Travelog for: Luc Zeke

Today, we, that is us toyvoyagers and prospective travellers, welcomed a new visitor, Mr Wilson.

Today, new ToyVoyager tags arrived. We gathered around them with the prospective travellers...  They looked excited... Who will be chosen to go on an exciting adventure around the world?

Today is also the day Clyde leaves for pastures new. Travel safely.

Mummy and us welcomed a new toyvoyager to stay.

His name is KalliHH

Mummy had put in some dried fruit for soaking in brandy the other day.

Today, we will make the Christmas cake.

The butter and sugar is being creamed.

Eggs were added.

Flour, spices, the fruit, nuts and treacle also get added.

The cake will take 4 hours in the oven, after our bedtimes. Maybe we'll have a photo with it when the cake is fed some more brandy.

Mummy is doing this jigsaw puzzle.

She isn't quite finished yet...

I wonder if she'll finish by the time I arrive at a new home.... She's letting me travel. I'm a lucky penguin.

For travel, I shall hop back into my egg. Farewell ToyVoyagers...

Heeeey mummy!
I arrived in Germany today. It was soooooooo cold outside and when I had to wait in the letterbox. It must have been around 7 pm or something when I was grabbed out of the letterbox. I was soooo excited because I hearded voices, but I couldn't understand what they were saying. Thank god I hopped back into my egg before I started my journey. I was really scared, especially because there were so many different voices around me...

There was a sound like someone was touching the envelope with crawls. I so wished you were with me at that point.

Suddenly my home for the past days got ripped off and there was this fluffy face of a bear looking at me!!

But actually he was very nice, he just wanted to help me out... Then I finally was brave enough to hop out of my egg.

I was right, there were many other toys around me, but they were all very nice and said hello and introduced themselfs.


Liza says a huge thank you for the christmas card! She was very happy when I got it out.

But at the same time it was very sad because two of the TVs are leaving tomorrow morning. Well, I'm happy for them because they get to see some new places, but I didn't get a chance to get to know them... I said goodbye to them... But now I will enjoy my first evening in cold Germany with lots of german christmas food

Hey mum!
Merry christmas! It's the 24th so in Germany everybody's busy and hectic, because it's "Heiligabend". My host and her bf are staying at home and handing out the presents, visiting his family and tomorrow they'll be visiting Lizas parents, so I'll probably get to see a bit of Mettmann then.
Today was the day to decorate the christmas tree and we, so Pink Lady, Sanji and me, we allowed to help!

The lights first... Don't they look lovely?

And then the christmas bells! They're red, blue and white this year. A bit of UK feeling, huh? I love it!




(This is me and Sanji )

Hope you're having a nice christmas, mum!
I miss you!

Hallo!
Wie geht es dir? (See, I already learned some German. It means "How are you?". Cool, huh?).
Today Liz took us all to work with her. As it's the week between Christmas and New Years Eve, there's isn't much to do so no one minded that we were there.
Well, Liz is doing an apprenticeship as media designer in a little printing company. They have a HP Indigo, on which they print stuff like cards and brochures and flyers and anything that can be printing but is not bigger than A3. They also have some broadsheet printers, which are used to print any kinds of materials for inner and outer use e.g. canvas, posters, flags and so on. I was pretty excited!

This is me with PinkLady and Sanji on the desk in the office.  Liz showed us around first.

This is one of the broadsheet printers. It's used to print posters and roll-ups. As you can see, they print on roles, not on single sheets. So they have roles in different widths for different prints and with different materials on the roles for every single need. It's pretty cool.

Then there is this room with foiles. They have a printer, which can also cut folies for example for cars or windows. This is me with the different folies!
We got a little further and there we got to the processing department. This is where the printed stuff is made into the finale product.

This is me and Sanji at the cutting machine. I was a little scared to stand right under the cutting bar, but Liz said that I don't have to worry because it won't fall down unless someone pushes the buttons. But we got on pretty quick, luckily!

