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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-02-24, Page 7THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2011. PAGE 7. The Brussels and Walton area folks were shocked to hear of the sudden passing of Ross Alcock. Ross was a familiar face around the Brussels area working for Canada Post for 34 years as a Rural Route carrier. He was considered the “best” by his many customers of RR 4-5 Brussels. He lived and farmed on McDonald Line with his wife Cora and raised two sons, Jeff and Brian. Ross was a member of the Brussels Legion and a member of the Lions Club of Brussels. Ross will be missed by many and our sympathies to Cora, Jeff, Brian and their families. Graham and Marg Work have had a wonderful visitor from the west. Their son, Ken from Alberta has been visiting for about 10 days. I ran into the Works while having lunch with him and daughter Judy from the Port Elgin area. They have enjoyed the visit and hate to see him leave. Happy birthday to Margaret McLeod. Margaret was a resident of Brussels for many years and now lives in Oakville with her daughter. She returns to Brussels to spend time visiting with her son Neil and family. This was a special visit as it was Margaret’s 80th birthday and a few old friends were invited to drop in to wish her the best. We hope she had a special day with her family and friends of Brussels. We send out get-well wishes to Steve Gulutzen. Steve is home again after having surgery in London and having a hip replacement. We hope he has a speedy recovery. We send get-well wishes to Harold McCallum who has undergone surgery in London this past week. We hope he comes along well and understand he might be coming home before long. Returning from a family vacation in Florida is Dave, Kandace, Ryan and Lucas Jacklin and Ray and Kathy McNichol. They flew from Detroit into Orlando. They stayed at Fantasy World in Kissimmee and spent the first day swimming, playing tennis and relaxing in the hot tub. They awoke to rain on the second day so the kids did indoor surfing at Fantasy Surf and then in the afternoon went to the Titanic Museum in Orlando. It was a very interesting place with amazing recreations of a first class suite and the grand staircase of the Titanic. They have original pieces from the great ship on display including a wooden deck/lounge chair and some dinnerware pieces. They spent two days at Kathy’s brother and sister-in- law’s, Dave and Linda Dunbar’s place. They have a house in the villages, about one hour north of Orlando. They spent a lot of time swimming and in the hot tub and went to the downtown village square. Golf carts are the main means of transportation and they saw some very unique ones. One looked like a scaled down version of a hummer, another like a Model T and they were really cool looking and we will assume quite expensive. The group went to watch the Tampa Bay Lightning play the Carolina Hurricanes in Tampa on Saturday night. The Lightning won 4-3 in overtime and they went to the V.I.P. lounge after the game. The boys had the opportunity to meet Blyth native Justin Peters and Cam Ward and had pictures taken and got autographs. They returned toKissimmee and stayed at the LikiTiki Village Resort and went toDisney’s Magic Kingdom. It wasreally busy and there were hugelineups for everything. At the end ofthe day they watched the electrical parade and the fireworks display and were glad to go to bed that night. The rest of their time away was spent enjoying the amenities of the resort like the water park, pools, hot tub, paddle boats, mini golf and biking. They had great weather with the temperatures ranging from the mid- to-high 70s and only one day of rain. They flew back into Detroit and the closer they got to home, the more snow they found. They are glad to be home even if there is still snow. They were happy to know that Don and Joyce and the McDonald boys had no trouble keeping the snow cleared and the house in good shape. Congratulations to Tim and Amber Harrison on the birth of a son, Copper. He joins his siblings Casey, Zoey and Tucker. Excited grandparents are John and Julie Harrison. Duff’s United Church is going to put out a cookbook for its 100th anniversary. Recipes will be wanted. So put your thinking caps on and pick your best to submit. Monique Baan would be glad to hear from you or give you information. A special celebration was held in Listowel on the weekend for Klaus and Theresa (Ten Pas) DeVries. