Well it's now Day 8 and Mia was the first to ask "when are we going back to Adelaide?". This comes a little earlier than we'd expected. It may have been a plead for more routine, as we've just visited 5 families in as many days.
Our friends have been so welcoming, filling our shelves, fridges and cupboards with more home-comforts than we could ever have hoped for. Mia restricted her diet to bread and plain pasta today! And Stephanie is supplementing her diet with far too many Haribo gummibaerchen!
We spent half a day at the fascinating Zeche Zollverein (coal mine) Museum. It's an ominous, rectangular red brick building 38m high and twice as long, where coal was once cleaned and sorted. To enter the building you must catch an escalator up to the 5th floor inside a black square tube with fluorescent orange steps called the A14 Kohlenwasche... Inside were 4 floors displaying the Ruhr's history - starting with the woolly mammoth 300M years ago. The displays were brilliant - the girls didnt lose interest with over 3 hours of history! Hubertus of course liked the fact that the museum emphasised the transient nature of the coal and steel industries - merely a firey burst in an otherwise much longer and more complex history.
We spent half a day at the fascinating Zeche Zollverein (coal mine) Museum. It's an ominous, rectangular red brick building 38m high and twice as long, where coal was once cleaned and sorted. To enter the building you must catch an escalator up to the 5th floor inside a black square tube with fluorescent orange steps called the A14 Kohlenwasche... Inside were 4 floors displaying the Ruhr's history - starting with the woolly mammoth 300M years ago. The displays were brilliant - the girls didnt lose interest with over 3 hours of history! Hubertus of course liked the fact that the museum emphasised the transient nature of the coal and steel industries - merely a firey burst in an otherwise much longer and more complex history.
On Sunday the 18th July we joined 3 million fellow citizens of the Ruhr in a cultural event called Still-Leben ("quiet life") on the A40 Autobahn. The freeway was closed to cars and people were invited to join a breakfast on the longest table in the world - 60km long! We still had traffic jams (Fahrradstau und Fussgaengerstau aber kein Automarmalade!!) afterall it is the most densely populated region in Europe!
Mummy forgot to say I burnt my mouth with hot mustard.
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