Here's just a variaty of the different kinds of paper they can print on. It's impressive I think. They have different kinds of paper e.g. extra white, or glossy, or structure and then they have the different kinds in different weights like 90g/m2 or 250 g/m2. Liz tried to explain why people need different weights, but I didn't really get it. Whatever.
They also have to send the stuff they print to the costumer and if one orders a lot, there are many cartons. I tried to hide but Liz got me...


In another room there was this scary thing. Liz said they use it to press folies on tshirts. So you can for example cut a motive on the already mentioned printer or you can also print a picture on a special folie and then press it onto a tshirt. If we find a shirt for me, maybe I'll get my own shirt.

These are wiro-o bindings. They are used for booklets. You can also have your own notebooks or college blocks made there if you want. They have then in different colors and also in different sizes, because the size depends on how many sheets there are.

After the tour we were allowed to try and work with the drawing table, Liz used for work.

It was pretty funny. It was really like drawing on a paper, but just on the Mac.

But it was fun nevertheless.

It was pretty cool to see where Liz is going when she leaves us in the morning.

Bye bye!

Hey mum!
It's New Years Eve! In German it is called "Silvester". In 335 Silvester I. dies on December 31st. He was pope from 314 until his death in 335. So the origin of the name is Saint Sylvester's Day in the Roman Catholic Church.
So we spent the day with Liz and her family. They all meet at one house and just enjoy the evening with loads of food and some games, until it's 12 am and the new year is calling.
I'll just show you the pictures of the evening. There isn't much to say about the pictures.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I just wanted to show you the pictures of me with the fireworks. You can't really see me but otherwise you wouldn't have been able to see the fireworks... It was reeeeeeeelly loud, but it looked so lovely!!
So, happy new 2012

Hey!
Today we visited a new city with our host. We went to Oberhausen, which is also located in the Ruhr area between Duisburg and Essen. Our host wanted to watch the musical Cats (which she didn't in the end, but we didn't know when we were going there). Cats is - which is obvious by the name - about cats. It is a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Long story short, it's all about the Jellicle Ball and who will be chosen to go to the Heavyside Layer and start a new Jellicle life. But, well, in the end we didn't get to see it... But Liz has the DVD of a London production at home, so we'll probably be watching this any time.
So, well... We went to Oberhausen. Before going to the CATS theatre/tent (it's a tent-tour), our host wanted to walk through the CentrO a little, because it was Sunday opening. The CentrO is a shopping mall, which also houses attractions such as a children's theme park and a water-lined boulevard with restaurants and pubs. Many shopping malls in Germany were build along the lines of the CentrO, because it made Oberhausen from a industry-based to a services-based economy.
When we arrived there, it was already getting dark. As mentioned, the CentrO has a water-lines boulevard, which looked lovely in the dark with the light reflections on the water.

This is me with Sanji and Hoppsi in front of one of the restaurants there.
Inside the CentrO there were soooooo many people. I've rarely seen such a crowded place - especially on a Sunday afternoon.
It looked very pretty inside the CentrO. It was just a little weird, because they still had all their christmas decoration on everywhere, although we already had Epiphany two days before and my host already undecorated everything. But on the other hand it was all so shiny and lovely...

Well, because of all those people we didn't stay inside very long... Just did some window-shopping and made our way to the CATS theatre. On our way there we passed the Metronom theatre. Unlike the CATS tent, this theatre is there all the time, with changing musicals. Since October 2011, the musical Dirty Dancing is played there (before that, Wicked was there for I guess 2 or 3 years...). I guess I don't have to summarize the plot...? We all know the movie about Johnny and Baby and their amazing dancing scene in the end.

You see, it looked very pink, because of the logo. Yeah, as we didn't watch CATS in the end, we just went back home, but it was nice anyway to be in a new city!

Wow, today was really exciting!
It's Friday, which means school for my host. She's going to school in Düsseldorf, which is the capital city of North Rhine-Westfalia, and as Hoppsi, the newest member of our group, has a mission to visit all 16 capital cities of Germany, we were all taken to Düsseldorf today for a bit of sightseeing.
Her school is located in Bilk, which is a pretty popular part of Düsseldorf, because the Heinrich-Heine-University is also located there. So after school we went to the K21 first. On our way there, we passed a playground, where we luckily stopped, so that me, Hoppsi and Sanji can have some fun.

