On Sunday it got as German as it can get in Michigan - we visited Frankenmuth. That’s a small town about an hour and a half north of Royal Oak that was founded by German settlers in 1845. The whole town is basically a simulation of Bavaria including the architecture and the traditions they maintain.

One thing there that’s not too German is Bronner’s - The worlds largest Christmas store.

That was our first stop and the size of the store was truly amazing. Even though I wouldn’t like to have even one of their items in my apartment it was very interesting to browse through (parts of) their selection. Below here you can see about half of section 8.

Around the area you can see quite a lot of water towers - something we don’t really have in Germany. Most of them look like the ones in Sim City (where they magically generate water out of thin air). I assume that here they are used to have water during power outages.

One of the larger towers is standing in Birmingham and fascinated me when I passed by. One evening, I stopped and took pictures of this tower while it was already completely dark. I should’ve brought a tripod but I’m surprised that I managed to hold the camera quite steady.

Last Saturday Tigran, Darren and myself drove to Hamtramck to get some Polish food. Hamtramck (pronounced “Ham-tram-ack”) is so broke that it can’t even afford the third vowel. Another possibility is that they have a majority of C developers who voted for Hmtrmck when finding a name for the city and in the end they all compromised on having at least two vowels.

We went to the Polish Village Café, had some beer and listened to the guitar and violin players. I had the Polish plate with a little bit of everything and it tasted amazing. I think I never had Polish food before and this was very close to what I would call traditional food from my region. It included sausage that tasted like Krakauer, mashed potatoes, Sauerkraut and something similar to a Kohlroulade (with Ketchup).

After a breakfast coffee at the awesome Bean & Leaf Café I went to the Sunday flea market again. This time, to my surprise, I found some German items for sale. The first one I noticed was this helmet of the Freiwillige Feuerwehr. Kronberg is very close to Frankfurt and from the looks of the helmet it could be from the 40s or 50s.

Then I found this record here which I think is kind of disturbing. To me vinyl records are something one would listen to for relaxation and I think I never saw a documentary vinyl disk before. It’s weird to imagine somebody having a nice cup of coffee on a Sunday afternoon and listening to “Hitler’s inferno vol. 2”.

Last weekend I spent the day driving around the city to explore some interesting places. My first stop was at the Heidelberg Project which is a neat alternative art installation in Detroit. Everything there was partially covered with snow which made it quite interesting.

Thanks to the sunlight and the white snow I was able to test the electronic shutter of my X-T1 that came with the last firmware update (thanks, Fuji <3). You can configure it that when the physical limit of the mechanical shutter is reached at 1/4000 it automatically switches to the electronic shutter that can go up to 1/32000. So no need for an ND filter when shooting with open aperture in bright sunlight. That’s pretty awesome.

Walking through the city I also took some pictures of the remarkable architecture.

The city often shows hard contrasts between older (or older looking) buildings and very modern architecture.

I enjoyed looking at all the skyscrapers and to wonder about the details of the architecture. What drives me crazy, though, is that these otherwise perfect and symmetrical buildings often have small flaws which nobody seems to fix. I mean what’s going on with that window on the top level of the tower below? Could somebody please fix that immediately?

I spent the last few days before Christmas in New York and I had an awesome time. It started with mixed feelings with regards to the city but looking back I had a lot of fun. Maybe it just takes some time to appreciate this crazy city.

I took a plane from Detroit to the LaGuardia airport that got delayed for 3.5 hours before even starting. When I finally arrived, I was standing on a ugly and dirty airport without proper public transport connections. After talking to multiple people, I learned that there are bus lines connecting the airport to the subway network. I jumped on a bus that then got stopped after a few minutes and searched by the police for an elderly women with Alzheimer that got lost somewhere at the airport. When I arrived in Manhattan I got hit by the noise and busyness of the city. Finally at the hotel I was pretty exhausted and done for the day. I guess I could’ve known that beforehand because there are some clear hints in the Wikipedia article about the airport:

After the last visit to the farmers market I didn’t have very high expectations when I went there again last Sunday morning to visit the weekly flea market. I was very surprised when I arrived because the place was packed with dozens of sellers and quite a lot of visitors. It was fun to wander around for an hour or so not only because flea markets are fun in general but especially because the things that were sold can tell a lot about the history of the country. I saw some space travel toys from the 60s and one seller even had three Yashicas identical to mine. It was really fun and I’ll come back for sure.

Americans take sports pretty serious, it seems. Football, college football, hockey, baseball and basketball are the most popular sports here and they are watched very often. Many of the bars have TVs and if there is a football game, they are definitely showing it. I’ve got the feeling that you can watch football 24/7 here, if you want to. I planned to watch all the different local teams at least once during my stay here. This week I was surprised that I can maybe achieve that pretty fast as I got invited to both a Red Wings (hockey) and a Pistons (basketball) game. On Tuesday my colleagues and I were invited to the Joe Louis Arena to see the Red Wings play. The arena is named after the black Detroit boxer who back in the days beat up Nazi Germany in a fight that became very popular. They played against the Florida Panthers and unfortunately the Red Wings lost in a game that was still pretty interesting. Especially the atmosphere in the arena was great.

Driving through the area during the last months I noticed some very interesting buildings. Today I spent some time to drive there again and take some pictures. Most churches back in Europe are from the Middle Ages and have a very similar (and to me rather boring) style. Therefore it is very nice to see a different architecture of religious buildings here.

Temple Beth El built in 1973: