So the Old Girl has been off the road for a lot longer than I thought she would. I had to replace the rear hub and also the rear swing arm…but more of that later. Waiting for parts to show up is what consumes the most time. I should have her back on the road shortly!
This video is from my last trip to Leipzig in 2023, my second home. I’d never heard of Pippi Langstrumpf before I met Astrid.
I did a lot of walking that last trip… though not always with any kind of real direction.
so here we are it’s um Thursday today’s Ascension Thursday which means kind of nothing in Australia but in Germany it’s a public holiday and in the east part of Germany because it was never a religious state as it were they used to celebrate Menitak in the west it’s Father’s Day but Menotak is not Father’s Day i don’t know whether we’ll come across anymore but you know basically all the men just go and get pissed and go around the place you know singing and carrying on and and uh and uh riding on horses and old draft horses and carts and stuff like that and and um you know when I first came to life I’d never seen anything like it and I still love it I suppose um I just ran ran into a couple of a group of young BS before just riding their bikes along and singing really singing really well actually um so what we’re going to do today is I’m now home alone everyone’s gone away for the weekend um so I I’m just going to look after myself and at the moment I’m going to go astral over to the Wentar which originally means Rose Valley i don’t even know what street I’m in fire okay so it’s along here to the left somewhere someone have a bit of a look of English curious business yeah just still in firebox at the moment planting some trees little fairy garden in fact the German eye there’s some sort of little place little square here no idea what it’s called let’s have a look shall we that must be the start of the [Music] Rosen the Den it’s quite nice here isn’t it little spot i mean the Vfield is a um is a pretty you know cubrious kind of neighborhood really still I don’t still don’t actually know what this is called this is a few part of the little river ditch gorgeous we’re not going to d it it’s miles away some kind of canal connected to the river this could be part of the river the Ster i say is quite small in places [Applause] welcome of course that’s what Germans do they are walking in the forest two lovely dogs um you the Germans are kind of forest dwellers you know historically and they go back there on the weekends you know just go walking around forests and stuff you got to be careful the Germans don’t jump out at you and shout in German it’s nice here though isn’t it hello hello give them my cooking glass uh-oh that’s some sad and dangerous sounding music yeah ly long [Music] film english Australia mhm foreign speech foreign speech foreign speech yeah yeah [Music] foreign yeah thank you that song is about Pippy lung squish pippy long stockings i think that got as far as Australia i can’t remember yeah sort of kids movies back in the whenever that was i didn’t know anything about her until I came here in 1990 and there was some you know stuff going on with that i got a feeling that it might not even be German it might be Danish or something like that just you know like a Pippy is um a a kid you know like a sort of adolescent I suppose with long stockings pippy long stockings with red hair and freckles you know had adventures like a German female pickles well not quite not quite tough they’re looking at the camera going what the is he doing i thought they’d be a bit more used to it people doing stupid making fools of themselves with cameras and stuff not apparently not i get the feeling and I stop sh I get the feeling it would be easy to get lost here but I’ve got a app all right let’s have a look shall we this is where we are here somewhere i suppose I don’t suppose too much can go wrong and we’ll uh end up I suppose we could just go over to the other side couldn’t we see what happens and um but I don’t think we will i think we’ll sort of go left a bit that way there’s one it’s nice to hear the bird song and the airplane of course and the sounds of spring which I may have mentioned in Germany and much gentler everything is much gentler in Europe than in Australia so yeah German forest you know nothing like Australian bush of course the mad mad sort of hot dusty eucalypted smelling Australian bush feels much more natural than this this feels quite refreshing and quite um primeval shall we say yeah anyway looks like I’m reaching a road up here and what that means I’ll never know well I do not know what it means i’ll end up walking for miles again like I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that etc so here I am still wandering aimlessly i stopped and asked the lady where I was and directions and stuff she says that’s the Valasa which is the street that I’m staying in so knows which way I’m going now whether I’m actually going north or south or east or west I should say so um we’re going to do that thing we’re going to walk around in ever decreasing circles for hours and collapse because of hunger cuz all the shops are shut and we can’t get lunch one of the things that I find slightly confusing about livig whenever I come back is that it’s it’s a lot a lot of the city is designed in kind of triangular shapes which makes it um sort of different than home where everything is mostly rectangular you know so I sometimes just get a little bit kind of weirded out by how things and the way things end up i think I’m doing a loop around that way i could be entirely wrong [Applause] so here we are back to a road don’t have no idea what road it would be now this river or stream or whatever you want to call it could be the part i don’t know no idea okay so I’m actually where I sort of wanted to go i came this way and I’m sort of over here it felt like I was going around but I haven’t i’ve been going the other way that’s all right i just sort of I think I’ll just scroll back through here somewhere and uh eventually hopefully end up back where I should either that or I should just go up to Gosser and get a bloody tram you know that’s sort of silly idea to val plots number 12 back too good looking good even okay so I’m in the Manastasa that was a little bit unexpected oh I know where to go yeah okay i’ve been here before obviously my friend Claudia Steinbach lives around here somewhere at least used to and uh Okay and does Gish Gut Gisher Schllesian is around here somewhere that’s why we’re calling it of course we go up here this will be the Golasa i’m probably near the uh gorenchena as well sort of famous okay so this is the gorish celestian here and that’s where uh gora gerta should and shilla you know those guys this is the shilla house i do believe you know those famous German authors and stuff schilla I haven’t really met read much Shilla i um I came here actually in 2015 with Carrie she wanted to see it and you go upstairs and you can see where he lived and worked and wrote you know that kind of stuff pretty groovy golisa Celelesian celelesium means like little castle not a villa a little castle we’re still in the Manasa it’s a kind of a strange bit of a street the Manasa it’s sort of got some posh places and some not so posh places but cool is you know generally speaking it’s a pretty up market part of town in the after the second world war uh the Russian army took over most of Goris and put their offices in these kind of places you know which they then completely failed to look after and um you know cover the windows with newspaper and stuff to try and keep warm instead of um putting proper curtains in and blah blah blah some of these places were ruined but you know a lot of all the places were ruined back in the day yeah so here we are going past the Gordon Shenko clutch of a dink gordon Shanka do a good old had lunch there with with Claudia Strain the last time we were here and that was the that was the second time I’d managed to get to the Gnenko it was quite a popular and famous place in its day um but it was you know every time I tried to come here it was closed or whatever full Now there are two photographs of me standing outside this church in Goris here one was taken in 1990 and one was taken in 2015 and you know I changed a lot but so did the church you know [Music] good night ladies
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Was hoping to catch up with you there, oh well…