Merry Christmas 2018!

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate the holiday! I hope Santa brought you all the bricks you asked for.

This picture was taken at the store Cora in France (you can see more about LEGO and Cora here). It’s a brick built version of Santa that’s pretty tall. The store didn’t have a sign about it saying who built it or how many bricks it is made of, but I thought it would make a great post for Christmas day.

So at this store it’s Joyeux Noël! Where I live, it’s Fröhliche Weihnachten!

Either way, happy building!

LEGO Brand Store Review - Cologne, Germany (Köln, Deutschland)

I recently had the opportunity to visit the LEGO Brand Store in Cologne, Germany. Most US LEGO Brand stores I have been to are in malls. This one is in a pedestrian only shopping area. Here’s a picture of the outside.

The front window highlighted a bunch of the new sets out there. From left to right there’s the Vestas Wind Turbine (#10268-1), the James Bond™ Aston Martin DB5 (#10262-1), the Technic Bugatti Chiron (#42083-1), Voltron (#21311-1), and finally the Pop Up Book (#21315-1). I found it interesting that the sets are all some of the larger new ones with only one selling for less than $100. Two of them are from the Ideas line and then two are from the Creator Expert line. These are sets geared towards an older audience. It’s interesting that they are not highlighting Star Wars or other sets geared towards kids since I visited in December 2018 (right before Christmas).

The inside looks like many of the LEGO Brand stores that I have entered in the states. We were greeted by a store worker (speaking German) who gave us a December 2018 store calendar and a LEGO comic book. He asked if my little guy wanted a copy (at least I think that’s what he said) and I responded that he was too little (in English). And you could see that he felt bad for spending that time talking to us in German when we had no idea what he was saying. Poor guy.

The store seemed well stocked and I didn’t see a whole lot of differences in sets being offered in the US. There were a few that I know aren’t on Shop @ Home, but not being near a LEGO Brand store in the US, I don’t know if maybe those sets are being offered at stores only. They were:

-#40251-1: Mini Piggy Bank - a freebie with purchase in the US during the July 2017 season, but available in Europe (according to Brickset) since 26 October 2018 for €14.99.
-#40222-1: Christmas Build-Up - a freebie with purchase in the US back in October 2016, but available in Europe since 3 October 2018 for €9.99.
-#5005156-1: Gingerbread Man - Brickset said you could get it in the US with a purchase in December 2016 and at LEGO Brand stores in the US for 2017 and again they are selling it in Europe and have been since 3 October 2018 for €4.99.

I also looked to see if there were sets available that are no longer available in the US. My only comparison is Shop @ Home. Sets may still be available at US LEGO brand stores or at other retailers like Walmart or Amazon.com. While I didn’t capture everyone of them, there were a few that stood out to me…

-#10253-1: Big Ben - This set just recently went out of stock after a sale on Shop @ Home in the US. It was readily available for €219.99 (compared to $249.99 in the US). At the going Euro to Dollar rate at the time of this posting it works out to almost exactly the same price. Since that price includes Value Added Tax (VAT) and buying it in the US, the price does not include sales tax, it is actually better to get it in Germany (unless you picked it up on sale during the Brick Friday sales)
-#10259-1: Winter Village Station - This set shows out of stock at Shop @ Home in the US as well, but was readily available in Cologne

The pick-a-brick wall had a lot of options. The pricing was €9.99 for the smaller container and €17.99 for the larger container.

Lastly, LEGO Brand Stores often have builds in them. This store included a fan build and a LEGO designer build. The fan build was placed in one of the glass covered boxes around most stores. Most of the boxes in this store had LEGO set builds in them, but one had this fan build of a Christmas scene in a town.

The other build in this store was actually out of Duplo. It was a steam train engine and it was big enough for most younger kiddos to poke their heads into. To get some of the detail like the number on the front, they used System bricks. I think it’s always cool to see some of the bigger sized builds.

So there you have it… not a lot of difference between US LEGO Brand stores. No major sets on sale that aren’t available in the US or weren’t available at some point. And while I didn’t do comparisons on all of the prices, if you factor in sales tax in the US and the exchange rate the pricing isn’t completely awful. If you find yourself in a German LEGO Brand store, pop in for a look!

Happy Building!

The Bugatti Chiron in the Wild...

