i really haven’t been doing very well posting. most days are spent watching the matches in some form or another. yesterday, we went down to the fan fest for costa rica v ecuador and england v trinidad. however, it started raining about 30 minutes into the england match so we went back to the hotel. of course, when we got off the u-bahn at the hotel, it was no longer raining.
the 14th, we went to cologne to check out the cathedral, city and the others went to the chocolate museum. the most interesting bit to me was the mural on the ceiling of the cologne train station. i tooke some pictures, but they’re crap because i don’t have a wide enough lense. addidas has some pictures as well as some of the other stuff. (we did see the huge kahn on the way to the match in munich.) i don’t think the picture is actually painted directly on the ceiling so i suppose it will be gone after the world cup. too bad. even if it is an addidas ad.
the cathedral is supposed to be important because it holds the “relics of the magi“. i’m not saying they aren’t real, but even the supplied story is highly suspect. not surprisingly, the bones and what not haven’t even been carbon-14 dated. regardless, it’s an impressive building. here’s 2 bad pictures. there really wasn’t even space around it to get a full picture with my camera.
of the places we’ve been (not many), it doesn’t seem like there’s a very good job of integrating new buildings with old. there doesn’t seem to be that many old buildings anyway. it may just be the cities we’ve been to (frankfurt, cologne, munich (really only the stadium though)).
we got back in time to watch the germany v poland match. there was a bit of celebration in the streets after germany won. the trains are great. we got up to 300km/h on the way to cologne. it appears that they go a little slower at night.
the 13th, we just went to the fan fest for france v switzerland and brazil v croatia. brazil did what good teams do, win when not at their best. i was a bit disappointed with france. nothing spectacular from either match.
i’m sure other stuff probably happened. maybe i’ll start doing better now that i’m not behind. tomorrow is the big day. we lose and we’re done. hopefully, we can at least have a better showing than the last match. maybe someone will actually show up to play. it’s absolutely time for any player who thinks they are somebody or wants to be somebody to stand up and be counted. yada, yada, yada.
My question to you is: How in the world did they have the vision, guts, and capability to create places like the Cologne Cathedral in 1100? I can’t quite think of the equivalent in today’s time, but it would be something that would take us 100s of years to complete given our current and near-term future abilities. No one has the vision, guts, nor capability to start, much less finish, such a project any longer. Very impressive to me. Oh, wait, Windows might be one of those.
windows is not a good example. cologne was started in 1248. the entire design was finished at that time or whenever before construction started as the vision of one individual (at least from what i understand). windows doesn’t even seem to have a good design now. i would expect a large part of the reason nothing like this gets built now is profit. this was not built for any kind of profit and required most likely a huge amount of money, resources and most likely, slave labor. paying people next to nothing or nothing for back breaking labor is most likely the key to any previous large projects. think transcontinental railroad, pyramids (ignoring any potential alien involvement), hoover dam, probably the panama canal, i’m sure the list could go on forever.
it would also have to be something that isn’t going to have to change for a long time. you couldn’t have a computer program that takes 5 years to write much less 50+ since things are constitently changing.