughts do not turn to Newcastle Upon Tyne, which formerly was the county’s largest city, or for that matter to any place in Northumberland. But for many English folk we have talked to, this area is a great treat, as it has become for us. Jim Marshall first put us onto the area, marking out Alnwick, Holy Island and Bamborough on our maps. We took it from there and spent three days prowling the backroads and coming to love the area, enough so that we delayed our trip to York until after our return from Germany, in order to get a bit more time in that corner of England. So, what have we seen and done to warrant such enthusiasm? Our first stop Sunday afternoon was, in truth, still in Scotland, at Preston Mill and Dovecote or as they put it Phantassie Doocot. The mill, which seems to be a locally popular stopping and walking place, was located an easy half m...