In case you didn’t see my last post, I’m in the process of building the LEGO Technic #42083-1 Bugatti Chiron. With that being said, I was walking down the street last week and a car caught my eye. It looked very familiar to a Bugatti Chiron, but I figured it couldn’t be. Most people don’t just park their $2.5M+ car right there on the street. I had to go over and take a look.

Okay, maybe I should be a little more specific. If you’ve read the blog, you know that my non-Lego job has taken me to Germany so I had to shut down sales. Living in Europe, my family has done some traveling and recently we took a couple days to go to the Alsace region of France. While there, we stopped in Strasbourg for the Christmas Market (if you’re an American and you celebrate Christmas and you have never been to a true European Christmas Market, they are pretty cool). Strasbourg happens to be near Molsheim, France (about 20 minutes away) and Molsheim is where the Bugatti factory is located.

Back to the car… no it wasn’t just sitting there. It was in a glass enclosed case and there was a security guard outside as well. None the less, it was still the real deal. I never thought I would see a Bugatti Chiron up close and personal or at least as close as the glass would let me. I talked to our host at the B&B we stayed at and he said Bugatti factory tours are only available for car buyers and friends of workers. Good luck getting to see inside the factory.

Back to the car… Next to the car was a sign.

The sign is in French on the left, German in the middle, and English on the right. In case you can’t read the picture I posted, it reads:

“We are proud of our company roots in Molsheim, about 25 km away from Strasbourg,
where our headquarters are still today.

In 1909 Ettore Bugatti founded our company here in Alsace, and to this day Bugatti
represents the pinnacle of the automotive world.

Like the Strasbourg Christmas market we combine tradition with a clear vision.

All qualities and know-how of our company accumulated in 110 years of our existence are
contained in each and every one of the only 500 BUGATTI CHIRON going to be built..”

The sign then gives some of the stats on the vehicle.

Engine:
-8 Litre 16-Cylinder-engine
-4 turbochargers with Bugatti 2-stage turbocharging

Power:
1,500 HP (6,700 U/min)

Torque:
1,600 Nm (2,000 - 6,000 U/min)

Acceleration:
0 - 100km/h 2.4 sec (that’s roughly 0 to 60 mph)
0 - 400 km/h 32.6 sec (that’s roughly 0 to ~250 mph)

Vmax:
420 hm/h (electronically limited) (or around 260 mph)

Enough blabbing, here are a few more pics of the car. The front was white and the back was a navy blue or darker blue type color. The blue color looks similar to the blue of the LEGO version.

So I wouldn’t be interested in this vehicle if it weren’t for the LEGO version. I’m not a gear head, but I’m a huge fan now that I have a LEGO version and was super excited to actually see one of these.

But that’s not all…

If you purchased the set you saw this picture in the instruction manual.

It’s a picture of the actual car and the LEGO version with an offset in front of the Château St. Jean in Molsheim, France.

On our drive home from the Strasbourg area, I was conversing with my Non-LEGO Spouse (NLS) and talking about Bugatti and how the plant was nearby somewhere. Using the power of the internet she looked it up and told me it was about 2 minutes away. So we came upon a traffic circle, I went straight instead of turning and…

Tah-dah! Okay, we had to take a few passes to get the picture just so, but thankfully it was a Sunday and there wasn’t a lot of traffic. So there’s the full building. Just no cars in front.

Here’s a sign near the Château.

We figured the factory had to be close by and sure enough it was. We hit a traffic circle and took a different exit and saw the factory. It’s not very big although if you’re only building 500 of a vehicle and you probably take your time building it, you don’t need a big facility. We didn’t take pictures of the signs in French telling us it was private property and to not trespass. We just took our pictures and turned around. My NLS questioned why the workers didn’t have better cars. My guess is the employee discount doesn’t take much off the $2.5M price tag.

Hope you enjoyed some additional info on the Bugatti Chiron. I don’t think I’ve seen a set review or LEGO blog yet that showed pictures of the actual car or the factory. I’ll claim to be the first to include pictures of both in a LEGO review.

Happy building!

LEGO at the Deutsches Museum - Munich, Germany

One of the great things about being an American living in Europe is the chance to see a lot of places you’ve never been to before without having to fly across an ocean to get there. I recently got back from a road trip with my family to see a few places and one of those stops was to Munich, Germany or München as it translates into German. While there, my family stopped at the Deutsches Museum to walk around. It was an interesting museum that had enough to keep my kiddos interested and it had some English translations too for those of us who can’t speak German.

