Culture Weekend.

This past weekend was beautiful. Sunny, warmer, and the chance to see some of the important cultural sites of Munich.

On Saturday a group of us went downtown to tour the Munich Residence, the home of the Bavarian Nobility starting in the 1100's or so and running up to the abolition of the monarchy in 1918. This place was a palace. I had walked by one of the sides a couple times before:



Before going in we took a brief stroll around the gardens outside the Residence, which were, unfortunately though understandable, not yet nice and green, all the way over to this memorial to Bavaria's fallen in the World Wars:


"They will rise again"


"Built by Munich (something along these lines) for the 13,000 fallen heroes and sons from the City of Munich 1914 - 1918"



All this was out in front of the Federal Building in Munich:



On to the Residence.

The Residence was constructed in parts over the course of the reigns of the various kings, dukes, and electors of Bavaria. Partially destroyed in the war, most of the palace has been restored with varying degrees of completeness. For example, there were a series of rooms depicting the seasons, elements, or some other set of things in ceiling paintings. The ceilings center painting was usually the focal point and depicted most clearly the rooms theme. Each of the center paintings in all of these "themed" rooms were beyond restoration and today only blank spaces remain:



Schade. What a pity.

Much of the palace survived the war or was reconstructed faithfully in the 1950's and 60's. These rooms were magnificent.




This long hallway is the "Antiquarium". It had a bunch of busts of, from what I could tell, Caesars:



Another hallway was lined with portraits of the various off-shoots of the royal family tree:



Included among those family roots was buddy Charlemagne. He was a Frank.

They also really really loved porcelain, for some reason. There were several rooms devoted to displaying the royal collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Apparently the Europeans couldn't figure out how to make it for a long while and the Asian imports became quite valuable. Here's a cool thing:



To think that people lived in this place once! Crazy! In addition to the Residence is the treasury, but we didn't have time to go in and check it out. I'll do that later though; don't you worry.

On Sunday I went to the Alte Pinakothek with Sam and a bunch of folks from his Bible study. The guy who leads it gave us a little tour; it was pretty cool and very interesting. I probably would not have paid as close attention if I were there on my own and that would have been a terrible shame as late medieval artwork has a lot of really cool detailed scenes. A lot of the times they will tell a story (like the life of Christ, for example) by combining images altogether on the canvas or by depicting a large image (like the healing of a crippled man) with the late outcome in the background (the man walking down the stairs out of the cathedral). I liked it a lot.

The Alte Pinakothek is one of three, alongside the Neue Pinakothek and the Pinakothek der Moderne. I will get to all of them eventually, especially after seeing how impressive the Alte was.

I saw Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait! I looked him right in the eyes.

So that's it, my weekend. This week I begin a little bit of the JYM orientation using my vacation time from work, which is alright since the orientation is only half the day and I'll get to meet all the new kids. Now I'm off to either meet some of them or do some St. Patricks day stuff. We'll see.

Toodles.

Skiing ist der Hammer!

Sorry it's taken so long to post everyone; I'm busy and lazy.

Germany is doing well, I'm glad you asked. I learned a German phrase this week that makes me chuckle, a lot. A slang way to say that something is "really awesome" is to say "Das ist der Hammer", translated as "that is the hammer!" I'm not kidding; it's wacky.

One of my co-workers sent me this blog the other day:

http://nothingforungood.com/

It's about Germany from an American perspective and, from what I've read so far, this guy has covered a lot of things I myself have noticed. His commentary is a little over the top but it's funny and really covers a lot of the cultural nuances over here. I particularly liked the posts about sandwiches, toilets, and this graph:



You should take a look!


On to the pictures.


I went skiing again this past Sunday at Brauneck, a resort in Lenggris near the Austrian border. I had read that this place is a local favorite and much less touristy. I would say they were spot on. It was also cheaper that the Zuspitze; I think I paid half what I did the week before for lunch.

The snow was great and the slopes were really challenging. Most of them were covered in a good deal of loose powder and the more difficult ones had moguls. We skied twice down a black slope, the "difficult" class, which was a good 8 km long. It was so tiring. By the time I reached the bottom, my legs were shaking. I probably skied some 30 km that day. It was sorta unfortunate that we found the long slopes later in the day when we were very tired and being tired really makes your form sloppy but I made it through.

My friend Sam came along, which may have been a mistake, but it was an experience for him nonetheless. He has never ever skied before. I thought this particular place was one of the most difficult places I've ever skied. Add that together and you get a rather challenging first skiing experience. Sam was a good sport about it.

In no order, here are pictures:





We weren't as high up as earlier but the views were just as spectacular. The peaks of this ski area sit on the edge of the foothills so you could look out one direction and see the flat lands and look the other and see the alps going on for miles and miles. The day was spectacular as well, with blue skies and sunshine. I got a little sunburned. All in good fun.

