Sluice Gate

Hey, look, a photo that's not of a train, car, plane or something related to my studies!



It's the sluice gate that would allow water from the millrace of the Reuschenberg Mill to flow back into the Wupper. I liked the colours and the tranquil feel of it, so I guess it was in the worthy-of-uploading category. I used to cycle past here on my way to school years ago, since there was a dirt road running parallel to the millrace for some of its lenght. It may have been a bit bumpy and muddy some of the time, but there was no traffic to kill me or traffic lights to stop me. Others in my class were amazed/scared by that, since I also took this road in winter, when it was all dark and scary. But as you can see by me still being here, nothing ever happened. Apart from some unforeseen stops when too much snow got stuck between the tires and the mudguards.


Also, it's the 3rd of October today, our national holiday, celebrating the reunification of Germany back in 1990.

I can be a huge history nut when it comes to postwar Germany and eastern Europe, considering that I was born in the last years of a socialist dictatorship (as Hungary also ditched its single-party socalist government by 1990). What really saddens me though is how a great number of people either don't care or don't know about what everyone east of the iron curtain had to endure after WW2. All you usually hear about is the Holocaust, and the Holocaust, and how the Allies came in to win the war. What many don't realize is that for the poor sods in eastern Europe, it just went from one dictatorship to the other, from brown to red, from nazis to commies. Western Europe was able to flourish in freedom after WW2, while the rest was pretty much annexed by the Soviet Union, with puppet governments subjugating the people with an iron fist. Whenever there was an uprising, whenever the people stood up and demanded free elections, they were soon met with tanks and gunfire.

This is also why I get quite pissed when conservatives in the US label Obama as a "socialist", apparently without even looking up the word "socialism" on Wikipedia.