Die Reisen des Spidermans

During one of my trips to Berlin (the one in January, I think), Bine and I stopped at the Flea Markt at Mauerpark.  It is (one of) the largest established flea markets in Europe.  It's full of amazing furniture, worthless junk, hand-crafted jewelry, DDR relics and it's my favorite place to shop.  While there, we picked up a pair of finger puppets. 

Mine is the very small Spiderman on the left, hers the miscolored Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the right.  He's wearing both blue and orange so we named him Donatello.  We decided that these could be our own sort of personal Flat Stanley project, and we could take pictures with them wherever we went.  So Spidey has been accompanying me all around Germany.

He enjoys trips on the Deutsche Bahn.  This is actually the cute little Regional train that zips between Kiel and Lübeck and I take to school every morning, though I only go a couple of stops.

This past weekend, we went to Husum, which is an idyllic little seaside town over on the North Sea.  It doesn't look it from this picture, I know, but I had walked about as far along this little wharf as I could before it turned into industrial docks, so I turned around for the shot of the town.

While attempting to find the beach, I got a little lost.  Somehow, my little brightly colored seaside town had turned into rural farms full of horses and sheep and the occasional car.

But the first trip he accompanied me on was the one to Heidelberg, before I had quite figured out the settings on the camera to allow me to focus on two things.  This is Spiderman posing with a unicorn riding a giraffe in a shop window.

In possibly one of the least focused pictures I have ever taken, Spiderman poses with a rather famous monkey statue, still in Heidelberg.  In my defense, it's very hard to hold a dSLR with one hand while taking a picture of a finger puppet on your other hand.  It's not really what it was designed for.

And, of course, back in his hometown of Berlin at the Reichstag, the seat of German government.  Someday, he'll get out of Germany.  Most likely when I do.