"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.

"The artist must train not only his eye, but his soul."

I had a forced vacation today. This weekend is Carnival in the Catholic world, a holiday that a lot of people take here in Germany. I was going to be the only one in the office and that's not allowed, so I had to take the day off. I certainly didn't mind.

Before I get into today I wanted to share some pictures with you, from downtown Munich.

This is the "Rathaus" on Marienplatz, which is sort of the city center I guess. It is a central shopping area. "Rathaus" means "city hall" in German; I've always enjoyed the fact that the word "rat" is in there, even though it means something entirely different in German.


Here's another view from Marienplatz with one of the many ornate churches in the area and the statue of probably King Ludwig, which sits at the center of Marienplatz. The churches around Marienplatz are sandwiched between shops and restaurants.


For Carnival this weekend they decorated a bit:



I thought that was pretty cool.

Speaking (or writing) of Carnival, I'm going up for some Carnival-ing tomorrow in Cologne. Should be pretty interesting, I hope, and it will be my first use of the trains here in Europa. Hooray!

Back to today. There have been these signs all around advertising a Kandinsky exhibit at the Lenbachhaus and today, with the vacation time that had been so nicely given to me, I decided to go check it out.



The Lenbachhaus is this neat art museum here in Munich and they, together with the Guggenheim in New York and the Pompidou thingy in Paris, put a bunch of Kandinsky works together to show. This is the building:



Also this:


The whole thing was pretty neat I thought. Kandinsky was pretty much the father of modern painting, more or less, and it was interesting to see how his work progressed
over time, becoming more and more independent of any recognizable form, beyond geometric shapes and lines. Someone told me Kandinsky could hear color.

If you don't know much about him go check out Kandinsky on Wikipedia and/or give him a Google search. I particularly liked this one, called "Moscow I":


Notice the Bavarian couple in the middle. The color was a lot more vivid in real life.

For Carnival tomorrow I tried to find a classic Bavarian hat to wear in Cologne; apparently they find the Bavarians pretty funny. Todd Bauknecht has one. Unfortunately, my is is just a bit bigger than the average Bavarian head and I could not find any hats that fit well. We went to three or four different traditional Bavarian clothing stores and none of them had anything that fit me. Hat's have always been too small for me so I wasn't too surprised, just disappointed. I will find one before I leave in August. I might even by some Lederhosen.

A couple people told me that Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. I think that's probably true.

Later this evening I went and sang Karaoke with some of the Germans on the 5th floor. One of the guys has a program on his computer for Karaoke and we hook it up to the sound system in the communal room. There were only 5 of us there but that hasn't ever hampered the fun. They really seem to love the whole singing thing; I want to try and get them to try it for real sometime, if I can find a Karaoke bar around here.

That about wraps up a particularly image-filled little post for you. When I get back from Cologne I'll have more exciting pictures and such.

Goodnight.

It's Really European Over Here

Blog time!

It's been a rather hectic week so far getting settled in and meeting people and such and I still haven't figured everything out, but I'm getting there. As I write I'm working towards doing laundry, which is a little trickier than back home and I need to be careful not to ruin my clothes. That might be a bit drastic.

Anyway, I figured I would try to at least write down the big things of the past week to get caught up with where I should be here in blog-land. The one thing that always foils my attempt to write something is the clash between my desire to be detailed and my need to be doing a million things at once. This means I want to take my time but also don't. As such, I may skip over details and come back some other time, all in the name of finishing. Let's get started, shall we?

We landed last Sunday in Munich fairly early in the morning and took a taxi over to the hotel. We would come to learn that we spent way too much money on the taxi and could have instead taken the subway and train right to the hotel. Of course we didn't know that at the time.

The hotel was very nice and in a fairly central "businessy" location. The beds were really soft.

After dropping off our stuff, my dad and I hit the subway to go check out the surroundings. We first went up to the StudentenStadt (Student Village auf Deutsch) where I would be living, but I couldn't move in until Monday as my room was still occupied. I'll put up a picture soon. It snowed most of the morning and everything was pretty dead all over. Sundays in Bavaria are pretty low key, with only restaurants open (if that) and not too many people walking around. It wasn't terribly exciting but we at least got a chance to learn the city a little bit.

I started work on Monday in the town of Garching b. Munich just north of town on the U-Bahn (the subway). The office is fairly new and sits on the outskirts of town in sort of an industrial park type area. All around there is rural farm-ish land. This company, Jacobs, is a U.S. company that does construction and other technology consulting, though this particular office designs automotive wind tunnels, like the one for BMW I got to see later that week. Incidentally, they also have an office in Southfield MI that serves the industrial life-blood of sunny Detroit. The office is small and half American, which helps my getting adjusted. The Americans have funny sounding American accents in German.

Work was sorta slow all week (as I've come to expect), though by Friday I was at least doing grunt work for them. They had a proposal to send off today so I was in charge of printing and assembling two 3" binders full of appendices. They had another one full of livers. It actually wasn't too bad and it did keep me occupied.

Enough work for now though.

Side note: There are 3 washing machines in this entire building. Ridiculous.

Munich has been pretty cool so far. My dad and I ate in a couple German restaurants and we even had Doener for lunch one day (that's a Turkish thing kinda like shiwarma or maybe a gyro). Yes, we did go to the Hofbräuhaus. Downtown there are loads of old buildings and new buildings and big churches and such, all very European feeling. When I have some pictures ready I'll put them up somewhere. Be patient.

On Wednesday morning my dad headed back home. Despite the snow storms he made it back alright.

I feel like this is a decent place to stop for now; maybe I'll do more later today. I will, at least, leave you with this picture:


This is the bedspread they provided me. No mistake, it's light blue with flowers on it. Hilarious.

Tchuss.