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at the Listowel Legion. They had an open house in the afternoon and then enjoyed a family dinner. Congratulations to Klaus and Theresa. A progress report on Jack Knight is that he can put some weight on his broken leg. He is still housebound, so visitors are welcome to make the days pass a little faster. Jean Bewley is excited to spread the news of a new great-grandchild. A great-grandson, Corbin, was born to John and Jilly Raven of Calgary last week. The arrival was a bit of a surprise being five weeks early. Big sister Bree is very excited that her new baby brother is here, weighing in at six pounds. Jean has even seen the newest addition via Skype with Grandma Brenda (Bewley) Raven showing off the new grandson. We are continuing the travels of our honeymoon couple, Kelly and Adam Jarosz. They have just spent Kelly’s birthday in Venice and now it’s time to head to Vienna, Austria. During the seven-hour bus ride, they watched the movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe and received their Contiki tour t-shirts. They had dinner at a Rathouse but had turkey schnitzel, not rats. They went to a Mozart and Strauss concert that featured only six people in the orchestra, two ballet dancers and a soloist. It was a very wonderful show. They enjoyed a bus tour of the city of Vienna and then a walking tour of the main shopping area. They were left at the Swarovski’s crystal store and were given a small talk of the origin of the crystal. A few more pieces of jewellery to add to Kelly’s collection, as well as gifts for some were purchased. They went to the Stephensdome, another very large church. Beneath in the catacombs are the bodies of many of the plague victims. They noticed that Vienna’s architecture is very different than the rest of Europe. Many of the buildings are Americanized and vehicle traffic can drive almost anywhere. Special walking – only roads have been in many of the previous cities. They went to the imperial apartments of the Hofburg’s Winter Palace. It holds the President’s Office and a few museums. One museum holds hundreds of dish collections made of gold, silver, crystal and ceramic. Italso displayed centrepieces, onebeing a 30-metre long gold piecewith candleholders and angels on it.The rest of the rooms were verydecorative with fancy trim andceilings. Each room had a white fireplace that had no chimney but was vented to a pipe that was in the wall and ran up to the roof. Red carpets and gold accents were predominate in most rooms. A tour of the Schnapps museum and some taste testing of the product was enjoyed by the group. They stopped at the summer palace and saw the expansive gardens, fountains and there was even a zoo for the family. Leaving Vienna they went to the Mauthasan Concentration Camp. They were shown a 45-minute video that was very informative about what happened at these camps. Survivors told their stories and they were heart wrenching. Prisoners forced to kill other prisoners, starvation, no heat, no beds, little food or water and the gas chamber. Mauthasan was the last concentration camp to be liberated by the Americans. Over 4,000 men were killed in the month preceding the liberation. They toured the camp, the bunkhouses, the crematorium and the gas chambers, it was a very sad place to see. They left and travelled to Munich which is the capital of Bavaria. Adam and Kelly decided to go to the BMW Museum on the subway. They saw old cars, new cars, concept cars and some very cool displays of how they build cars. The museum is very high tech made from stainless steel and glass walkways. The showroom had lots of cars to see and Kelly’s favourite was the bubble car. There were interactive displays and some amazing features on prototype cars to test. You must have dinner at the Haubrauhaus –the most famous beer hall in Munich. There were hundreds of tables of people wearing drindles and lederhosen and enjoying beer, pig knuckle and pretzels. It was a very fun evening. It was on the bus the next morning and heading to Prague, Czech Republic. While travelling, they saw fields that were covered in tall sticks that held wires at the top. They were fields of hops – one of the four ingredients of beer. There were other fields that were covered in solar panels. When they arrived in Prague they went on a walking tour right away and saw the Hrady Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral. It is a gothic- style church that took 600 years to construct. The only thing of note about the church was that it was colder in the church than it was outside of the church. The most treasured landmark of Prague is the Charles Bridge with its defense towers on each end. The Old Town Square is the home of the Astronomical Clock. It chimes on the hour and they were there at five o’clock and watched as the skeleton of death empties his hourglass of sand and a procession of apostles march around inside the tower. A trumpeter plays as the clock chimes and it is a very impressive sight. The next day they went to the Museum of Communism, a museum that tries to expose the flaws of the Communist system that ruled over the Czech people for many years. They took the Funicular lift up the mountain to see the entire area, but