| From: "Bron Gondwana" <brong@brong.net> Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 08:40:54 +1000 (EST) |
I'm going to jump in with a little rant about German bathroom designers here, and a little hint for them. Water runs downhill - no, seriously, it does. Not only that, but in a bathroom, water will get on the floor. Hopefully all of you following along at home will have made a connection here, and realised that a drain should be placed at the lowest point of the floor - possibly even that a floor should be created with a lowest point, but even more so that it should have a drain. Half the bathrooms don't seem to have any drain at all - and in the one that I did see with a drain, it was a good few centimetres above the lowest point. These bathrooms were built after the war too, so no excuses about the floors moving, and even that doesn't explain no drain at all. We've seen the same in public places - a lot of roads have low places, and nowhere for the water to drain to - which could be explained by the cities being older except that there ARE drains, just not in the lowest point. *sigh*. Back to the diary... Took the Lonely Planet walk around the city after deciding against the Leipzig card - we didn't need public tranport, and the discounts were rather pathetic. The Lonely Planet walks tend to be good in Germany - especially if you like churches! We saw the Bach Museum, and Kate bought a score of his motets. On our way home, we discovered the the Stasi (secret police) museum was still open, and free - though we only had 25 minutes left. Amazing views of just how much information and power they had. They had about 100,000 informers in the Leipzig district alone - every one of them feeding back dirt on their neighbours. Mail to/from outside the area was copied so they had handwriting samples for anyone with external contacts. Between that and serious phone tapping capabilities (they could tap 300 lines at once, in the day when not many private people had phones), they really did know just about everything. Had dinner with our room-mates, Travis (from Melbourne) and Tina (Germany), then played cards with them. Another room-mate went to Tas Uni, at the same time I was there. |
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