Here I am in Europe/Germany/Oberkochen for almost a month. Yet nary a peep from me on the interwebz. Well alas, here goes, my first in a new series InContinent- Dispatches from Europe.
Well today (actually just pretend today, I’m writing this the next morning) I finally visited the Zeiss Museum. In this wee little town of ~8000 people, one of the worlds leading optical manufacturers is headquartered.
I walk past the Zeiss building virtually every day but visited the museum for the first time. For giggles I took my Sony A7rii with what I assume is a copy of a Zeiss lens, their 35mm f2.8 Sonnar, Samyang/Rokinon/Wallex/Bauer 35mm f2.8. Both lenses have some unique similarities: a lens cap sun shade, very small and light, and weirdest of all, a concave front element (it curves inward.)
I was the only visitor in the whole museum/store, maybe 400sq/m 4000sq feet. There’s some cool modern science crap. But I headed over to the camera area. There were a few cool things, but the museum is pretty effing small.
For me perhaps the most interesting bit was the fastest lens in the world (“fast” = let’s the most light in). It’s the 50mm f0.7 (or as the Europeeans write it f0,7) Zeiss Sonnar.
The gift show was interesting. There you can buy modern lenses for my camera for example, albeit for full retail price. I don’t have it with me, but I own only one modern Zeiss lens for digital, a 12mm f2.8 Zeiss Touit. I bought mine in like new condition with the box from a dude of Craigslist for $250. I could buy the same lens new from Zeiss at their company store for €1000.
Being a rainy summer day (which I welcome, since it’s been ~30c with high humidity for much of my stay, I went off to do some German style shopping.
I used my Deutschlandticket to go to the nearest “big city”, Ulm. The D-ticket is a subscription ticket that all local German transit operators and the national railway operator Deutsche Bahn offer for €49. It’s good on all local transit and all trains except for the fast long distance trains (InterCity, InterCity Express, Eurocity.)
Believe it or not, there are some old American brands that don’t exist in the US that are common here. One is Woolworths, where I bought an umbrella, a belt, house shoes.
Also having heard that some of my hosts are fans of Asian noodles, and having noticed that there’s an Asian supermarket: Go Asia, in the under passage at the main railway station, I stocked up on noodles and other Asian crap. I thought it would be cool (or cruel) to give the kids some extra spicy wasabi coated peanuts and not tell them they’re spicy.
Stay tuned for more dispatches. I hope to cover fish in cans, jars, and other packaging forms, quirks and quarks of German and European culture and who knows what else. Along with mostly boring photos that are intended to go to my stock photo library.
So, if you managed to read this far, pat yourself on the back. You wasted five minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
Alternative titles:
Zeiss, Zeiss Baby
It’s Nice to Have a Zeiss, but better to have a Bauer
Play on a German/English saying: It’s nice to be a Preuss, but better to be a Bayer (Nice to be Prussian, but better to be a Bavarian)
File under: TMIchael Halberstadt
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