Last week the Bundestag-Mobil made a stop at the Epinayplatz in Oberursel.  The Bundestag-Mobil is basically a lorry that expands to form a mobile exhibition about the workings of the Bundestag.

The Bundestag-Mobil on the Epinayplatz in Oberursel

Inside there is an impressive backlit photo of the glass dome that sits on top of the Reichstag building in Berlin, and a number of terminals to access the Bundestag website.  At one end a monitor shows the current debate in the main parliament chamber. Read the rest of this entry »

We discovered Bonjour Provence!  last year during the Hessentag in Oberursel when they had a stall in the Strackgasse.  The stall sells products from the South of France that have been either hand-made or produced in smaller companies.  They also have an on-line shop.

Yesterday they took up a permanent base in the Strackgasse when they opened their new shop there (at Strackgasse 9). Read the rest of this entry »

A joint announcement was made at the Rathaus in Oberursel yesterday, and you could tell how important it was by of the number of people present.  Representatives of 5 political parties, the school, the town, local residents, and even the mayor got together to announce a compromise had been reached on the location for the new FIS sports hall.

The project started two years ago when Frankfurt International School (FIS) in Oberursel held a competition to design a new sports hall.  The winning entry would have probably been the easiest to build, as it was outside the current campus and would have been located diagonally opposite the main entrance at the Waldlust, next to the Hans-Rother-Steg.

Except that this location had its opponents.  For a start there were the local residents in that road who already have to contend with the traffic that the school generates.  They collected over 900 signatures against the plan.

But there were also a number of groups who were opposed to the forest being cut down to make space for the building.

This particular area of forest is called a Schutzwald, ie. a forest that enjoys a certain level of protection because it performs a specific function, such as preventing landslides or for water management.

And so it was, that in the past months all of these groups, along with the parties from the town’s parliament, have sat down at a so-called “round table” to discuss the options available.

A number of options were on the table, and the school evaluated each of them on criteria such as security for the campus, accessibility, but also for their environmental impact and whether they could also reduce the daily traffic load that the roads around the school have cope with. Read the rest of this entry »