snow immersion.
we finally made it to december, yay! i know, november was quite the month and i probably needed too much time for wrapping it up. but life continuously gets in the way, and when only posting like once in a week, it adds up. anyway, december's going to be handled rather quickly, i bundled up all the photos i shot in that last month of 2017 and will post it in one go! somehow i end up never really shooting much in december - and winter in general - maybe because i'm not a big winter lover. also, it is the most stressful time of the year for me ( probably for everybody in the world lol ) and it's also often too cold and too grey to actually go out and see something ( unless it snows or you are visiting places in the dark, because that seems worthwhile enough for me to take photos of :P ).
just like that day in early december when i visited my parents on a short whim and my mom and i ventured out to the unstrut river for a little walk in the snow. it was heavily snowing during our walk and we ended up being rather soaked through - but it was worth it. walking around while being in the middle of a snow flurry is quite a thing - everything is kind of mute, no one's outside and the world is quiet. it is pure solitude you get to experience, a good kind, and it's kind of magical.
i love when trees turn into skeletons in winter, especially when snow covers their branches.
dike walking. it really looks like the flurry turned into a storm here :D
ah, the serenity of snow.
passing the watergate.
the gate to the canoe club.
the canoe canal. okay, by now it REALLY was a little snow storm ^^;
i loved how icy the whole scenery looked. the unstrut river has this cool blue-ish colour going on that you only associate with deep ocean water.
we needed a warm-up, so we headed to the little christmas market of sömmerda. drank some mulled wine & listened to a cheesy christmas carol guy. 
after some time we decided to go back home as we couldn't fathom the cold anymore. on our way back i had to get this shot of the pomona sculpture. i love this photo so much, especially the shadow pomona casts on the city wall. she was created by wolfgang dreysse in 2010 and symbolizes the importance of agriculture in the city of sömmerda.
the next few photos were shot on christmas eve. my cousin & his family visited us for the gift giving event & before we opened up all the presents we made a little walk around the village & went to the church to see the annual nativity play. the walk around the village is a tradition whenever we celebrate christmas at home. when my brother & me were small we also always saw the nativity play ( because there had to be a reason to get us out of the house in order to prepare the COMING OF SANTA ), even though our family was never religious. i think back to those times fondly, it was nice to head back home in a sort of festive mood, especially since it was always so freaking cold in the church and there was warm food & christmas gifts awaiting us.
my dad decked out his ernie tree. ( why, yes, ernie from sesame street! )
christmas lights in our street.
rudolph hiding behind bars. even though 'hiding' isn't the best word for this.
i love the twinkling lights of christmas season, it makes winter kind of bearable.
this interesting sculpture is located in front of the public school. the sculptor robert krainhöfner from jena was the creative mind behind it and together with school kids & the local blacksmith manfred klose he forged something very unique. upon closer look ( which i have no proof of, lol ) you can make out signs, various motives & images - all of them linking to the school in one way or another.
the alleylane i photographed in november - now in the darkness.
the beautiful organ inside our church. it was built from 1773 to 1782 by johann friedrich hartung. it's really that old!
the nave of the st. vitus church was built in 1500. but the church itself goes waaaaay back to the mid-12th century. i never quite appreciated the old age of our church when i was small, but this time i kind of was blown away. i haven't been inside this church for at least 15 years and seeing it again, with an older mindset and more knowledge about architecture and history was something else. i could finally see the glorious antiquated beauty in it, when all i ever felt as a child was the emotion of: it's fucking cold inside, get me out of here.
the altar is really, really something for the eye. it's a shame that this beauty of a church is not kept in a very good state, in various corners you can see the paint & walls crumbling. i get that it is an immense financial struggle to upkeep a building like this and i also understand that there's not much of money to work with in our little village, but damn... this could be such a jewel.
on the first day of christmas we spent some time with my older half brother in jena - in the highest building of the city to be exact: the jentower. we hade some really expensive food up here with the longest waiting time i have ever been through ( we sat there for 4 fucking hours - while the people around us were served rather quickly and probably stayed for half the time as us, lol ). the food was absolutely divine, though. just... the waiting time & the service weren't. the experience wasn't really worth the money ( even though the dishes were super delicious - but what counts should be the complete experience, right? right. especially in an expensive restaurant like this. )
well, okay, the experience of seeing jena from way up above was still amazing, though. what a vista!
jena is a medium-sized city in the east of thuringia, known for being one of the oldest university cities of germany, and, probably even more important, for being the center of optical & fine mechanical industry in germany. i don't know if zeiss lenses tell you anything, but if they do, yup, their origins started in jena. carl zeiss is probably the figurehead of jena's world renown. i've never explored jena more deeply, even though i've been here on visit for several occassions. but they were almost all family happenings like birthdays and a funeral, and you don't just quit a family gathering for a city explore, right? especially when your family lives on the outskirts of the city. when i was 14 i went through 2 weeks of internship at the university's archive ( a work i really liked - but did not succeed in applying for :( ) and lived at my half-brother's place while there, but even back then i rarely explored jena. i really want to change that in the future, come what will. it seems like such a cool city, with all the industrial areas around which are connected to lush topography & nature!
