Castle

Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle
This castle reminded me of the LEGO castles. Because it is a castle of the Middle Ages with draw bridge and towers and LEGO castles are what I know as castles in Europe!
ヨーロッパの大聖堂や城を眺めていると、人類の建築芸術はあの頃に花咲いて、もうとっくに山を越えてしまったのではないかと感じる。この城は1900年頃にウィルヘルム2世が中世の城を修復し再現させたというけれど、この皇帝も昔の建築のほうが美しいと思ったのだろうか。

Over the River Rhein

A German family kindly invited us for dinner, so we crossed the river Rhein and went into Germany. It was just 20 minutes ride from town to town...how easy it was to cross the border!



Breisach



Now, it is France over there.
Border is just a line on the map that people decided to draw.



Burkheim
I love these timber framed houses!

Candy town

On that night, I was in Colmar, France, passing through Luxemburg. All the houses in the town were colorful and cute just like candy houses.



Petite Venice
To my surprise, I learned that Colmar was where the Sophie's town in Howl's Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki was modeled after.
スタジオジブリのスタッフは、この町でしばらく取材をしたという。ファンタジーであってもイメージの元となる場所やものの"first-hand observation" が大切、というチューターの言葉を思い出した。



What I really wanted to draw was the lanterns but nothing else...



From the morning till evening, I could hear Swifts shrilling above the sky.
ヨーロッパアマツバメが飛ぶ町の朝。



We had a French breakfast at a cafe by the church. This is what I wouldn't experience if I was just a student traveler. I had to grin remembering the expensive tiny little cup of hot chocolate in Paris. Thank you MC and Jane!
ソフィーの住むおとぎの町、大人な観光を楽しんでしまったので、長女でもない、末っ子でもないわたしの「運試し」の結果をみる機会は、残念ながらなかった。

Brezel

The very next day after the hand in, I was eating Brezel sitting at Koblenz Hfb in Germany with my American host grandmother and her friend. I myself didn't know what happened.

Snow Forest

Winter is over and summer has come!







ようやく8000語のエッセイを含め、すべての課題を片付けた。夏休みだなんて、信じられない。

誘惑物

"All kinds of owls, it's amazing! Bring a sketchbook!"
I got this information about the Raptor Foundation's booth in the town, so I went out, escaping from the 8000-word essay again.



I was surprised to hear that many small kids exclaimed "Look at that Barn Owl" but not just "owl".


Oh, I really don't know how I can finish that long essay in ten days...there are so many temptations and also things to do.
But thanks, Zack!

Warblers

While I was writing and drawing for my assignments, summer visitors had already come. Although I am still far away from finishing them, I went out for birdwatching because spring comes only once in a year and I'm not sure if I can stay here next year. I was surprised to hear Cuckoo here in April because in Japan it is usually spotted after May.

It became a day to learn warblers.
英語のWarblerという言葉は幅が広い。ムシクイもセンニュウもヨシキリも、ウグイス科はみんなWarblerだ。



Grasshopper Warbler（ヤチセンニュウ）
We were lucky enough to see it closely! Its eye-stripe is pale and thin. But Reed Warbler （ヨーロッパヨシキリ）has more plain face and the color is more orange with no pattern on its back. Reed Warbler was hidden in the reed and didn't allow me to sketch...



Sedge Warbler（スゲヨシキリ）
has bold black eye-stripe and obvious cream eyebrow. The one that I sketched had a ring on its leg. In England, I've seen ringed birds more often than in Japan.
3種の中ではスゲヨシキリが一番、オオヨシキリやコヨシキリに鳴き方が近かった。

Coloring eggs

From the middle of March, I was asked to keep the skin of onions for Easter. And this is what they are for!



ブルガリア人のハウスメイトが教えてくれたイースター・エッグの染め方。
Just by boiling eggs with onion skins, they became beautiful reddish brown. I tried it as well with two of my eggs and off course with some piece of paper! The paper became yellow and my fingers brown.

There is a Japanese story by Naoko Awa called Kitsune no Mado or Fox Window.
The fox dyes people's fingers with balloonflower. If you make a rhombic window with your thumbs and index fingers colored by him, you can see whatever you want through it. I wonder what we can see through the window colored with onion.

朝の鐘

We got a room with a view, not in Florence but in Venice.
In the morning, I sat on the window sill and looked down the square, hearing the people walking and pulling the roller bags on the cobblestones. At seven o'clock the first bell of the day rang.
I would love to live in a place where a bell rings.

City on the Lagoon

We hopped on the train after the Book Fair to Venice.
Most of the people got off the train at stazione di Venezia Mestre and there were only four of us in the car. Suddenly, we could see the sea from both sides of the car. We went into the lagoon.



I was impressed by the idea of settling on a marsh and building a whole city on millions of wood poles. There are certainly many people living on a former marsh in the world, even some familiar places for me: here in East Anglia and also in Bangkok! But these places were reclaimed by drainage building canals. I also know that some people are living in floating houses on lakes like the one I stayed in Klong Ya national park in Thailand last spring. But these are just some houses, not the entire city like Venice.
If the sea level rises in the future and even more places become half sank in the sea, we may all have to build a city like Venice...


Since it is just one month after the disaster in Japan, I can't help thinking about earthquakes and Tsunami. Venice is still there soundly because earthquakes seldom happen there and it faces the Adriatic Sea in the Mediterranean Sea. Tsunami is an acute disaster while acqua alta or high tide is more chronic.


Building the inflatable barriers at the canal gate would work better and be more reliable for acqua alta than building breakwaters for Tsunami. However, those constructions are always based on an estimate. It may be about the height of the water coming in or the effect to the current, environment. But when it comes to nature, we cannot calculate everything, so such estimates very often turn out to be wrong. And it seems that the more we try to overcome or resist the nature with hardware, the bigger the damage caused by a hundred-year or a thousand-year event.


If I could be a travel journalist, my first topic would be "Living on the water".