Back from the trip!

What a great weekend!

One day and 750 km (~ 470 miles) after I left my home I returned and I had a great time. Here’s a list of all the places we went to. We had to cut three stations because of lack of time but we found one place that we didn’t plan on going to.

February 18th:
Diekirch, Luxembourg (National Military History Museum)
St. Vith, Belgium
Baugnez, Belgium (Baugnez 44 Museum)
Bastogne, Belgium (101 Airborne Museum)
Sedan, France
Reims, France

February 19th:
Reims, France (Cathedral, Museum of the Surrender)
Épernay, France
Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France (American Military Cemetery)
Vauquois, France
Brabant-sur-Meuse, France (German Military Cemetery)
Verdun, France (Fort Douaumont, Ossuary)
Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial, Val du Scheid, Luxembourg

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Tour d’histoire militaire

I had this idea a long time ago but never made it happen until this week: A military history tour through Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

Europe, especially the BeNeLux countries, France and Germany, is heaven for military historians. Both world wars and many other wars happened here. There are also many places you can see, visit, explore and most of these places are accompanied by museums.

Earlier this week I decided to do this trip, no matter what happens. The previous week was kinda crappy and I needed a timeout. I asked one of my best friends, who is also interested in history, to join and he was in. I’m really looking forward to this trip.

Gonna charge the cameras, pack my stuff, do some research, find out the addresses for all the places and then tomorrow morning we’ll head out.


View Larger Map

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Whitney Houston and the military

Whitney Houston is dead. Her singing career was pretty much dead before but it’s still quite shocking that she died that young. Just 48 years old. But I’m not surprised at all because she was a huge addict.

Not even a day later there were dozens of posts on facebook where people degraded her career and compared her death to the ones of military service members. Right or wrong?

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Germany just missed the hattrick…

Too bad, too bad… New England’s Sebastian Vollmer could have been the third German to win a major US-championship since June 2011.   But last Sunday wasn’t the day for the Patriots…

Barton Silverman/The New York Times

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I’m better than your kids!

Papp of the Week

While I’m watching retarded shows on TV where people embarrass themselves in front of the whole nation for 1,500 € I thought I share the latest “Papp of the Week”. I’d like to thank my former USAFE co-worker Mr. C. Murphy for this wonderful discovery.

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Sick of football… for now

Baseball season is getting closer and closer and I can’t wait! Then I have a reason to stop watching football and concentrate on following baseball. Saturday I relived most of Grantland’s Brian Phillips’ thoughts on “Soccer”. It was horrible. Tragic. A huge disappointment.

It started so good. Know the feeling when something hasn’t even begun and you know it will be great? I had that feeling. When I walked up the stands and heard the music (Bläck Fööss – Du bes die Stadt) they were playing I was getting really excited. Then the hymn of the club (Höhner – Mer Stonn zo dir) and if it didn’t happen already I get the creeps because it’s an amazing thing to hear 50,000 people chanting and waving their scarves during that song. And even after song when the game is on the fans continue and it’s even more amazing. I love it. I love to go that place. I have great memories of the RheinEnergie Stadion and I know I can’t stop returning and paying money (where I sit I usually pay 37€) for it.

The game begins and it took Cologne three minutes to score the first goal. They played excellent! At least for the first 20 minutes.

An ugly game. It’s the worst thing for a fan to see an ugly game. A 0-0 can be good, although a goal is always better but the way both teams played was an insult to football. Both teams made lots of mistakes, stupid mistakes that can easily be avoided by actually playing the game it is supposed to be. DO NOT pass the ball to the players of the other team or if there are some players waiting for you to pass the ball to them you SHOULD NOT pass the ball to the player who is covered by two defenders. Oh, and if there is a defender you SHOULD NOT try and run against him. In the first 20 minutes I thought that winning this game seems realistic, after the first half I thought that we can be happy with a tie and then when Schalke scored the equalizer I knew we will lose.

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40 days… until baseball!

40 days

Red Sox - wikimedia.org

40 days until Spring Training begins. 73 days until the season opener against Detroit. 81 days until the home opener against Tampa.

That’s how long it will take until we see how the Red Sox do this season. Red Sox Nation will be excited to see how the team changed, how Ben Cherington and Bobby Valentine do, after Theo Epstein and Terry Francona left the club.

