Friday, October 7, 2011

Home Again: views from Hannover and the Harz Mountains

We're back from our trip! We celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, at reform synogogue services in Hannover. Tonight is Yom Kippur Eve.

We had a wonderful time. Hannover has a "Red Line" walking tour (with guidebook) which was perfect for keeping me busy while Dan was at the conference during the day. I really enjoy this type of walking tour-I always go into all the buildings along the way so it takes me days rather than hours to finish. Here are just a few highlights plus photos from the wonderful trip to the Harz Mountains organized by the Leibniz conference.

This simple and elegant monument in the plaza of the Opera House (right behind the monument) is the Hannover Holocaust Memorial.
It is the most powerful Holocaust Memorial I have ever seen-each person's name, age or date of birth and place and date of death is inscribed on the sloping sides. They finally have a gravestone.
I think I went to every museum in Hannover-large and small. Here are just two of the wonderful things I saw that I wanted to share: a pair of antique dolls ( taken through the glass case).
Most evenings we went out to dinner with other conference participants-it was nice to finally meet many people that I've heard Dan talk about for years. We did go to the opera one night (The Marriage of Figaro) and this is the door knob of the Opera House! Pretty cool!
Saturday, the conference organized a trip to the Harz Mountains (bird seed, anyone?). I've discovered that the Harz Mountains are really a plateau of rolling hills and
beautiful forests.
We made a friend...isn't he gorgeous!
The trip was organized around Leibniz, of course. Besides math and philosophy, he was interested in industry and general problem solving. The silver mines in the Harz Mountains had terrible problems with water in the mines...the solution was to use water wheels to run the pumps to get the water out! Leibniz thought he had a better way-windmills-or at least a closed water system that then utilized the water pumped from the mines to run the water wheels. It wasn't actually put into practice at the mine he worked with but both were later used at another mine.

We saw a model of a water wheel...
sluice and pump house.
And a real water wheel...look at the size of it!
How did they get enough water to run the water wheels? They dug channels to bring water from higher, more distant mountains-these covered miles and miles-
and they created reservoirs to collect the water from local streams and creeks-creating lastingly beautiful places.
Now that we're back, Tuesdays Tomes will resume-I definitely had no time to read on our trip!

2 comments:

Karen - Quilts...etc. said...

what a wonderful trip you had. That is good you had things to keep you busy when hubby was in meetings.
Karen
http://karensquilting.com/blog/

Elaine/Muddling Through said...

Beautiful photos, Miri! I especially like the antique dolls and the opera house door handle.