fog set in and they were unable to see much. They were able to get some good pictures on the ride down again. They went to the beer factory where the beer tap is in the middle of the table. A machine keeps track of how much you drink and you are charged accordingly. It was home to bed for an early rise the next morning to travel to Berlin. They made a stop in Dresden on their way to Berlin. During WWII, Dresden was bombed for two nightsand was nearly incinerated. Over25,000 people were killed. Thesurvivors decided to rebuild the cityand you can see areas of oldbuildings surrounded by newbuildings. They went to the Frauenkirche Church of Dresden. It re-opened in October 2005 after a 10-year reconstruction period. The people originally thought the church had survived the bombing during WWII because it did not take a direct hit and was still standing after the bombing had ended. However, three days after the bombing, the sandstone began to crumble and the entire church came crashing to the ground. The new church is bright, painted in pastel colours, lots of windows and has a feeling of happiness in it. They did a bus tour of Berlin after arriving. They saw the Unter den Linden (Europe’s best known boulevard because it has trees down the street), the Brandenburg Gate, the Russian Embassy, Bebelplatz (book burning area where university students burned over 20,000 books on Hitler’s orders), Tiergarten, The Reichstag (the current home of Germany’s governing body), the Berliner Dom (the oldest church to survive the war) and the painted section of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was really two walls with an open area in the middle called No Man’s Land or Todesstreife (death strip). The wall separated the Communist East Berlin from the Americanized West Berlin. The majority of the Berlin wall was taken down in 1990. During the walking tour the next day they were able to stop and visit the above places as well as others. They went to the German Museum for three hours and it was huge. It had information from the 1400s up to today and a special exhibit dedicated to Hitler. The day finished with a night of bar hopping and dancing. They left for Amsterdam, Holland in the morning and arrived in the late afternoon. The tour group went to a Live Sex Show in the Red Light District that evening and it was quite something. They went by the Grasshopper Café – one of the most famous marijuana smoking houses in Amsterdam. The next morning they went to the Cheese and Clogs. They demonstrated how Gouda cheese is made and how to make wooden clogs. They went to Anne Frank’s house. Anne was a Jewish girl who hid from the Germans and after she was found was sent to the concentration camp where she died. Her father survived the camp and found her diary when he returned to their home after the war. The diary was published and the home is now a museum. They went to the Heineken Museum where they enjoyed the Heineken experience of being turned into a beer. They went to the taste- testing area where they learned the Dutch serve their beer with a layer of foam on top to preserve the freshness of the beer once poured. The Van Gogh Museum had a video guide that described Van Gogh’s life and his progression as an artist. He painted from 1880-1890. They enjoyed a boat cruise later that night that was great. They went clubbing after the cruise as it was their last night of the tour. They flew from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Germany and then to Toronto. Celebrating birthdays this past week include Brian Dolmage, Helen Brenie, Steve Blake, Kathy Clark, Tyler Williamson, Steve Knight, Joel Dalton, Kevin McNaughton, Rachel Sutcliffe, Bruce McDonald, Tamara Williamson, Chris Lee, Adam Hamilton and Terry Nichol. Happy birthday to all. VICTIM SERVICES OF HURON COUNTY Victims Need Your Support Are you interested in becoming a Volunteer Crisis Responder to help others and to work in partnership with Emergency Services? Victim Services of Huron County is a volunteer based organization that provides emotional support and practical assistance to victims of crime and tragic circumstances. If you are looking for a rewarding experience and the chance to give back to your community this may be the position for you. Requirements: 20 yrs of age + A valid driver’s license and access to a vehicle Ability to handle crisis situations Police check Can commit to 40 hrs training session and 3-4 on-call shifts per  month Training will be held on Thursdays from April 7-June 9th from  6:30pm-9:30pm and will be held in Goderich Application online at www.victimservices.cc          to be faxed or mailed at (519) 524.4108 We are accepting applications for our spring training until March 23rd, 2011 Application to: Shelley Dorey Executive Director Victim Services of Huron County By Jo-AnnMcDonald Call 887-6570 PEOPLE AROUNDWALTON NEWS FROM WALTON