Culture

Directly at the Hard Rock Cafe you can walk to the inviting street cafes and impressive squares of Antwerp city center. The Large Market with its imposing buildings, the town hall and the guild houses, also impresses with a decorative fountain, the Brabo fountain in honor of the folk hero Silvius Brabo. This is said to have done the same to a vicious giant who cut off the hands of merchants who were unwilling to pay on the way to Antwerp. Hence the giant hand that is flung away from the stature like a discus.

Venice of the North is called Bruges in Belgium in the Merian. And if you think of the well-known novel by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, you also understand the title of the film "Seeing Bruges ... and Dying?" From 2008 by Martin McDonagh (screenplay and direction). But that ends the initial similarity between film and novella - while Thomas Mann draws the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach to Venice, in Martin McDonagh's tragic comedy the two hit men Ray and Ken, masterfully played by the well-known actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, travel to Bruges.

Every two years the Great Square, a landmark of Brussels, is covered with a sea of flowers. This event takes place in mid-August and makes the beautiful old guild houses and the town hall appear completely unfamiliar. More flower constructions can be seen throughout the city, making all of Brussels a special tourist attraction.

Manneken Pis, who wears special clothes on this day, is surrounded by crowds - good to have a telephoto lens.

After the siege of the German leased area and trading base Qingdao by the Japanese army, the German troops in China surrendered on November 7, 1914 during World War II. Around 4,700 Germans were then interned in 12 camps in Japan. The Bando camp occupies a special position here, because while torture was reported from other Japanese camps, thanks to the liberal attitude of the camp commandant Matsue Toyohisa, a good cooperation between the local population and the prisoners developed here.

From February 16 to August 16, 2020, the Arp Museum in Rolandseck station showed the impressive exhibition "Sinn Frisst" by the artist Jonas Burgert. Especially for this exhibition, he created seven large-format works that lead into fictional worlds that immediately draw the viewer's accent of reality. One encounters beings who seem to be in the usual reality as well as in dream worlds and who locate the concept of "dark matter" from physics as an artistic transformation in the social world.

The most famous Bhutanese monastery in Bhutan, the Taktsang Monastery (short for Paro Taktsang Palphug Monastery) is located in the Paro valley at an altitude of 3120 meters. It is also called the Tiger's Nest Monastery because it "hangs" like a nest on a steep rock about 700 meters above the floor of the Paro Valley in Bhutan. On the other hand, there are several legends that explain this name, e.g.

Traveling to Bhutan takes a lot of preparation. For example, during our planning phase we had to organize driver, guide and compulsory exchange into local currency.

Only groups of 4 people or more were allowed to enter but it was particularly lucky that we were given permission to travel to Bhutan in pairs.