A funny story from getting there: We got on a children train accidentally. Here's Sam in from of it:



Halfway through the train journey the train split up to go to three different end locations. We knew about this ahead of time but, when the time came to change cars, we weren't paying attention and no announcement was made. Someone realized we need to change and we rushed perhaps too quickly from our car to the front car. We jumped through the doors as they closed. As we caught our breaths we started to notice some telling signs that we were in the wrong place. This train was filled with middle school aged kids on their way to a smaller ski resort. As you can see in the above picture, the train was clearly labeled but we were too hurried to pay attention. The thing had teddy bears and flowers all over the inside and out. If we could have taken our time we would have known.

We had to go back a stop, which delayed us an hour, but it wasn't a huge issue. Thank goodness.

These other pictures are from Saturday, when we went exploring around downtown. We went to this modern Japanese products store, which was really wacky, as well as a really neat but rather crowded tea shop. I though it was pretty cool.

We also stopped in a church along the way, called the Asamkirche or the Church of Saint Johann Nepomuk. As you can see, it was really ornate inside.






And it had skeletons. I'm looking forward to seeing more of these old churches because the inside are usually impressive like this one. Sorry I don't have more inside pictures.

Beyond that I've been mostly hanging out doing little things around the StuStadt and whatever else.

We made pork chops the other day.

I also saw Watchmen, in English, on Tuesday night. I thought it was a pretty decent overall, though very very graphic; probably more graphic than reality. The story was pretty cool to follow, but really dense and complicated, which was probably my only issue with the film. It's probably better served in graphic novel form. Also, they used really odd and probably ironic music all throughout the film. If you see it you'll know what I mean; I never expected to hear the song "Hallelujah" in the situation in which it was used for this film. At the end of the day it was worth seeing but, like 300, was better at being an action movie than a profound piece of cinematography. Or more simply, it won't exceed any modest expectations for a superhero movie.

My goodness.

I'm gonna do cultural things this weekend. And sleep. That will be nice.

Take care team.

Skiing On Germany's Top, at 2950 m Above Bremen Level.

I went Skiing today! It was absolutely amazing at this place; I was really blown away. Wow.

Look how happy I was:



Our little day trip out to the mountains began this morning at 6:50, or so, as we waited on the platform for the U-Bahn to arrive. We had a 7:32 train to catch at the Hauptbahnhof and the timing was starting to look tight. We had to wait until about 7:10 for the U-Bahn to arrive and we found ourselves sprinting towards the train, catching it about a minute or less before it left.

Our destination: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, home of the 1936 Winter Olympics and, more importantly, a town at the foot of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak. We bought our passes from a rather irate woman at the ticket office and soon hopped onto another train that would carry us up the mountain. The ride was long and we often stopped for 10 minutes at a time for no particular reason, but at least the scenery was wonderful. At one point we stopped inside a tunnel for at least 15 minutes. I don't know why; it was rather annoying.

In that tunnel we saw a sign denoting the elevation above the city of Bremen. I always thought elevation was done above sea level...

Eventually we made it to the top. After picking up skis and boots and poles we walked outside the lodge to our first magnificent view of the Alps. It was almost overwhelming; I found myself marveling at the scenery the entire time we were on the mountain. It's funny how most of the people around seemed fairly used to it or at least not as impressed as I was. Weird.

In no particualr order, here are some of the best pictures I took:






Wow. That sure beats any ski experience I've had, ever. I'm used to being able to see flat valley all around, along with the bottom of the slope, From the top of the hill. The slopes were also pretty solid, with one run that at 2.9 km long; that's 1.8 mile! On top of that, these particular runs are fairly average compared to some other ones I've seen elsewhere in Germany.

As you've already seen, the weather was beautiful. We were really lucky. At times I was too warm wearing my ski jacket and standing in the sunlight.

Surprisingly, the place was not too crowded, given the weather and the weekend. We never had to wait long for lifts and the hills were never congested. Great.

Speaking of lifts, they had a lot of these rather goofy t-shaped lifts you sat on, sort of like a really long tow-rope. They looked like this:



My only complaint was that these "t-lifts" weren't terribly restful. By the end of the day my legs were getting sore and it would have been wonderful to sit down once in a while, but I'd rather tough it out and ski if I had to choose between.

Overall, a really good experience. The scenery was spectacular, the prices weren't terrible (for a ski slope), and the conditions were great. Never before have I skied on real powdery fresh mountain snow; I don't think they even have snow machines at this place and they can still be open until April. I was impressed as well with my ability to pick skiing up again after having snowbladed for so long. My snowblades at home are much shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable that skis but, after 3 or 4 runs in the skis, I didn't have too much trouble flying down the hills.

I'm looking at doing some more skiing next weekend, in Austria maybe, and, after seeing what skiing is like in this part of the world, I can't wait to head back out.

That's all for now. Remind me to tell you about swimming in an outdoor heated swimming pool sometime. I did that on Saturday.