One of the sections of the Museum was the Technical Toys area. As expected it included LEGO. The picture here is Godtfred Kirk Christiansen who was the third child of Ole Kirk Kristiansen. He was also the managing director of the LEGO Group for many years. You can read more about him on the LEGO website here. According to the museum exhibit and Google Translate it says that he was the “inventor of Lego-plastic construction kits.”

The LEGO article has some information I had never heard of. The “10 Lego Characteristics” are spot on. I definitely think they met their goal. Good thing they decided to go away from wooden toys. Otherwise, where would we be?

The museum display had some bricks placed in some fun designs, but more importantly it had some of the boxes from the very first LEGO System sets. Even better, some of the boxes are in German. The box towards the upper right corner says “System im Spiel.” Google Translate says it means “system in the game,” but a spielplatz is a playground so I’m pretty sure it is system of play or something similar.

I think the museum could use some AFOLs to help beef up the displays they have. While the designs are good, they could use some new designs. Maybe some German architecture?

It was hard to get good pictures of the boxes from behind the glass display case, but here is one of the boxes. I looked it up on Brickset and I think it is 311-4: Airplanes from 1961. Am I right? Maybe some LEGO history experts can help me out here.

Interestingly enough right next to the LEGO display was IDEMA. I took some pictures because I wasn’t familiar with this toy at all and I couldn’t read the German next to the display. The best I could find was a website from Portugal that says it was a German building toy started post World War II made of Bakelite. I had to look Bakelite up as well… it’s a kind of plastic. Anyways, IDEMA did not catch on and ended up fading away in the 1970s. Looks like part of the reason it didn’t catch on was competition from LEGO. Hard to say as I couldn’t find a lot of info on it. Here are a few pictures to include a mug shot of its German inventor Josef Dehm. Here is the website I found which looks like it is Portuguese. The site has a good picture comparison picture between IDEMA bricks and LEGO bricks. You’ll also notice a a version of London’s Tower Bridge which isn’t quite as detailed as set 10214-1, but still is pretty impressive.

And finally a Ferris Wheel along with a few other builds out of this toy. Interesting stuff. I had never heard of IDEMA before. It might be that the toy didn’t make it out of Europe so we never saw it in the States. I don’t know. If you’re in Munich and you have some free time, check the Deutsches Museum out.

Brick le France - with beaucoup de retired sets

If you’re an American AFOL, you’ve probably glanced at notices for new sets and have seen pricing in other countries listed. You’ve probably also seen AFOLs from around the world complaining about how sets are priced in their country as compared to US prices. As an American AFOL living in Germany, I figured I would take a look to see what I could learn.

Before I go into a specific example, I wanted to point out a difference in taxes. In the states, depending on where you are, you pay a sales tax. This tax is priced in after you make the purchase. So LEGO sets its retail price (or Walmart, or Amazon.com, etc.) and then you pay an additional percentage at checkout. In Europe, from what I’ve seen, the Value Added Tax or VAT is built into the price. Your receipt tells you how much the item actually was and what you paid in VAT. So keep that in mind for those Americans who forget the sometimes 8% to 10% sales tax that gets added onto purchases.

Back to my main point… I stopped at a Cora store in France a few weeks back. For those of you in the US who have never been, Cora is kind of like a Walmart only the one I went to was much nicer than a Walmart. While there, I of course had to check out the LEGO selection.

First off they had a lot of retired Collectible Minifigures, but not the current Harry Potter Collectible Minifigure series.

As you can see from the pictures, they had the Ninjago movie minifigures still on sale for €3.99 each. These were released back in August 2017 in the EU and apparently they still have them at retail price. Next you can see the Batman Movie Series 2 minifigures. These were released in the EU on 1 January 2018 and Cora had them for €3.50 which is less than the original retail of €3.99. Finally they had the Series 18 minifigures for €3.50. They were released back in April and again Cora had them for less than retail. I’m wondering if this is a trend in Europe or an anomaly. At Walmart or Target, usually collectible minifigures go fast so I was surprised to see so many options

Next up were a few City sets.

