Bikes, our House, Rising and Falling Water, and a Dinosaur, for good measure

Jacob's fine example of DDR (East German) mobility:

and Eleanor's sleek purple "Panther":

And for all of you wanting to see our living place, here it is:

It's not much, but it'll do. I like to take my morning tea in the garden, and afternoon tea on the roof terrace. The visitors are bothersome, but we manage.

Seriously though, this is the castle Pillnitz -- the summer home of king August the Strong. There are legends of him crumpling up silver platters with his bare hands as if they were paper. He seems to be a big deal around here.

And this is the dinosaur that we found at the castle. Nice character.

Here we are in front of one of the castle buildings -- there were several large buildings like this, and a huge set of gardens. Really quite a complex for summer living. As our roommate said, "if you lost your glasses here, you would never find them again."

This is a close-up of the wall you see behind us in the last one. Those lines on the wall are not a tally of the growth of some royal kid. No, they are marks of the various floods that have happened here, with dates. Hard to imagine the water rising this high.

And here is another fun water thing. This is in the courtyard of some buildings in Neustadt -- a very trendy part of town. The wall is painted and water really runs through all those pipes, etc. It wasn't raining hard enough when we were there to get the full effect. Pretty cool though.

And here was our guide for the day: our roommate's boyfriend Christian. I only got this blurry picture of him, as he kept stepping out of all our pictures.

As for real pictures of where we live -- they're coming! My camera battery died before I managed to take any, then I found that I couldn't plug the charger into our converter, so we had to go find a new one, etc, etc. You will have more pictures soon.

But this morning we're off to Prague for a few days before jacob's classes start!
xoxox