Last post with photos from my early-March visit to Schloss Ahrensburg (the Castle at Ahrensburg). Including, for those interested, photos of an explanation of this castle’s links to the Atlantic slave trade, and a timeline with some historic events and visits.
At the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, one follows those white curvey white lines of paving stones to go through the high entryway next to the downward spiral slide, then walks through one of the rotating glass doors below to enter the indoor space, which when we visited early last month was hosting one of the most captivating exhibits I’ve ever experienced, called “Amazonia.” (Along with a personally-moving photo exhibit from a gay NYC artist active in the 1970s and 1980s, and an exhibit on the long history of commercial sex work which, for me, was actually the least captivating of the three.)
This time of year, I tend to accumulate a lot of lovely small-wonder-worthy photos, so we’ll be dedicating the next set of posts to such macro beauty :-). Starting with these from a lovely late-Feb& early-March weekend in northern Germany.
During my lovely bike holiday in Gelderland last year, I showed you many parts of this photo from ground level. I took this photo during a December flight from Amsterdam to Doha (en route to Bangladesh, for the trip from which you’re still seeing Longest Beach photos, fyi), when I noticed the clouds had cleared enough to show me: from the left to center, the first branches of the Rhine after it enters NL (further explanations in last year’s post), and at the bottom some of the hilly landscapes of the Veluwe Zoom national park, of which we showed many posts including this one, last year. In the gallery below is a zoomed-in view that shows a bit more detail of the hilly park landscapes. Rest of the photos are all from the NL and DE parts of that flight.
No shortage of bridges at Schloss Ahrensburg, given that the castle itself is an island within an island. To see what I mean, enlarge the castle photo below – if you’re on computer or full view, it’s the left photo in the circular gallery below; if on a plain phone view, it’s the next photo.
The castle at Ahrensburg, outside Hamburg, was completed in 1585 during the hundreds of years in which most of what’s now the German State of Schleswig-Holstein was Danish. At least one Danish king visited this place in the 1700s at some point. It was the very first rather-legitimate nobility-related castle I saw with my own eyes, back when I spent a year living nearby before college. Oddly enough, I never went inside, never even entered the gardens and grounds to explore, ’til last weekend when I was back for a longer visit than I’ve managed in recent years. If you’re in large-screen or full-view mode, you’ll see three round photos in a row below; the one in the middle was taken from the ground-floor turret room front left in the photo above, looking inwards, and if you enlarge, you’ll see areas where recent renovations uncovered some centuries-old paining, which they’ve tried to match a bit to show what the old colors would have been when fresh.
(so much world, so little time....) 