Category: watchtower

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On the Northern Edge

I was reminiscing recently about my travels to Norway back in 2012 after reading a couple of articles focusing on places I visited during that trip. Both articles are about how places of Norwegian-Russian contact have been affected by the current war Putin is waging against Ukraine. The first article is about Spitsbergen, more specifically about the Russian mining town of Barentsburg. The other article is about Kirkenes and the nearby border with Russia. So both places are a bit on edge at the moment, and both are located in the far north – hence my choice of title for this post.

In both places

Patarei prison

I’ve just finished the last updates on my main website for Tallinn, Estonia. The last significant chapter to go up was this one for Patarei prison, based on my visit to the place at the end of July this year. I already featured a couple of Patarei photos in this general Baltics post on this Blog that I uploaded in August. However, Patarei is such a photogenic place that it really deserves another post of its own. See also the

30th Anniversary of German Reunification

On this day, thirty years ago, on 3 October 1990, Germany was officially reunified and the GDR (the old communist East German state) ceased to exist, just eleven months after the so-called Fall of the Berlin Wall (or, more precisely, the opening of the border crossing points, which is generally seen as the beginning of the end for the GDR). The physical Wall too was soon after mostly demolished. So it has now actually been gone longer than it had been in existence! How time flies.

30 years is of course a big anniversary and the German media are predictably full of