First, let me explain my busyness. On March 19th orientation began for JYM. Although I work during most of it, I took three days off to participate for the first few days, mostly to learn what I needed to do to sign up for classes and the like. Then, reality attack! "You need to get organized for classes soon Chris Grimm!". Oh dear.
On top of that I started working 9 to 9.5 hours a day from then on at work, to make up for some time I missed early in February here and, more so, because of an unfortunate bout of bad timing and economy. Listen: we have lots of vacation days here in Germany; I have 5 for working two months. Awesome. I wasn't allowed to use any vacation days early in my time here because of a probationary period. Fairly reasonable. When I had to take time off for U-Bahn strikes and such, I couldn't use vacation so I just took sort of an "hours IOU". Normally I could have sacrificed vacation days later to cover this deficit, but with the slowdown worldwide, Jacobs enacted a new rule in Europe that forced everyone to take any vacation time accumulated during the year before the roll-over date April 1st. In Europe you don't hold on to vacation from previous years and, per company policy, if you were to have any left over, you would simply be paid for those hours. Now, however, they got rid of this paying policy in order to get people to work less, and to keep from paying twice. Now they only have to pay for the day of vacation taken instead of paying for a day of work and paying for the "un-taken" vacation. I hope that made sense.
To get back to my point, I now have to work overtime to make up my deficit so that I can quit early next week by taking my two left-over vacation days. How silly.
I will probably do some traveling with the time, which will be nice.
Long story short: I have a bunch of responsibilities all of a sudden and not as much time, energy, and motivation as I did previously with which to keep this bloggy-fellow up to date. Sorry. This will (hopefully) not have any effect on the long term existence and health of the blog, so don't you worry.
Right. So two weeks ago I took off a Thursday and then a Monday and Tuesday to do some orientation with the "new kids". The biggest thing I needed to officially do was learn how to work classes and get my residency permit for living here in Germany. I also wanted to get to know the people with whom I would be taking classes and spending my time here in Germany.
Since then I have gotten to know quite a number of the summer semester people and I like them; they all come from different backgrounds and different parts of the states and they all bring something different to the experience here. Three of them are directly half-German, with a parent having moved from Germany to the US. These people are really good at German and sometimes I find it hard to keep myself from comparing my bumbly awkward German to their fluid accented German and getting frustrated. Oh well.
I have some pictures for you now. On Saturday nobody was doing very much so I decided to go over to the 1972 Olympic Village here in Munich and just walk around. It was one of the first few sunny and warm days that have now become quite prevalent in this fine town.
Here's the tower:
I haven't gone up yet, but on a clear day you can see everything ever from up there. Pretty cool.
The stadiums were all built with this "steel tent" architecture style. Take a look:
The great thing I found in my walk-about was the "Olympia Berg", a hill of sorts that they built on the other side of the lake from the stadiums that affords a fearless climber a really nice view of Munich and the surroundings. The climb is not difficult at all and, from the looks of it, it might be one of the highest places in the city. I want to come back at least twice; the first time on a really clear day when the Alps will be fully visible and at night when the city is lit up. I took a few pictures but the conditions and the size of my camera really don't capture the surroundings well enough.
Tangent! Here's a really nice picture of the Rathaus again:
Later that Saturday a group of us went over to the Paulaner Starkbierfest at the Paulaner Keller Hall. Paulaner is one of the "big 6" Munich breweries. As legend has it the Paulaner monks way back when found a really nifty loophole with which to circumvent the Lenten Fast by brewing a really strong beer with the nutritional content and similar filling ability of several loaves of bread. "Stark" means "strong" in German. One of the side-effects of the added material in the beer is that it also "strong" in the alcohol sense. One should only drink one in the course of a night, lest they find themselves as sloppy as some of the other people there.
Paulaner's Starkbier is called "Salvator":
It's actually pretty tasty too; sweet and filling.
The festival itself was, apparently, a pale reflection of the cheesy German-ish large beer hall events that go on during Oktoberfest. It was certainly worth seeing and enjoying, but got kinda old and felt a bit "touristy" after a while.
They had live music.
The band played a lot of cheesy well-known American stuff, like "YMCA", along with Nena's "99 Red Balloons" in the original German and, rather startling to me, "Sweet Home Alabama". "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually a medley of the classic Lynyrd Skynyrd with Kid Rock's more recent "hit" which sounds to me like Kid Rock ripping off the original and being sad that he didn't actually write "Sweet Home Alabama". The Germans have a terrible taste in music, worse than most Americans. Usually.
So that's one of my weekends. Hopefully I can find the time to tell you about the next few, with Murnau and Regensburg!
Hello Mr. Grimm,
ReplyDeleteSo, though this was the first page that came up in my google search for your blog (At Katie Kool's recommendation - P.S. very descriptive title), it is indeed quite an older entry. That being said, I will soon check out your latest and then figure out what in the world you have been doing all these months away.
Sincerely,
Siew-bee-doo