Christmas Market in Mainz

My previous BlipFoto entry was for Saturday 23 November, and I showed a photograph of a Christmas Market in Oxford, a new institution modelled on the famous German Christmas markets.

One week later, we travelled to Mainz, in order participate in a Symposium (see later, below), and here we are at a real German Christmas market on the Sunday morning. The first few photographs in this collection also show the Mainz market on this day.

Here are a few highlights that viewers may find of interest.

The map of the market, showing its large size and variety of stalls.

Some tools (spanners, nutcrackers, etc) made out of chocolate.

The occasion for our visit to Germany was a symposium, The Anthropocene, held in honour of the 80th birthday of Paul Crutzen, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on catalytic ozone loss in the atmosphere. Paul had worked in my group, and had many diiscussions with me during the early 1970s.

This evening, we were invited to a reception and banquet in the Max Planck Institute fuer Chemie in Mainz, and frames 15 to 46 of my collection show some aspects of this joyful occasion. Paul himself is seen in this photograph.