So, back to our way to the K21.

The K21 ist the "Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen", so the art collection of North Rhine-Westfalia. There are two buildings, but we just visited the K21 in the Ständehaus. It's called K21, because in there you can see art (Kunst=K) of the 21st century. The Ständehaus was erected in a neo-Renaissance style by architect Julius Raschdorff between 1876 and 1880.

In the garden around the K21 is a piece of art. It's called "Zwischenräume" (gaps) and was made by an artists called Alf Lechner. Well, I don't know what it's supposed to mean, but it looked nice, so we took a picture with it ^^

We didn't get it the K21, because Liz wasn't sure if taking pictures is allowed inside and it would've taken very long to see everything and then there wouldn't have been much time left for sightseeing.
So we made our way along the lake to the tram.

Lovely, isn't it?

On the picture you can already see something, that is a landmark of Düsseldorf. You can see the Rheinturm (TV tower) from almost everywhere in the city, because it's huuuuuuge! We googled it's height - 240.50 m/789 ft). But we will get there
So when we got to the tram, we went to the Landtag(State parliament), which is also in Bilk, but easiert and quicker to reach by tram. At the station is the "Apollo" theatre, which is a varieté and a circus.

Well, that's what Liz said. But tickets are pretty expensive so we won't get to see it.

This is me in front of the Landtag.
Right next to it is the Rheinturm.

You can also get up there, but it was pretty full and we didn't want to wait that long. Liz said, that we will try it again, when she has a day off from school in a few weeks, so we can get there earlier.
On your way to the Hafen (harbour) we passed the WDR.

It's the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, which means West German Broadcasting. The WDR was created in 1955, when the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (so the broadcast of north west Germany) was split into Norddeutscher Rundfunk (so the broadcast for north Germany) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (broadcast for west Germany). WDR began broadcasting on two radio networks on 1st January 1956. In 1965 it also began its regional television service as WDF and has been known as WDR from 1994 on. In Düsseldorf there's one of many sub-regional studios, while the programmes are mainly run form the headquarters in Cologne. Maybe we go there, too, and thee the huge building.
Okay, enough of radio and television. We went trough the Hafen. It's obviously called harbour because the habour of Düsseldorf is located there. Well, there's another one in Düsseldorf-Reisholz, but this one if always called "Hafen". Actually it's called Media Harbour, because many media companys have their offices there. It is also full of spectacular post-modern architecture, fore example the three constructions by Frank Gehry.





And this is another very crazy building. I hope you can really see it - there are colorful "people" climbing up the building... It's called the "Roggendorf-Haus" and the figures are called "Flossies". It was designes by a art professor from Stuttgart (in the south of Germany). They were originally designed for the opening of the German Plastic museum in 1998 and climbed up the walls of the NRW-forum "culture and economy", but had to be demounted in 1999, when the exhibition "art and plastics" ended. Well, the flossies had gathered so many fans until then, that Düsseldorf had to find another place for them instead of just removing them. In May 2002 they were officially added to the Roggendorf-Haus. All in all there are 29 figures climbing up and standing on the building.
I know it's not much of Düsseldorf, but I guess it's enough to show you, what you can see there And it's just a part of it. We'll visit some more places in the upcoming weeks. I'm pretty excited already

Hey!
It's me again. I'm having a great time in Germany, although the weather really sucks at the moment. It's rainy and windy all the time, so we don't really get the chance to get out a lot. But luckily it was dry today so we got to the Düsseldorf International airport to watch some planes. They have two observations desks at the airport, but we've just been to one of them.
The airport is the largest airport in North-Rhine Westfalia and the third largest in Germany. In 2011 over 20 millions passengers landed or startet in Düsseldorf. The so called skytrain, which is a "H-Bahn" (hanging railway or Hängebahn in German), is used as a inter-terminal transportation, which connects the terminals and parking decks with the railway station.
The airport has 3 terminals A,B,C, which weren't all built at the same time. C is the newest (1986), while B is the oldest (1973) (although terminal A was re-opened in 1998 after a rebuilding). The different airlines are located in the different terminals. For example terminal A is mainly used by Lufthansa and Lufthansa Regional and its airpline partners while B is used for domestic and EU-flights by Air Berlin and SkyTeam and Oneworld members (like British Airways or Air France). So each terminal has a special "purpose".
Okay, so, as I already said, there are two observations decks. One is inside the airport located at terminal B, from where you can see the air traffic on the apron and the aircraft dispatch procedures. The other one is located at the railway station and this is where we were. You can see the takeoff and landing runways, and that was soooo exciting!

