Lego buildings

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These apartment buildings are in the middle of the former East-Berlin. They are just down the road from the Stasi headquarters. I don’t know how old they are, but to me the look very simple and functional, with an emphasis on cost and not on amazing or interesting design.

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They remind me of my old lego set, looking like they could have been assembled from really big lego blocks.

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The noon gun

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We have a tradition in Cape Town that a canon is fired from Signal Hill every single day at 12:00pm. This has been a tradition since the early 1800’s. Originally the gun was fired to signal the arrival of a ship, but now it’s just a tradition.

Running past the guns is now part of one of my new running routes, and its a really interesting place to visit. If you are there at noon you will witness the gun being fired, but you can also walk around and see the somewhat eclectic connection of old cannon on display.

The guns are also the oldest cannon in the world that are in regular use.

This must never ever happen again

Auschwitz is one of those places that is difficult to describe. We visited both camps in 2015, but somehow I felt I needed to go back and visit Birkenau one more time. Appearances are deceiving; in some ways it looks so innocent, but everything about it tells a different story. From the cattle wagons on the train tracks, the thin walls of the barracks making it freezing cold in winter, and of course the remains of the ovens on the far side of the camp.

This is a place that needs to be remembered, it needs to be visited. We need to know what we are capable of, and we need to do everything we can to prevent this from ever happening again.

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