Over the last ~25 years there have been lots of efforts to provide nature reserves for birds and other wildlife in the region that have proven quite effective in re-establishing populations of storks, golden eagles, sea eagles, great egrets, king fishers and other birds that used to be non-existent during my childhood. The first stork I ever saw was in the late nineties on a holiday to Usedom in north-eastern Germany but today they are a common sight on the lower Rhine along with eurasian cranes, red kites, long eared owls and even some eurasian spoonbills which are technically an invasive species but from what I have heard they are not harmful like other invasive species.
As I was eating breakfast I heard the sound of a low flying jet. I looked but couldn’t see it.
A few minutes later there was another one. And then another one and a few more in the minutes thereafter.
I then remembered that there is a training area in the northern part of Rømø. So I hopped into the car and drove the few km north.
And there I was, taking pictures of a live fire exercise of two F-16 jets! They threw simulated bombs as far as I could tell, but they shot the gun for real.
Sadly I don’t have a really good camera (I took the photos with my Sony Alpha 58) or a good lens, and both the automatic and I suck at getting sharp pictures of jets flying in the sky, but at least I managed to get a few shots.
Fun fact: These might even be the Ukrainian pilots being trained to fly the F-16, because the jets flew toward the east after they were finished and they were two-seaters. Skrydstrup Air Base is 40km to the east, and that’s where they are trained since two weeks ago.
Here are the few pics that I took which don’t completely suck.
The brrt was cool.
They did another pass but I couldn’t get the plane into focus.
Then there was a pause and I hoped they would do a third pass so I could record a brrrt video, but they apparently rejoined and called it a day because they came back only once more, quite low, possibly for BDA or just for show. They surprised us a bit so these pics aren’t very good. The sheep weren’t very impressed btw.
Interesting Derbysieger. Your cruising speeds seem quite fast vs mine which is around 20 km/h.
My front tire went flat on me about 1.5 kms into my ride today. Jogged back while leaning on my bike which was interesting as with some weight taken off my knees it went well. Wonder if they make sport walkers, could be a way to back into jogging as well lol
I am riding about 60km a day, 5 days a week and I have been doing this for around 9 years at this point.
Even if I haven’t done any targeted training for the last couple of years it’s at least regular exercise.
I have a pretty quick touring bike - it’s steel, it’s heavy (~14kg without water bottle and panniers) but the frame is custom made to fit my body and it’s built to be fast.
I am almost half your age without severe health issues apart from my hay fever but that is only an issue for about 2month a year and the exercise actually helps with making it less of an issue.
If you have the option to try a road bike or gravel bike with a relaxed geometry (for example at a local bike shop) I am sure you’ll be quite a bit quicker.
What I want to say is: don’t feel bad about your speed. The first rule of cycling is that there’s always going to be someone who is faster. I am always happy when I can beat my own records.
A lot of the Strava segments around here are dominated by Semi-professionell or even regular professionals. I know I will never be able to sprint at 60km/h for 2km unless I get out during a storm and use the tailwind to smash some records lol.
My attempt at a translation, some of it is really difficult to translate.
You see this? Crane location? Am I supposed to place 60t here? People simply don’t do their jobs, because they … I don’t know, are too stupid or what?!
CRANE LOCATIONS NEED TO BE COMPACTED
Now I come up here … look at this ■■■■! Do the people here simply not care? You have to ask wether they - I don’t know - are we supposed to go home now?! This is a joke, right? You guys know how much a crane weighs, right?! I am getting slowly annoyed here… I have had enough now. Don’t they have an 8m tape measure? Boy, boy, boy (lots of boy! )
Oh man, stop it! Bunch of nitwits. Only original nitwits, every one of them! Is this a construction site for complete idiots? Idiots like Norwegians ( I have no idea why he’s referencing Norwegians). Idiots! That’s why they’re not in the EU either, (next part is really hard to translate) because they don’t live in the same reality (maybe idk I don’t think there’s an English equivalent to what he’s saying in German), those nutcases. Packing up, the end. Can’t even hold a tape measure correctly
Poor guy. He’s right tho, and all the other peeps know it. Vid reminds me of the forklift safety vid that came out of Germany, remember that one? Forkin hilarious
That’s the same here. I have a few friends I follow on Strava and they are all faster than me. I use that to as a carrot to think that maybe, someday, I can close that distance a little - and I do that by looking primarily at my own segments/records.