THIS are the takeoff and landing runways. As you can see, the weather was pretty good from time to time.

There were so many planes landing and taking off. I don't know where they came from or where they were flying, but it was cool to see them from that close actually.
Sorry for being out of focus, but otherwise you wouldn't have been able to see the plane.
And there was a plane, that was soooooooo huge! I didn't get to take a picture with it in the background, but I can tell you, it was awesome! I was an airbus from Emirates. An Airbus A330 to be exact. We googled it and it has a maximum of 440 seats and a Wingspan of 60.3 m. A common AirBerlin plane was a Boeing 737-700 and for comparison it has a wingspan of 35.7 m and 126–149 maximum seats. That was really impressive.

Yeah, I know that's not many pictures but it was cool to watch those planes really. Altough I got a bit homesick I miss you...
Bye byr

Hey mum!
I know, I haven't really kept you up to date on what I'm doing, but it is sooooooo freeze here at the moment so we go our RARELY. It's going to like -13 ° degrees at the weekend (at nights)... brrrrr.
Well, but, last week Liz took us to Düsseldorf again. She had a day off from school and so we went to the Altstadt for a little walk at the Rhine. It was very sunny, but also very cold. Thank god I had my scarf and my cap.
We took the tram to the Heinrich-Heine-Allee, which is really in the center of the "längste Theke der Welt". The station is probably one of the most important stations in the city of Düsseldorf (apart from the main station), because you can get to almost everywhere from there. Although the "Altstadt" is the second smallest area in Düsseldorf, it's known at the "longest bar in the world" as in the there are more than 300 bars and discos.
There's just one restaurant next to a bar right next to another bar and so on. I think it's pretty funny, because coming from the tram station the first thing I saw was this church ^^

This is the Neanderkirche. It's an Evangelical church. It opened in 1684. It's an early-baroque  aisleless church. Liz told me a bit about the building characteristics of Baroque . She learned it in school. I don't know if the stuff she told me is correct, but what she said sounded good. Hehe.

Here's a picture of the church without me, so I can show you how to notice if it's baroque  or not
There are mostly concavo-convex shapes, as you can see on the dome. It has like these curved shapes which makes it look more dynamic. Well, it's not a decorated as it was usual in Baroque, because Protestant churches weren't allowed to be very decorated. Something history-related. I don't know ^^
We'll be visiting the Schloss Benrath probably, this is really baroque, so I can show you more

Okay, so we passed the longest bar of the world and got to the market place with this statue.

It's an Equestrian statue of Jan Wellem. Who's Jan Wellem you might ask... Well, I also asked myself who that is and so we googled him, when we got home.
His full name was Johann Wilhelm Joseph Janaz von der Pfalz and he was born in Düsseldorf in April 1658. In 1690 he became electoral prince. He promoted art and culture and founded the Düsseldorfer art gallery with paintings of Rubens. Today the pieces of the gallery are mostly in the Alten Pinakothek in Munich.

In the background it the old townhall of Düsseldorf. It's building style is renaissance and it was built between 1570 and 1573. It looks similar to the extension building of the Düsseldorfer castle, of which only the castle tower is left today. (We'll get there )
Today the townhall is composed of 5 parts, which were build bit by bit.
Okay, going on. We found an interesting house on the way to the Rhine. There was a painting on the wall saying "Haus des Karnevals" (house of the carnival). Düsseldorf is pretty famous for it's carnival - apart from Cologne. Modern carnival there began in 1823 with the founding of a Carnival Club in Cologne.The highlight of the carnival period is Rose Monday (Rosenmontag). There are huge processions through the cities. In Düsseldorf for example they have 72 wagons this years and people travel to the city just to see this - mostly between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people!! It's broadcasted on TV also. I think on ARD.


