Posted by Martin Orr on
Friday, 21 July 2006 at 19:21
Wittenberg is a small, quiet town whose claim to fame is as the centre of the Reformation in the 15th century. A few streets of the old town have been preserved as a cobbled pedestrian zone, although there seemed to be a lot of resurfacing going on.
Near one end is the house where Luther lived, now a museum. From starting as a monk, he seems to have become comfortably well-off and certainly well-known and influential. Appearing before the Holy Roman Emperor in his twenties and refusing to recant his beliefs must have been a pretty daunting experience.
At the other end of the street is the Schlosskirche, to whose door Luther pinned his 95 Theses in 1517. The door itself was destroyed in the Seven Years War and has been replaced by a pair of bronze doors with the Latin text of the theses engraved on them. The church was attached to the Saxon Elector's palace, little of which has survived. Its building does however contain the youth hostel, at the top of a dramatic spiral staircase.
Now in: Leipzig
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Martin
Tags
germany, holiday, luther
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 20 July 2006 at 17:36
Since Saturday I have been on holiday in Berlin with my family. Much of the centre of the city is a building site or full of new skyscrapers, following the fall of the Wall. Certainly the square Soviet apartment blocks are not terribly attractive. Apart from a few 18th-19th century cathedrals and museums, the history that you see is very much dominated by the Cold War. Evidence of the Nazis has largely been swept away, such as the completely unmarked car park which now stands above the bunker where Hitler shot himself. Nearby is the new, and somewhat peculiar, Jewish Memorial, a large square covered in concrete blocks which range from 50cm to 5m high.
The line where the Wall ran, back and forth across the middle of the city, is usually not obvious; it ran close past then-existing buildings as well as new ones. We saw one piece which has been preserved as well as a museum about the Wall, escape attempts and non-violent protest.
On Tuesday we went to Potsdam just outside Berlin, where the Prussian emperors lived. The Park Sanssouci is huge, but I was surprised by how small the palaces were: only one storey tall and one room deep.
The rest of the family flew home today; until 14th August I am Interrailing in Germany and Italy. Tonight I am in Wittenberg.
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Martin
Tags
germany, holiday
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 19 January 2006 at 08:26
Well I'm now back in Cambridge. Lectures start again today, and I have my first supervision (left over from last term). Between leaving Belfast on Wednesday and getting to Cambridge on Saturday, I spent several days staying with my aunt in Hove (near Brighton). During this time I rode up and down the south coast by railway, and visited Stonehenge, Salisbury, Chichester, Bosham, Portsmouth, Brighton and Fishbourne.
A few photos are at http://www.martinorr.name/2006/South
On Monday I went to visit our IOI guide, Beata. She and her friend Marzena are working in a cafe in Bracknell. They are both enjoying living in England and clearly it is financially worth coming here: the minimum wage is five times what it is in Poland, rent costs four times as much, food up to twice as much and other things are of comparable price. Marcin, a friend in college with Polish parents, reckons that the difference in prices is greater than that but that it would still be possible to save considerably more in the UK than in Poland.
Full Term started on Tuesday with a college test on last term's work. I came top out of the people who did the test, although one of the three Maths Directors of Studies did not get his students to take the test; and by an alphabetical coincidence that includes five of the seven former IMO team members (four UK, one Ireland, one Greece and one Vietnam) in the year.
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Martin
Tags
england, holiday, ioi, tripos