jay | Last weekend...

Catching up, after the hospital and conference are both past...

Last weekend I travelled from Rio Tinto to Munich, with a few sights...

After

sarahh dropped me off at Seville station... the AVE high-speed train, waiting to depart:

A dry brown view at 220mph, rolling past for 2.5 hours:

Then, Sunday morning I caught a connecting Air France flight from Madrid to Munich. Connecting passengers at CDG airport Terminal 2F... were shunted into the main terminal, on the other side of security. No passport or customs, I could have jumped in a cab and left for Paris. And there were non-EC flights coming in with us...

Arriving in Munich... I scrambled to recall my limited German, not used in 10 years. Besides English, I began the day speaking Spanish, then French, then German... lots of brain shifts. Worse, twice I addressed people here in Russian...

A rental car was arguably a liability, but NASA travel had given me one... I was upgraded to a high-end Opel. Which cruised smoothly at 200 kph on the autobahn. It was fun to get to drive fast again... traffic flow was at 160, roughly 100 mph.

But Germany wasn't all about fastidious hospitals or jolly beerhalls or even space robotics conferences... so I stopped from the airport, for perspective. At Dachau. It was a pretty Sunday afternoon.

Here's the entrance tower:

With its notorious "Work makes you free" iron gate:

Here's a possible LJ icon shot, in a black-humor sense...

And the former crematorium, surrounded by well-fertilised lush vegetation...

On the way out, I saw a juxtaposition that caused me to turn the car around to get a photo... granted, local residents of the town of Dachau may see nothing weird in it, but for me it's a bit like advertising the, say, Auschwitz Burger King. Not appetizing... arguably trivializing.