So here we are in August…

… and in the shops you can see amazing bright coloured cardboard cones everywhere.

Like a Christmas stocking on the first school day

These are essential accessories for every child starting school for the first time. Their parents fill the cone with sweets and little gifts (often school related, like pencils and crayons) and the child takes it to school on the first day. At the end of the first school day, they are allowed to open it and have all the contents. Of course school-life goes downhill rapidly from this glorious start!

Of course the end of August is the right time for these cones to be in the shops.

I was rather less enthusiastic to find the first flush of Christmas Lebkuchen clogging the aisles though.

Premature Christmas Fare...

I know the weather’s been chilly… but surely nobody thinks it’s Christmas yet?

 

Street scenes in Aachen

I had to go to Aachen this morning.  It was a sunny day and lots of people were taking the opportunity to have a paddle in one of the local fountains, along with some statue-people.

Real people and statue people enjoy the warm weather...

I can't reach my toy boat....

Is that statue picking pockets?

I also came across a small boy with some vomiting fish… or something like that…

Projectile vomiting fish?

…and a bird bath, but no real birds, only bronze ones…

Fake birds... and no wonder, the bath was empty!

What I really did like though, were the hanging baskets. Aachen has the biggest hanging baskets I’ve ever seen! They looked more like trees, because by now the petunias had all grown together… fabulous!

Giant hanging baskets....

 

Remembering…

I visited Moers this week. When I was there I came across the ruins of a synagogue in the shopping centre. There was not a lot left – it had been destroyed during the war. Actually, even the doorway which appeared to remain was a replica, rebuilt as a memorial on the site of the old synagogue, with the names of all the murdered jews from Moers inscribed on the inside of the doorway. A permanent reminder of what happened here back in the 1940s.

The site of the former Moers Synagogue

Names of the dead

 

More German street art…

I was in Viersen this week and I spotted plenty more interesting street art.

To start with, there was this group of figures playing boule…

A game of boule...

Then there was a strange bee-hive which seemed to be home to a range of weird bugs.

Beehive... or bug-basket?

Then there was a bishop sitting amidst a range of weird creatures…

Doctor Doolittle or St. Francis of the hallucinogenic pills?

A few details of the surrounding statues…

Cluck cluck

Hissss

A little further away there was a pair of angels engaged in WWE wrestling… or something…

Ready for the smack-down?

…or possibly it was Icarus being caught by a very skilled out-fielder…

Icarus caught out on the boundary...