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Why hello. I’ve got some time to kill on the train to Zurich so I figured I’d try to work at catching up so I can tell you about Switzerland sooner. At the moment I’m writing in Word but I’ll put this on the web when I get the chance.

I register for classes today. I can’t stress enough how amazing a web-based registration is, especially when I hear about the olden days. Plus, I can register for classes from Switzerland. Nifty.

Anyways, the weekend of March 28th and 29th saw the first JYM day-trip outing into the wide world of Bavaria. This time, the destination was Murnau, a little town south of Munich known for its ties to early Nazism and as the summer home of Kandinsky before The Great War. It was here that Kandinsky and his friends were inspired to paint the works of the now famous “Blue Rider” group and kick off a new direction in painting.

Our trip began in the late morning on Saturday with an hour or so train ride into the small town. After leaving the train our guide and JYM professor, Patrica Thill, took us on a bit of a hike/stroll through down to the Staffelsee, through the village, and out to the marshes surrounding the town. It was sunny and warm as we began our trek; the first hint of springtime. Here is a picture of the lake:


And the village:





I really enjoy how quaint and nice these little villages are. They’re not spread out and separated like a subdivision or suburb but rather are grouped together and have more of a community feel.

Here’s the house where Kandinsky and Müller and a few others spent their pre-war summers:



We then worked our way out of town for a bit to see the marshes and mountains.







It doesn’t look like it, but the ground out there was really wet and squishy; trust me, I walked out on it.

For lunch we stopped by this nice and plain little church. I had sausages and kraut. Yum.



They were having a wedding at this church after we left.

As we ate we had the chance to watch a group of kids, probably ten or fifteen of them all around 7 or 8, I would say, send a bunch of messages into the sky tied to balloons. The balloons were all yellow smiley faces. It was neat yet somewhat odd to watch; we had no idea what they were doing or for what particular reason. I tried to take a picture, but it’s not very good:



They took us into town, but by this point it was rainy and overcast and, in typical Bavarian fashion, most things had closed for the afternoon.



The main “attraction” in town was this little museum where we spent about an hour or so before heading back to Munich. We looked mainly at the artwork they had as well as an exhibit dedicated to a local writer who, before his death, was a vocal but indirect critic of rising Nazi sentiments. I would have liked to check out some of the natural history exhibits they had in the lower levels, but there just was not time.


Later that evening we went out to a Belgian French-fry restaurant in the university area. This place is noteworthy for having twenty-something different sauces for the fries, ranging from ketchup to mayonnaise to a spicy “samurai” sauce. Not bad for a quick snack and not too expensive.

The rest of the weekend was fairly low key, which was a nice rest for me having been sick for the past few days. Plus, with 4:00 church, I can sleep in on Sundays.

I think I might try and write another entry with another half an hour or so to Zurich. Bis bald!

I Worried That This Might Happen

Hey team, sorry I've been so lax with updating the ol' blog of late; I've found myself really really busy in the past two weeks. A lot has happened and I imagine that catching up is going to take a few posts, so bear with me.

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!

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.

The Hills are All Snowy; They Make Me Want to Ski!

I have a half day tomorrow. The subway works are striking all day and there's really no other effective way for me to get to work. I do need to go over to BMW and see the wind tunnel again, which I can do by bus, but after that, I'm done for the week. Awesome.

Let me tell you about my business trip.

On Tuesday I went on a business trip in a foreign country. It was pretty easy to get there, having started in a foreign country to begin with. Ha. The place was this factory that makes lifts for car dealerships and test equipment for research facilities. We went to go look at some test equipment they had proposed to build for a climatic wind tunnel we are designing for a company in Sweden. A climatic wind tunnel simulates weather, like snow and rain and such.

The factory was situated out in the middle of nowhere Bavaria in the foothills of the alps. Inside there were a bunch of funny little rooms in and around the offices and manufacturing space. One of these rooms was a little bar with an old-timey wooden interior. On one wall hung a picture of "Mad" King Ludwig of Bavaria, the guy who built a bunch of crazy castles over a hundred years ago, and on the other, a picture of John Wayne. Their cafeteria also had very traditional-looking wooden chairs and tables. Quaint.

The meeting was tough for me to sit through, knowing very little about the equipment from the start and having to try and muck my way through specific technical German. My conversational German is getting better, but talking about cooling and ventilating motors in German is an entirely different beast. I survived.

As we finally left to head home late that afternoon, the two guys who had brought me along informed me that we were taking a scenic route home. The two guys were Steve and Klaus, by the way. Steve is an American, with a very goofy American accent in German, and Klaus is a German, with a very funny German accent in English. Both fairly friendly.

The aforementioned "scenic route" involved driving south through the foothills of the Alps to see the cute little Bavarian towns and the little bit of countryside we could see through the fog and snow. On a clear day the drive would have been absolutely majestic, I imagine, but we had to imagine most of the mountains surrounding the road because of the fog. We even stopped at Neuschwanstein Castle, the famous Disney-inspiring castle built by King Ludwig. You really could not see much at all. Here's me with the castle, if you can see it at all:



We could have driven closer, but Steve's dinky little car probably would not have been able to make the ascent. Going to Neuschwanstein is a staple of the German tourist experience, so I will definitely be back in fair weather.

The snow was really fantastic. In some places it got up to a meter and a half. Another picture perhaps:



Absolutely wonderful. Everything was so simple and alpine in and around the villages. It reminded me of the big ski resorts in the states, though every single little bit of what I saw was completely authentic and not a cheesy replication. The ski resorts at home should probably remind me of here.

We stopped for dinner before leaving the Alps. As I'm told, most of these villages have their own special beer, a tradition dating back to the time when monasteries were everywhere in the mountains. Monks used to make a lot of booze back in the day.

My goodness do I want to go skiing now. It looks like it will happen too; I've got a trip to Austria in the works and a couple day-trip possibilities on the horizon. I'm gonna go Alpine Skiing! For real.

"If we get up now, we can catch the afternoon"

This'll be short, but I wanted to make another little post.

I slept until 4:00 or so on Sunday and took it easy for most of the time after that. Later that evening I went up to hang out with Ben Schmitz, this German guy I've hung out with a couple times. His English is a not great but that means I speak German with him most of the time. I need to speak more German here.

He gave me some German music that has so far been pretty good. I particularly like this band, Juli:



Ben is a music student here in Munich and, as he was telling me, the music school here occupies the building previously used in 1938 for the Munich appeasement conference, before the outbreak of World War II. Below this building there is a network of tunnels and bunkers Hitler had built in case he were in Munich and needed to take refuge from a gas attack. The tunnels apparently span much of the city and, as the story goes, people have gotten lost in there in the past and died. Freaky. Anyway, because they want to keep out all the Neo-Nazis only musical school students are allowed into the depths of the building but Ben was going to see about showing me around in a weekend or two. Sounds pretty cool. Apparently Hitler's bedroom is still intact down there somewhere along with some engraved graffiti made by Allied soldiers while occupying the city. I'm looking forward to it.

I thought I'd write that down quickly. Sorry about no pictures but I did at least leave a song.