If that is the first rule of cycling, I think that the second is to focus on consistency - not pushing yourself too hard for individual rides, but trying to do rides more often at a pace that you can sustain. It is better to do 5 rides at 5km a ride a week rather than 1 ride at 25km per week. Obviously, your distance is up to you. There is a lot of talk recently about ‘Zone 2 training’. This is going at an effort that would allow you to carry on a conversation with someone cycling along with you, without putting you out of breath. It is argued that most of your rides, during a week, should be in this zone.
I tried writing similarly - after telling people on the German section of ED forums that I was fluent in the language, I tried to write “with a dialect” - a Berliner dialect, in fact, and spelled the words how they are pronounced to try and get that effect, rather than as they would be written in correct German.
End result - they all thought I actually couldn’t speak German and carried on in English!
German dialects can be pretty distinct (Berlinerisch definitely counts) and it’s not just pronunciation or a few words that are different, it also extends to grammar which can be quite different. Then there’s the issue of putting a dialect into writing. If you do it “wrong” it will not be obvious to a German that it’s an attempt to put a dialect into writing. There are actually books written in dialects. Asterix & Obelix is a good example of a series of comic books that are released in different dialects like Kölsch, Swabian etc. I have it in Ruhrdeutsch somewhere and it’s actually really good with lots of references to local culture, politics and regional peculiarities.
I first started doing that when I worked in Bonn - girlfriend from Bad Breisig used to make sure I pronounced it right (according to the dialect). It was fun watching the expressions on the faces of Germans who knew I was British - so I just did the same once I had the hang of Berlinerisch.
I used to make up my own ‘German’ words too, then explain why my version was logically correct and theirs wasn’t!
Like “Schnäuzer” (pronounced “schneuzer”) was one of my faves - and it usually had them in stitches
Dialects have always fascinated me. How in Europe or the US you can tell what part of the country (in some cases even what village) someone comes from by how they sound.
You would think that in Australia because we are sparsely populated with 90% of us concentrated in about a dozen cities that are separated by 1000’s of km that dialects would be more pronounced?
Nup, we literally do not have regional dialects and about the only way to tell where someone is from is whether they order their beer by the Midi, Schooner, Pot or Pint.
That’s interesting. I love dialects and the differences we have separated by language. I’m not skilled enough to hear a dialect in a foreign language, though my German is all Austrian based from skiing.
I’ll resist the temptation to say you’re all convicts, but that has to have a basis on the origins of Australian dialects. Has theirs been enough time for regional difference before we had access for a homogenised version of the language.
Recently where we used to live, “Da yoof” tend to speak an almost south bank cockney ghetto dialect. Nobody above the age of 25 speaks like that.
Fascinating stuff which is sociology based.
In other news, good weather has broken out and the silage is cut.
That might explain a common baseline to ‘Australian’ English, but we really are a multi-cultural melting pot. And perhaps that mix is so broad and ever changing that it has become homogenised over the decades or actually prevents dialects from forming. Doesn’t explain the accent though - I’m sure sociologists have a field day over this stuff?
With my wife, you only have to go back three generations on her fathers side two on her Mothers to find Irish and Swedish ancestors. When I lived in Brisbane I had as many Vietnamese friends as Anglo’s and these days my old stomping grounds have sizable African populations. Same in Melbourne - I probably had more friends with names like Kotsanis or Kolabaric than Smith. Did you know that Melbourne is the 2nd largest (by population) Greek city in the world?
Yes, I totally agree, this was my experience in Sydney and I hope I’d didn’t sound disingenuous, hence resisting the stereotype.
I think they do and why they find this stuff cool. My daughter is a sociology teacher so will mention it next time we speak, though I may not understand what she says.
I did actually, I have a mate who lives there and swears the best Souvlaki in Aus is in Melbourne.
)
Hey we like to riff on the “we are all convicts” when it suits us 