GIANT FOR A DAY

When we were in Hamburg a couple of weeks back we visited MiWuLa. That would be Miniature Wunderland - the world's largest model train world. We were there with my whole family - kids, parents, sisters and their kids - to celebrate my father's 60th birthday (which was last year already, but hey, there are only so many available weekends to match in a year...) My dad was in to trains when he was small (and still is), thus the visit. 

Things like this totally awakes the little tech nerd in me. BIG TIME. I have hundreds of  photos from our trip to Legoland a few years back with the boys (I got a bit insane there too with all the miniature Lego worlds and vehicles that move and I am not even going to start on how many pics or video clips I started taking now at MiWuLa because it all looked so real and the airplanes fly and land by themselves.)

The place is huge. It has millions of visitors per year and they have put thousands of work hours and millions of euros on building the place over the last 15 years. One of those things that give me a headache, thinking of all the planning and execution to get something like this done... Of course, it is surely The Dream Job for some.

Here they are building new landscapes. Italy. It's interesting to get to see things half way trough too, how it's made.

And yes, I managed to shut that somebody-built-all-this-stress aside and enjoy all the small details instead. And go crazy and take 1,000 photos of everything. Well in some cases the good optical zoom could help spot details that otherwise were to small to see; I took pictures of a lot of animals for ecample to show to Dag as he had a hard time spotting those out himself.

It's a good spot for kids, although it is more fun for an adult; trying to find all the small fun, ironic details and scenes. For me it's not so much the trains (that actually go around the whole damn thing, all trough different settings and scenery that blend into one another in different etages, some 10km all in all, which itself is a total whoah -well, that's kind of the actual point with the whole place) but all the things happening.

It's mostly funny things. But something terrible happened here.

And here too. (There's an angel crying behind the tree.)
Well there are quite a lot of accidents actually.

Bikers gathering.

Pride party!

Airport catering kitchen.

Nordic walking in Scandinavia, of course.

As the old harbour worker I am, I had to take a few extra shots of all the harbours.

Mm-hhhmm, mhhhm. (Add nodding of head here.)

And then that cruise ship left berth and sailed away on water! Real water. Sorcery!

No realsorcery though, but lots and lots of chords and lots of computering behind it. (There's that headache again thinking about it. I'll spare you any pics I might have taken of any chords and servers that you could see at one point. But then I looked at the wiggling tails of the elephants at Hamburg Animal park -you could press buttons here and there to have stuff happen, like tail wiggling - and left the engineering be.)

In Finland it is forever winter. That's what it feels like for real sometimes too

The light switches between day and night with sunsets- and rises too.

Here's Las Vegas at night.


And the small green men and men in suits underneath area-51.

And a concert with some 20,000 small people attending. With lighters in the air and cameras flashing when it got dark. Plus of course moving figures doing the show on stage.

If you have a thing for technique, kitschy details, miniature stuff (and of course model trains) then you should definitely stop by MiWuLa when in Hamburg (and book tickets in advance to avoid waiting for hours).