At the Fair - Travel report 2

This year's colours:
1. Untitled, 2. IMG_4528, 3. Untitled, 4. MARBLEHEAD BARN DOOR, 5. algae, 6. Maguey thorns, 7. Reflector., 8. orange, 9. feathers, 10. wallpaper, 11. http://www.flickr.com/photos/43184328@N00/1626403/in/pool-colorfields/, 12. Graff Hall 2

Created with fd's Flickr Toys. I was having lots and lots of help from Kaija, my daughter, who is visiting us for a couple of days.


Last week was at least the 16th time I went to a technical fair with my DH. Machines are his job, foreign languages are mine, so we make a perfect team.

When I was visiting this kind of fairs for the first time with my DH, all the machines were painted battleship grey or green. Then some welding robots got orange or bright yellow paints. Over the years the use of other colours has increased. This year - it has been four years since our last EuroBlech - I noticed new trends. Many machines were painted white, off-white or very light grey. Like the manufacturers would like to emphasize that the work is clean, not oily and messy. Very dark green was combined with these light colours. A new colour was a deep red, by itself or combined with graphite grey. Bright red was combined with black. Turquoise was used alone or with a hint of purple; purple was mostly used alone or with a little black/dark grey. Yellow and orange were used both alone. The blue colours were either used alone or in combination with white. The use of colours has made the fairs and exhibitions more enjoyable for me; luckily the noise level has also come down considerably over the years.

Many of the fairs have been in Hannover, Germany, like this year's EuroBlech 2008. This is the West Entrance we used, and Hall 27 is one of the really big halls.

The fair area is huge. This Promenade is 900 m long and there are 400 trees planted there.

All the trees have labels with their name on it:

This is the same tree, you can see the blood-red leaves. This place must look wonderful in spring when all the cherry trees and plum trees are covered in blossoms.

This roof was built for the World Exhibition in 2002.

There are four parts like this, each is 39 m x 39 m.

This is a general view between the halls. The halls are 496,000 square meters all together, and the outdoors area is 58,000 square meters. It takes a lot of walking to see everything. Our fair was spread in 7 or 8 halls; there was another fair (Infa 2008) at the same time in other parts of the fair area.

As you can see, the weather was fine for us: not too sunny to make us want to prolong the coffee break; no rain so we could keep dry between the halls and on the way "home" by tram and train.

This is all from the official part of my trip. I will not go into detail about the bending, cutting and joining of sheet metal!