Germany... in two dozen pictures!

My final batch of "interesting" pics from my German holiday:

This snapshot from a Dresden tourism office poster (obviously) shows most of the major cities covered, excluding Hannover and Stuttgart. Our tour director said the 11-day trip spanned over 3,200 km or 2,000 miles:

Yes, we did find the 4711 brand in Cologne (Koln)!

We were told Schmidt is the commonest family name in Germany:

We tried calling Killer, our mini schnauzer, Schmidt, but he's no hoi polloi. He refused to acknowledge that plebeian handle.

I don't think this name will be quite as common...

Found... the Mississippi Queen, in Hamburg harbour!

Roll it, roll it, roll it on the river.

Berlin, my favourite German city. And this is our tour director's favourite restaurant there, for good reasons (hic, hic)...

The Berlin Wall... one last kiss before their world crumbles?

So that's how Communist leaders embrace each other!

Hmm, so who's Dominic Khoo from SG?

 Checkpoint Charlie... the fake one, for the camera-toting tourists...

Reminders of the hubris of Nazi propaganda (Nuremberg Documentation Center)...

At Dachau...

Into the famed Black Forest. This calls for a Black Forest cake!

...and a choice of cuckoo clocks with or without cuckoo sound!

  

If cuckoo clocks keep you awake, you can always Zleep in this Hamburg hotel...

...or have a flutter at this casino:

Maybe not this one...

Check this out... for Big Bertha??

Erotic?

...and erotik??

After all that erotic/erotik stuff, Hot Red Wine!

Meanwhile, I thought this yoghurt drink has an odd brand name...

  
Finally, this one's for Angie!

Gute Fahrt? The Germans sure know how...

I am still on my (hopefully) good-humoured excursion into German "sign language". So here's to a "Gute Fahrt!" or, more long-windedly, "Auf wiedersehen und gute fahrt!"...

I found another online "essayist" with a similar sense of humour:

How to Fahrt in German

https://learn-german.language101.com/how-to-learn-german/how-to-fahrt-in-german/

So now that you know what fahrt means in German, here's some more such signs that I spotted enroute:

Stand and Fahrt?

These other signs also amused me...

Just like Singapore... No this, No that!!

Beware of tree, or Beware of truck??

Oh deer, they are at it again!

Why do we non-Germans say and spell a particular city as "Munich" while the Germans themselves use the version "Munchen"?...

Apparently, it has something to do with the umlaut (those two dots). Non-German speakers may have difficulty enunciating "Munchen" correctly. But, then again, maybe someone else might have a better explanation.

Finally, Mental Floss has a piece on "11 Facts You Should Know About the Umlaut":

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58936/11-facts-yu-should-know-about-umlaut

On the road in Germany... just when you think things were Bad, they got wurst!

Angie and I returned from a great holiday in Germany. We loved it, so don't let the header above fool you...

One fellow traveller asked me after the sausage-laden breakfast: "How was your breakfast?"
I replied: "It was the wurst meal I had."

I didn't know then that it was going to get from brat to wurst...

Like I said, it was really a very nice holiday. And I found MY car in Rothenburg!

Explanatory notes:
Bad means  "spa".
Everyone should know that wurst means "sausage".
And the car above is the Tesla S, an all-electric sports saloon. The number plate was what caught my eye!

Oh, what a gas!

This ad in The Straits Times (April 11) caught my eye:

German gas? I remembered that my older siblings used to tease each other whenever one of them released some really stinky "German gas"! But this expression seemed to have sputtered out and I am not sure if Generations X and Y are familiar with it.

Wikipedia (under the heading "Fart") has this interesting cartoon which hints at the German origin of this expression:

The caption reads thus:
German peasants greet the fire and brimstone from a papal bull of Pope Paul III in Martin Luther's 1545 Depictions of the Papacy.

I posted the German gas ad on Facebook and KA responded with this pic of a well-prepared dog...

Oh no, the old fart's at it again!

 Finally, the Family Guy cartoon series seems to have this scorching farting scene in one of its episodes!...

Haha, I am off to, yes, Germany, for a holiday. So I won't be blogging for two weeks.

Amazing graffiti art!