I dunno that much about Ben Cherington but the situation that will come up is comparable to the fate of Michael Rensing after succeeding Oliver Kahn as goalie for the FC Bayern Munich. Oliver Kahn was a goalie legend. People called him “Titan”. He played in 781 matches for Karlsruhe and Munich and played 86 games for Germany. He won the national championship eight times, the national cup six times, the UEFA Cup (Europa League) and the UEFA Champions League. He became the best goalkeeper of almost everything in his career. Then came Michael Rensing. Backup goalie, big prospect, had to wait forever until he moved up. In 2008/09 he became the #1. He played 37 games but at some point he got demoted to #2. In 2009/10 the new coach gave him a chance but he only made seven appearances.

Rensing was without a job for a half year, didn’t play for almost a year and then signed with Cologne where he became a great and #3 on the Goalie of the Year votings.

What I want to show is that it’s hard to fill successful people’s shoes. Rensing never was a bad goalie but couldn’t replace Kahn that suddenly. He got the chance in Cologne and is playing fabulous. Cherington has been with the Red Sox since 1999 and (I hope) had time to learn from Theo.

Bobby Valentine already has a good standing already but I bet once the Sox have a cold streak people will compare him to Tito. Or even now. I’ve heard friends mentioning that Valentine’s managing career hasn’t been that successful, not even close to Francona’s. Well, hold on. First of all it were the Rangers. From 1972 until 1985 they had five winning seasons. From 1986 until 1991 he had three winning seasons. Francona’s time in Philly didn’t include a winning season at all.

After a stop in Japan, where he did an excellent job, “Bobby V” joined the Mets and did good, even making it to the World Series against the Yankees in 2000.

Bobby Valentine and Ben Cherington deserve a chance.

Cherington worked on the roster trying to avoid the luxury tax and making room for a good rotation. Recently they traded SS Marco Scutaro to have some room for Roy Oswalt. I had to look him up as I’m not that much of a MLB expert and can’t keep track of all teams and players and what I saw wasn’t too bad. A career ERA of 3.21 and an average record of 16-10 looks good. His last season didn’t but maybe that was just an exception. He just needs to stay healthy. We also have other options regarding relievers and starters. Daniel Bard and Alfredo Aceves are still options for starters, although I think that Bard should stay as a reliever. Vincente Padilla might have a chance to get in the rotation. Andrew Bailey replaces Jonathan Papelbon and there are still a few more pitchers we can put in.

But who is gonna be on short? Scutaro’s backup, Jed Lowrie, got traded to the Houston Astros. That leaves us to Mike Aviles, Nick Punto and Julio Iglesias are options and should be given a chance.

Well, it’s still time until Spring Training begins… 40 days.

Flipping through the news

Papp of the Week

Flipboard it is! It’s a free app I found a couple weeks ago and it became one of my everyday tools. While I use it for news and sports updates only I read about people who use it as the primary facebook and twitter app.

The app is quite simple. Install, start, select a category and add the channels, feeds, boards or whatever you want to call it (I’ll call it channel for now). Flipboard offers channels that cover all publishers of a category or you just pick single publishers. If you don’t like the selection go and search for it! If you search for “mpitsch.com” you’ll see my inactive tumblr page, tweets mentioning the URL and RSS feeds. Just watch out when you selected a bunch of channels and want to add a few more. Don’t select channels you already have as duplicates could appear.

The design is great and whoever came up with it should get 100 years of free Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. It’s simple and it looks fun because all you have to do is to flip the pages. Just like a flipboard… Guess where the name comes from! Haha… Funny indeed. The first page shows a big box with an image for “Cover Stories” and it’s a mix of the latest updates. Two smaller boxes underneath the bigger one showing whatever you selected. You can sort the channels by dragging them in the “Your Flipboard” options. The pages are limited to four pages though so page 2 to 4 show up to six smaller boxes and if you have more than 20 channels you have to select “more” on the last page. Too bad. Once you selected a channel you can flip through the headlines. Select a headline and you get to the article where you can continue to flip through the content. I’m this app rocks on iPad…

flipboard.com

 

Herrooo 2012!

I’m back from my fantastic leave and I managed to bring my power cord to work! Yay! Last week I forgot it at home and couldn’t write. Actually I could have but I wasn’t in the mood to use the iPhone app.

First of all: Air Canada is a good airline to fly with. I had a great flight! Had enough legroom in the plane and I didn’t need the extra legroom for $130. Not sure if it was that much more than the other airlines I traveled with before but I sat well. My plan to finish my book failed because I watched movies, read a little bit and slept for a little while. Surprisingly the food was excellent. Of course not as good as a restaurant but compared to other airlines this was superb! Not like Continental where I basically ate the desserts and the breakfast snack.

