The Lion Report

While I’m not yet a European or German dining expert, I’ve been to enough restaraunts and biergartens by now to compile quite a considerable list of minor and major differences from dining here and in the US. The differences range from minor changes in the way the bills are calculated, to obvious cultural differences between the continents.

But first, a couple more quick points about the blog. If you’re reading this from the front page of the blog, hopefully you noticed that the page loaded faster. But you will also notice that the older posts are now truncated - no worries, though. It’s all there. Now the front page will just shows the first paragraph or two of the longer posts, so just click on “More” or the title of the post to see the full post and leave comments. Also, on the front page of thalions.com there are now links to this and Alisha’s blogs, so if you lose or can’t remember this address, just go to thalions.com.

NOW, onto the food!

Let’s start with the basics - seating and server ettiquite. For most cafes, bars, biergartens and smaller restaraunts, the seating is all self-serve. No waiting for a hostess, just grab what you see. I went to a giant biergarten last week that was very busy and might have been considered “up-scale”, and we were seated there, because otherwise I think you would have been lost in the crowd. But for the most part, after you seat yourself, it is up to you to get the attention of the server; they will not come running over to you as soon as they see they have new patrons. Along the same lines, you will not get a “how’s everything taste? Can I refill your xxx?” in the middle of the meal. If you need anything else, you’ll have to flag them down, and it’s not considered rude to doso. Then at the end of the meal, they will not bring you your bill automatically - again, it’s something you have to ask for. This can be rather nice sometimes, but can be a pain if you’re in a hurry.
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Not anything new to report, just some updates to the blog and site. First, the URL has changed yet again to thalions.com/blogs/joe, but all the old address automatically redirect to the new address, so you don’t neccessarily have to update your bookmarks. But if you find any links or pictures that are broken because of the URL changes, please leave a comment and let me know and I’ll fix it.

But the more fun news is that I’ve added a photo gallery! You can find the link at the top of this page, or on the link list on the right side, or by clicking here. I will keep the gallery up to date with pictures I take in my travels, and I will still use samples of them in my posts. The gallery already has several albums, including lots more pictures of the city of Munich and more from the rides I did last week.

[warning: entering geek mode] If you’re interested in how the gallery is set up, continue reading - otherwise, enjoy perusing the gallery. As I reported earlier, I switched to Wordpress for my blogging system, because I found some excellent plug-ins. I have also always been a big fan of Gallery for my online photo management, which is what I used for our wedding photo gallery. There is a new version of Gallery out (creatively named Gallery2) that has a whole new backend and is finally database driven. But more importantly, I found another great Wordpress plug-in that integrates a Gallery2 gallery directly into a Wordpress blog, so that’s what I did, and after some configuration difficulties (which led to the new URL configuration, actually) I got it all set up and it works great. What’s more, I found a plug-in for iPhoto (which I use now, on my Mac) where you can resize and upload photos straight into Gallery2 from iPhoto, so I can take pictures, import them into iPhoto, upload to Gallery2 and make a new blog post all in one seamless action!!!! Whew, I’m all geek-ed out for tonight.

UPDATE: See full photo-gallery of Perlacer Forst here

For those of you who don’t sprechen sie duetsch (or l√∞ fran√flais …. or el espan√≥l), the title of this post is commending Lance Armstrong’s outstanding final time trial victory earlier today, which will pave the way for him to ride into Paris tomorrow to claim his 7th consecutive Tour de France win. Helluva feat, and an excellent performance today. The time trial was great to watch, as Lance was down to Iban Basso, who has been in 2nd overall in the race for a couple weeks, at the first time check, but proceeded to blow by everyone, winning the stage and beating local hero (here in Germany, that is) Jan Ullrich by 23 seconds. It was a heartbreaking performance for Michael Rasmussen, who has been riding in 3rd place overall for some time now. Going into the stage, he had 2:12 on Ullrich in 4th, and as Ullrich is a former time trial world champion, Rasmussen was going to have to have a perfect ride to keep that gap open over the 55km time trial to stay on the podium. He had anything but a perfect ride, though, experiencing 2 crashes and 4 bike changes….. he slipped to 7th overall in the race, and Ullrich jumped into 3rd overall.

In the time trial, there were 4 Americans in the top 8, and there will be 3 Americans in the top 10 overall after tomorrow’s (mostly ceremonial) stage ending in Paris. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming years with Lance retiring. Not that cycling is by any means popular in the US, but at least with Lance’s fame, people were aware when the Tour was going on, and whenever Lance took the lead. Not to mention, it’s on OLN 23 hours a day, and a lot this year on Discovery Channel/TLC due to Discovery Channel taking over sponsorship from USPS for Lance’s team. But I don’t think the other 3 or 4 big Americans in the race, George Hincappie, Bobby Julich, and Floyd Landis, have what it takes to be the “next Lance”, and will therefore probably never become household names in the US. Tyler Hamilton might have had that opportunity, and he got a following during and after last year’s tour because he came off as a completely humble and all around “good guy”, but he got busted for doping, so he’s 1) out of cycling for a couple years, and 2) out of the running for ever being an iconic figure in American sports.
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So if you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve notice the overhaul in the look and feel of this blog. (If you’re not at least a semi-geek, the rest of this paragraph won’t interest you in the least, so feel free to skip to the next one) I mentioned earlier I wasn’t happy with blogger.com, and was experiemeting with several other blogging tools. Of the 5 I tested, I wasn’t completely happy with any of them, mainly because they all lacked one vital feature: the ability to upload and insert images and thumbnails directly into a post. They all had that feature in one way or another, but you either had to do the thumbnail creation yourself, or do the upload via a seperate FTP program, or something. So I thought I was going to go with b2evolution, but then I stumbled upon an outstanding set of plug-ins for WordPress, another system I was looking at. These plug-ins did exactly what I was looking for, so I immediately chose WordPress. If anyone else is interested in setting up a blog for any reason, I would recommend WordPress. The installation is rediculously simple, and there are ample plug-ins and themes to choose from.