looking down the jentower onto the inner city. the tower is 144,4 meters high & was built from 1970 to 1972 ( skyscrapers produced in the GDR? why, yes! ). i remember my dad always calling it 'keksrolle' ( cookie roll ), probably because it looks like the packaging of cookies.
my father has a special connection to jena, he moved here as a teenager for an apprenticeship in mechanics, got to know his first wife here at the tender age of 19 & also produced a child ( my really cool half-brother ). as a child i knew that my dad was married before he met my mom, but i didn't know much else about that part of history. i didn't grow up with my half-brother. it wasn't until i was a teenager that i finally met him. he reached out to my father at a festival in our village ( he was visiting his grandma - who lived in the exact same place as we did, lol, i don't know why we met earlier ). well, they re-connected immediately and began to build a really nice relationship between them. and since that moment my half-brother was in our lives! when i met him he was with his first wife ( ha, continuing my dad's history, lol ) and i thought of both of them as the super coolest people on earth. he had earrings & a mohawk and his ex-wife had really brightly coloured hair with an undercut and i guess i don't need to mention that both of them had immediate impact on me. they ignited my love to punk rock, which lead to my visual kei / j-rock phase and consequently everything alternative subcultures related. i loved them immediately! even though they're both divorced right now ( with my half-brother now being married to a different woman ) i still remember meet-ups with them very fondly. they had a son, too and he's now the most handsome young man of my family ( in my opinion, lol ). i watched him grow up from baby to man, and it's still so strange to me to look at him and remember that little kiddo. my half-brother has 3 more kids now - 2 he had with his new wife and 1 - now a teen, too - she brought into the new marriage ). their children are still young, 3 & 1 year old. i really like his new wife as well, she's got a real knack for interior design. i'm often quite sad that i don't get to see them more often... ah, well.
into the direction of the wöllmisse mountains & lobeda - a city district of jena. you can see the saale river meandering through the city.
the sun made a nice appearance and shone a beautiful light on jena. this is into the direction of the leutra valley. jena is surrounded by hills & mountains and creates a really distinctive recognition value through that.
a look onto jena-west & jena-nord.
the same direction, angled a bit differently. down there you can make out the dome of the planetarium ( with the green roof ) & the botanical garden.
a closer look on jena-west. from up above everything looks like a miniature city.
two buildings catch your eye here: the medieval city hall & hypermodern sonnenhof - which is a living & office complex.
bau 59 ( construction 59 ) was a former research facility of the zeiss company and initially built in 1965 by hans schlag. its post-modernist coating was created in 1993 by rödl & braschel architects.
johannistor ( john's gate ) is the last remaining city gate of medieval jena, dating back to the 13th century. it is part of an old fortification wall ( connecting to the pulverturm - powder tower - which you can glimpse in the background on the right ). on the left you can also peek at some more towers - they belong to church st. john the baptist & the church of peace ( from left to right ).
finally - the jentower - which is part of a structure called neue mitte ( new center ). this mall was built around the tower around 2004. the jentower's architect was hermann henselmann, he was one of GDR's finest.
that sleek cylinder surely is one of a kind and it really amazes me that GDR construction wasn't only plattenbau & socialist realism follies. when you look at that tower, would you think of it as almost 50 years old? to me it looks like it's a construction of the present, a contemporary skyscraper.
and with this last photo of the jentower i conclude the year 2017. yup, finally! i'm sorry it takes me so long to post my adventures, but... well, it is what it is. i will probably always be behind schedule, and by now i don't even care so much anymore. it's nice looking back like half a year and remembering everything from a distance. of course i probably fail to bring back certain details, especially when it's about personal feelings and all this kind, but it's also interesting to me that my brain is not as dead as i sometimes make it out to be. pictures help immensely going back in time and remembering all the places i've been to!
on a last note, i won't be posting for 2 weeks now, since it's finally time for our summer vacation. my family is headed to hungary this year - after a 10 year abstinence? i'm a little divided about how to feel about this, on one hand i'm pretty excited to revisit childhood / teenage memories and how it compares to my adult mind now, but on the other hand the constellation of my family going there as a 4 person menage kind of gives me great anxiety. my brother's joining us this year, and i don't really have the fondest memories of him being part of our vacations. right now, i just hope for the best and will try to work very hard on being more reserved when around him. i'm sure it won't be easy, but maybe it's not going to be as bad as i now make it out to be. trying my very best to compartmentalize & dissociate myself whenever critical triggers might turn up :P wish me luck! and see you all in 2 weeks!
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