Beer, Wurst, and Michael Jackson

Last weekend we finally broke the seal on Germany with a trip to Munich.

We got in very late and were a bit concerned about figuring out train connections into town. It turns out that this was a well founded concern, but a friendly fellow passenger took pity on us and got us onto the proper trains. Following the exit signs at the Munich station brought us to an elevator straight out of a Michael J Fox movie from the eighties, where he gets separated from his school trip and mistaken for a spy and has romantic hijinks while helping an attractive East German teenager defect. We had a few wrong turns on the way to he hotel but eventually made it.

Our first major site was the Residenz museum and treasury. Usually treasuries do very little for us, but this one was very well laid out and cool. It's amazing how ornate religious work was back in the day, and seeing the fine detail up close was impressive. We also discovered that St George (the patron saint of pretty much everywhere) was probably fake. As his patron-saint-of-everywhere-ness is a running gag between Mary and I, this was a pretty astonishing discovery.

The palace itself was interesting, though mostly just huge with ninety rooms (many of which were reconstructions.) As Mary said, the problem with palaces that model themselves after Versailles is that once you have seen Versailles, they tend to get a little same-y. Do your own thing, palaces! Fight palace peer pressure!

After a lunch break of wurst (served with fries and a delicious curry ketchup) we headed off for a self-guided city walk. This took us by several cool churches and a city museum. We are usually fans of these local history museums, but this one was a bit stuffy and lacked good English descriptions. We also did a tower climb, as we are wont to do, and got some great views of the city. The tower was also fairly recently reconstructed, though it still had staircases that really couldn't handle the two-way traffic they were accommodating.

Old buildings in Munich are odder than usual, because almost all of the city was heavily damaged or destroyed during World War Two. In the Residenz, almost every single room's placard pointed out that it was heavily damaged in the forties and that most of what we were seeing was reconstructions of original rooms and furniture. Each of the churches we visited had photos of the bomb damage, which was quite sobering. It's difficult not to think of all the damage to culturally significant works that was done by our side, but on the other hand...Nazis. Speaking of Nazis, we spent Saturday morning at Dachau. In he interests of keeping this light I won't go into too much on that, other than to say I am very glad we visited. It has a well laid-out museum and several memorials, and was deeply moving and thought provoking. We opted not to take each others' picture by the ovens, unlike one of our co-visitors.

In the afternoon we finished up the rest of our city walk, hitting a few more churches and grabbing some snacks. We also hit a good art museum, and the strangest site of our visit: The Michael Jackson memorial. Apparently he always stayed at the same hotel, and since his death, fans have been leaving offerings in the small part out front. It's bizarre, but touching. We did feel a bit bad for the now ignored composer whose statue was commandeered.

Munich ended up being a great food city. Pretzels and donuts (such good donuts) were plentiful, and dinners were heavily meat-centric. I could see the heaviness of the dinner food getting old on a long trip, but for just a weekend it was great. The beer was also very good, and I could see coming back in the summer to enjoy a few in one of the many beer gardens. At breakfast on our final morning we spotted a waiter carrying a beer on a platter, and watched with great anticipation to see which frat brother or pot-bellied man would get it. We were delighted to see it delivered to a small old German woman reading the paper. Stay awesome, Munich!

London Year One

We have officially lived in London for one year, so it seems like a good time to look back and reflect on some of the plans and questions we had when moving here to see how it's going.

Live British One of my goals for the trip was to attempt to live British. We often hear of folks moving to another country and then looking for the most American experience they can find there. I wanted to at least attempt to live as the locals do. This has lead to many surprises with gas meters and grocery stores, but I do feel that it has added to the adventure of it all. We are doing fairly well on this front. I have gotten used to writing my dates backwards and I think that I am very close to a breakthrough on 24-hour time. We know a few common conversions from F to C and back. We know how to pay on a pub. I know how much one stone weighs (14 pounds, for what it's worth.) Going digital When figuring out what all to bring, I made some bold statements about having less stuff and going digital on more things. We did indeed leave our books behind, and have mostly stuck with e-books on the Kindle (though we can't resist Mary Roach's footnotes and silly pictures in physical form.) I have also (mostly) broken my desire to own physical copies of music media, though I will admit to buying a few CDs from particularly beloved artists. Mostly I have embraced Spotify as a good way to listen to music, though there is a part of me that still wants to run out and buy the physical discs from some of the artists I have discovered there. I had planned to move most of our video watching to streaming, but we've made less progress on that front. Rather than sign up for NetFlix here we went for a local option, though we later found out that Amazon had purchased them. I find that the steaming options are pretty limited, though we do use it when we can (we still get discs for the rest). From hearing friends in the US talk, it seems like limited (legal) options is at least a bit of an issue there as well. Have less stuff Overall we had planned to have less stuff here. On some fronts (books, CDs) that has worked out well, on others less so. Some of the items that we thought we could live without (toaster, microwave) we eventually relented on and bought anyway. Some of our American stuff just fundamentally doesn't work here (lamps, our too large sofa) and so more appropriate local solutions were procured (thank goodness for Ikea). It's unclear how much of this will come back to America wit us, so we'll call this one a wash.

Will we pick up British terms? We all knew that pretentious kid in school who spent two weeks in England one summer and came back with an affected British accent. While we didn't want to be That Guy, I was curious to what extent we would pick up local slang and sayings. We have acquired more than I expected to, but none of the very prototypical ones. Both Mary and I have started saying 'proper' when in America we would say 'real' as in, "It's impossible to find proper American bacon in British restaurants." I have started pronouncing 'weekend' the British way (with the stress on 'end' rather than 'week') which I attribute to all the small talk about weekends one does at work; Mary, conversely, works with very few British people which is why she has not picked this up and mocks me for it. We don't say 'quid' for 'pound', though we do say 'P' instead of 'pence'. While I know when you would use quid since it's almost exactly like using 'buck' for 'dollar', I am so used to saying 'buck' that I just blaze through and use that. I have said 'cheers' exactly once and it still felt very weird (even though I was IMing with a Brit.) How will the cats do? After a few days to get over the trauma of the transportation, the cats are completely unaware that anything has changed.