I landed a bit too late in Montreal and had to wait a few hours for the next flight but everything went well and in Boston my girlfriend and I had enough time to grab something to eat and take an express bus up north to spend Christmas with her parents.

2011 was the best Christmas I had in a while. While getting used to spend Christmas with your family at home and maybe forget the importance of being together with them I got reminded that it’s a very important season.

But I enjoyed the “post-Christmas” time as well. Boston is awesome and every time I come to Boston it amazes me. It’s beautiful and I almost feel more comfortable than in Cologne (which means a lot). Especially the historic buildings in the middle of the city, for example the Granary Burying Ground where famous people like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock are buried. Or, as shown below the Old South Meeting House.

Old South Meeting House

Just too bad I didn’t see any sports games this time. It’s Winter so I wasn’t able to see some baseball (last time in July I went to a game but against my expectations they started the game after the rain delay… and we were back in the apartment already…). The Boston Bruins just had an away game and the Celtics… I’m just not that much into basketball. But next trip is planned for July and I’m sure Fenway Park will have an excited visitor again. For some reason I’m really excited for the new season. Really excited to see how the Red Sox will do and I didn’t think I’m gonna be that excited in January already. For the past couple days I’ve been following ESPN and the Red Sox site. By accident I noticed that I finished 5th out of 20 in the past season’s fantasy baseball league that a former co-worker organized. Didn’t really follow it last year so I worked on my team every other week. Thinking about doing that again, especially after watching Season 3 of The League, hrhrhr!

On January 2nd it was time to say goodbye. It’s always sad to leave and it really stinks to know that you won’t see each other, except via Skype on the weekends, for four months. The longest time was when I was in Hamburg for a couple months. Didn’t see each other for almost five months and we didn’t even have Skype on most of the weekends. I’m really glad that both of us are patient people and willing to go through it.

 

This time it’s Canada!

Friday it’s time again to get on a plane and fly over the Atlantic to visit my girlfriend and spend Christmas and New Years!

It was quite a pain in the ass to get the ticket as I had to check with the company I do my intern at and couldn’t book before but it all went well. Then I did a mistake with the booking but everything is fine and Friday I’ll get on a Air Canada Airbus 330-300 to fly to Boston with a stop in Montreal, Canada. The flight from Montreal to Boston is with a Canadair Regional Jet 200 and I’m quite excited, to be honest.

The flight back to Germany will be with a Boeing 737-700 from Boston to Newark and to Frankfurt with a Boeing 757-200.  Both planes operated by Continental. I’m really excited as I used different airlines and airports every time since I visited the States from 2008 on.

1. US Airways: Frankfurt – Philadelphia – Boston – Philadelphia Frankfurt

2. Air Iberia: Frankfurt – Madrid – Boston – Madrid – Frankfurt

3. Iceland Air: Frankfurt - Reykjavík – Boston - Reykjavík – Frankfurt

4. British Airways/American Airlines: Luxembourg – London Heathrow – Boston – London Heathrow – Luxembourg

5. Air Canada/Continental: Frankfurt – Montreal – Boston – Newark – Frankfurt

By the way, this is just the chronological order of my flights from old to latest. Air Iberia was the worst regarding flying, London Heathrow was the worst airport and the best tour was with Iceland Air.

I love flying but when I wanted to reserve the seats I noticed that I need to pay $109-$129 for extra leg room. Now I’m about 6’2” tall and it sucks a little bit. In March, just a week before I left to the States again, a hip pointer incurred during PT made flying very painful and some extra leg room would have been so amazing…

And because I love flying, the amazing things like looking out of a window and see some cool stuff or the annoying things like little screaming children, my Papp of the Week will be TheOatmeal.com

Papp of the Week

It’s one of the funniest pages I’ve seen in the past couple years. Primarily I use this site for the comics because they are hilarious but the creator, Matthew Inman, does a fine job with quizzes and his blog as well. If you like one of the comics you can buy them as posters or, especially for Christmas, you can buy greeting cards from the shop as well.

Here are some examples, all with flying ;) Just click on the image and get directed to the comic!

If I shouldn’t post again for this year I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah or whatever you celebrate. Plus a Happy New Year! Stay safe and don’t kill yourself with fireworks! Fire and alcohol are dangerous together ;)

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