Well, we finally got to the Rhine. Look how beautiful it looks! I mean, it was really really windy and really cold but the Rhine looked pretty cool (you can't really see how dirty the Rhine usually is, can you?   )

The Rhine is one of the longest and the most important rivers in Europe. It's about 1,233 km long, it has it's source in Grisons in the eastern Swiss Alps and issues into the North Sea coast in the Netherlands.

Do you recognize something from the last trip to the Düsseldorf city? The TV tower for example? And if you have a closer look, you can also see the Gehry buildings.

In the background of this picture you can see the Schlossturm.

Well, we spent some moments there and just enjoyed the sun. There were many people actually, I guess most of them spend their lunch break there. I'd do it Sadly Liz's work is too far away from the Rhine (it's more closly to the Anger, but it's pretty small ^^).


Okay, so here's the Schlossturm I already told you about It's a maritime museum today (one of the oldest in Germany) and the landmark of Düsseldorf. As I already mentioned, it's the only part of the Düsseldorf castle that is left. After being just a little castle outside the city close to the Düssel (of which the city got it's name by the way ) it was rebuild in 1550. In the 17th and 18th century the interior was rebuilt in a baroque style. 1749 French troops bombed and destroyed a big part of the castle. It was rebuilt in Prussian time, but there was a fire in 1872 and by the end of the century it was pulled down. Only the tower was left. Because of a Royal order.

I wonder what the castle looked like or would look like today...
I thought about that all the way back home, but I can't really figure it out. It probably would look a lot like the tower from the outside. But what you the inside look like? Hm. What do you think, mum?

We got home after that stop. We were all pretty tired actually and there was some house work to do.

I miss you mum! But I'm having a great time here!

Hey mum!
Sorry for not updating much lately, it was a pretty busy week and the weather sucked so we didn't really get to go anywhere...
But today the weather was awesome! Still a little cold, but pretty sunny, so Liz decided to take us all to the Landschaftspark Nord in Duisburg. As she lives in Duisburg, she thought it's time to show us something of the city and not of Düsseldorf, which we visited pretty often during the past weeks.
Duisburg is actually not that far from Düsseldorf. It's in the western part of the Ruhr area and also located in the Lowland Rhine area. The city has a total area of 232.82 km2, which makes it bigger than Düsseldorf (217km2), but with "just" 489,599 inhabitans (Düsseldorf's got 588,735).

Okay, so we went to the Landschaftspark Nord today. It's a public park that can be visited during the whole year. It was designed in 1991 with the intention that it work to heal and understand the industrial past, rather than trying to reject it. The park closely associates itself with the past use of the site: a coal and steel production plant (abandoned in 1985, leaving the area significantly polluted) and the agricultural land it had been prior to the mid 19th century.
The park is devided into different areas, whose borders were carefully developed by looking at existing conditions (such as how the site had been divided by existing roads and railways, what types of plants had begun to grow in each area, etc). The site was designed with the idea that a grandfather, who might have worked at the plant, could walk with his grandchildren, explaining what he used to do and what the machinery had been used for. At the Landschaftspark, memory was central to the design.



We first went to the Blast Furnace 5, which is the only blast furnace left in the park, that is accessible for everyone.

I'll just show you the pictures and if there was a board with further information, you'll read them.

This is the cast house.



Awesome, view, huh? This is on platform 4, which has a height of around 51 m.

This is at the so called "Windenhaus" (winch house), where the electric winch of the inclined elevator moved the skip with ore, chalk or coke to the charging hopper of the blast furnace .

This is the charging floor. From this place the blast furnance was charged with material.

This is the view from almost the top. There was one more platform, but there were some other people taking pictures already so we didn't get up there. But where we were was fine. It must have been about 70 meters high.
It was pretty cold up there as it was very windy. But it was awesome how far you are able to see from up there. On the website they say on a sunny day you can also see the TV tower in Düsseldorf. Amazing, isn't it??

We just walked through the park a little more, but most of the buildings look pretty much the same. ^^

But I enjoyed this trip a lot - seeing something different was very interesting.

I miss you mum...

Bye bye