You can see #60104-1 - Airport Passenger Terminal - Retired in France in November 2017. Retail was €99.99, but selling for €94.99. Also #60051-1 - High-Speed Passenger Train - Retired in France in June 2018 and selling for €10 under retail. #60052-1 - Cargo Train is right next to it. It retired in June and they still have it selling at the original retail price. The last one I’ll mention is #60103-1 - Airport Air Show which retired in France back in January 2018. I have no idea on pricing from the picture I took because the label does not match the set. Anyways, interesting to see some retired sets still out there.

I didn’t go nuts taking pictures of all of them and I didn’t buy any either, but one that stood out was #75105-1 Millennium Falcon. It retired in France back in January 2018 and was done in the US back in November 2017. It was still at Cora and there were multiple copies. I know I have seen the price of that set going up on BrickLink.com and I may have been one of the sellers of those a few months back.

If any Americans are reading this, should I have bought some of the retired sets you can’t find in the states anymore? Even with the exchange rate of around $1.20 to the Euro, would it be worth it? What do you think?

A Visit to Gartenschau Kaiserslautern and the Awesome LEGO Display (Summer 2018)

As an American AFOL living in Europe, I had to store some of my collection back in the USA and I have relied on reading fan sites and listening to the Bricks King podcast to stay in tune with the hobby.  My NLS and I decided to take our kiddos to a park and I ended up hitting the jackpot.  The Gartenschau (Google Translate says it means "garden show”) Kaiserslautern is what my kids refer to as the dinosaur park.  It has lots of great garden areas surrounded by large sculptures of dinosaurs.  It also has a lot of playground equipment for kids and a bunch of other things to do.  Here is the link to the site if you want more info (it's in German, but Google Chrome asks if I want to translate it).

As we walked into the park, we saw a sign advertising a LEGO display so we went into the building where it was located.  And then I started to drool...  Wow!  It is advertised as creations and builds from builders from Germany and Luxembourg and boy is it ever.  There were glass cases stacked with MOCs and sets from LEGO.  Then there were huge display areas with some giant creations.  At the end was a kid play area with LEGO System bricks, DUPLO, and some large toddler friendly rubberized LEGO bricks.  To top it off, there was a LEGO store with some sets on sale (that wasn't open when I was there).  The display is on site until the garden closes at the end of October 2018 (not sure it comes back regularly or not).  If you're in the area, definitely check it out.  If not, here are a few pictures of what is there.  The lighting is not super great for pictures so my phone didn't capture the best shots for a website (sorry).  

You'll notice in the one case on the top left there is a brick build sign that says Lauter Steine EV.  This is a LUG in the local Kaiserslautern area that is connected to a LUG in Luxembourg (per LEGO's web site).  

A few more display cases... I won't show them all, but you get the idea.  

There were also a few MOCs of existing buildings.  This first one is of St. Michael's Basilica in Mondsee, Austria.  Here's a link to an Austrian web site with a picture of it.  As an AFOL, I wish they had more info about the builder, some of the techniques used to build it, total brick count, etc.  You know, all those geeky AFOL things that we're into.  I realize the display is meant for non-AFOLs so it's all good.

I'm not an expert of the area yet, but I'll find out where these buildings are and post some actual pictures or links.

The Statue of Liberty at around 6 feet tall.  I left the case next to it so you could get an idea of the size.  I also threw a picture in of the train case next to it just because I'm a big LEGO train fan.

Ok... I was not expecting to round the corner and see this on display.  WOW!!!!!  The Cologne Cathedral looks phenomenal.  If you believe the Wiki page I found, it took 2 years and 900,000 bricks to build.  Another site I saw said it was more like 500,000  If anyone can find other references, please let me know.  I could spend a whole post talking about this build, but I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.  If you want to see more, definitely Google it.  There are tons of additional photos and some videos if you want to see more detail and close ups (with better lighting).

The display also includes a few dioramas. Here’s a picture of the pod racing scene from Star Wars episode one..

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but here’s the fight scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi on the moon of Endor.

This picture doesn’t capture the whole scene either, but here is a LEGO Space display.

And of course, they have a giant LEGO city. Here are only a few pictures of the many I took. It’s quite an impressive scene with a farm area, a fairground, a train, a giant town square, construction, and plenty of buildings ranging from MOCs to some of the modular buildings from the Creator Expert line.

I’m hoping they do this setup again next year because it’s awesome! Thanks to my new neighbors in Europe for putting this together!