Stammtisch

On Monday, we had another successful evening at the Mansion House and I would like thank Gunther for the lovely meal and Councillor David Faulkner for his interesting talk on the Ruhr, which celebrated Capital of Culture in 2010. One of the acts that David mentioned was an American singer called Bobby McFerrin – who, I must admit, I wasn’t familiar with. But apparently everybody in Germany knew him and I thought I share his appearance at the Sing! Day of Song event at the Gelsenkirchener Schalke stadium with you, which is on YouTube – click here.

Stammtisch member Sylvia Graham is the honorary librarian of the Meissen Library at Durham Cathedral. This is a specialised collection of mainly protestant theology in German and does contain books not available anywhere else in Britain. There is a website www.meissenlibrarydurham.co.uk and Sylvia would be happy to reply to emails from anyone interested – jms.graham@btinternet.com.

From 1 April, our Stammtisch member Kim di Rollo will also be responsible not only for Brussel Airlines, but also Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines here in the region. She has also passed on an interesting website for small to medium sized businesses, where they can find out more about the Star Alliance Company Plus programme. This can cut company’s travel costs as member companies earn PlusPoints whenever their employees fly with one of the alliance’s 13 participating airlines– click here to get to the website.

And if you’re travelling to Germany and you’re not quite sure yet where to go and what to do – the ‘Germany is Wunderbar’ website might just give you a few ideas – http://germanyiswunderbar.com. Last week, the Guardian also had a very insightful series on Germany and you can still get this online – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/germany.

This week Germany is also mourning the loss of Knut – the four-year old polar bear from Berlin Zoo, who passed away last Saturday. Happier news come from Nuremberg. Their star Flocke (snow flake), moved successfully to France last year with her Russian companion Rasputin and lives now at a sea water enclosure in Antibes. And her mother Vera just had two polar bear twins in December, who are doing very well. For photographs – click here.