So you may have noticed (but probably not), the address of this page has changed to blogs.thalions.com/joe. You may want to update any bookmarks you had for the old address, thalions.com/joe/blog. You don’t have to, through, because all traffic to the old address is automatically routed to this new address, so you can safely use either URL. UPDATE - The URL has changed once again to joelion.com.

If you’re curious, the picture on the header of this page was taken by a co-worker last week while they were on their department team event - a hike in the Alps. My previous post details my team event, a bike ride through the foothills. Our bike ride did not produce any stunning photo-ops like the hike did, so I’m including here some other pics from the hike that our co-workers shared. Note that I haven’t actually been to these places yet, but you can bet that I will soon!

UPDATE: Click here to see the full gallery of views of the Alps. Below are some samples.

Hope you enjoy the new blog. There may be some changes coming yet, especially to the sidebar on the right and the header, so don’t worry if some of the links don’t work or if it’s cluttered - I’ll take care of it in due time!

UPDATE: See full photo gallery of the ride here.

OK, after much stalling (an entire week’s worth actually), I’ll finally post about the bike ride I did last week in the Bavarian Alps foothills. After all this time, though, the post may be a bit underwhelming!

So as I’ve mentioned several times already, last Thursday my department at work did a “team event”, which consisted of taking the train south of town and riding in the shadows of the Alps for about 50 miles. We all met at about 8:40AM at an S-bahn (above ground train) near our work place. There were over 40 of us, so we split into two groups, the first group taking the 9:00 S5 train south of town. The outbound trains were pretty empty at this point since most people are commuting into town at that hour. So there was plenty of room for our bikes - in fact, the first and last cars on all the trains are designated as bike-cars, and they have several seat sections removed where you can lean your bikes several deep.
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I would like to take a break from the normal blog and make a serious post. I started to put this in a normal message (about my ride last week), but decided it should have is own post - I will continue as usual tomorrow.

Yesterday, Monday July 18, was not a good day for Women’s Professional Cycling around the world. And seeing as I have quite a vested interest in the sport, I thought I should mention it here. While pre-riding the course for the upcoming Thuringen Rundfahrt (sort of a “Tour of Germany” for women), the entire Australian National Team, aged 20, 23, 22, 20, 27, and 29, was hit head-on by a car, killing one rider immediately and severely injuring all 5 others. The team was descending a hill when a car driven by a newly licensed 18 year old German girl lost control and entered their lane, striking all 6 riders. The rider killed, 29 year old Amy Gillett, was an Olympian in 1996 and was still one of Austraila’s top female riders. The opening stage of the race, scheduled for today, was cancelled and a memoriam was held instead.

This isn’t meant to scare anyone or make them worry even more about cyclists we know and love ourselves, because these accidents happen from time to time, in Europe, America and everywhere else. The only thing we can do is to make sure that as riders and drivers, we are always fully aware of our surroundings, and we always ride and drive within our means and abilities.

Team AIS

First off, some housekeeping. Thanks to everyone who is reading and enjoying this blog - please contine to comment!, and i’ll try to respond to all the comments. Also, I may make some changes to how the blog is set up in the next couple days, so you may find a completely new layout or format when you come here next time - don’t worry, all the content will be the same! I’m using blogger.com for the blog management right now because they are fast and easy to set up, and very popular. But now that I’m using it, i’m not very happy with its flexibility or robustness or the comments setup, and it’s slow and unreliable. So I’m looking at some more servies, like WordPress, b2evolution, MoveableType and LiveJournal to see how they work. If anyone has any experience with those, or other services, please let me know what you think. Not that any of you care about any of that, so now back to the fun stuff!

So, it so happens that the first Thursday I got here was a department “Team Event”. Actually, it was originally scheduled for the Thursday before I arrived, but lucky for me, it had to be postponed to this week because of rain. But before I get into the ride, I have a thought I’d like to share. Last summer, the Infineon office in Cary did a team event of going to Busch Gardens (an amusement park in Virginia) for 2 days. My department in Munich went bike riding in the Bavarian countryside for a whole day, and another department went hiking in the mountains the day before. Can you imagine what the response would have been if a manager in Cary had said, “for our team event this year, we’re going to ride 50 miles on our bikes around Raleigh in the middle of July!” HA - he would have been laughed out of the building, then the rest of the office would have gone to Six Flags for the day. It’s strange - I don’t know if the people here are more healthy or fit (they eat less fast food, but they eat a lot of fatty meat and drink lots of bier, and many of them smoke like crazy), but the mindset certainly is different. Even people who are not athletic at all are still up for biking or hiking for a full day.
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