I actually did have a good time though, and unsuriprsingly, the event was excellently run (no pun intended). There were >10,000 people signed up for the 10k, but everything went very smoothly, no waiting in huge lines or getting caught in crowds. It was chip-timed as all the big races are now, and as soon as you finish you give your chip to a dude with a computer, he scans it, and immediately prints out a result and time card for you. And it was also cool because we received our race packets in the mail last week, and they included the race t-shirt that everyone wore, which were bright orange and a nice, light silky material. That way, everyone who paid was wearing the same shirt, so it cuts down on “race bandits”, or those crazy people who like to run for the fun of it, and will enter a race without paying or getting a real result. Plus, it just looks cool to have thousands of people running through the trails in the English Garden wearing the same thing.

Arguably, the highlight of the race morning was walking out of the chute after the race, and being greeted with an ice cold Weissbier! Only in Germany!

And you gotta’ give it up for this guy, running the 1/2 marathon race, in full lederhosen, while pushing a stroller (but bucking the dress code!).

Hope everyone had fun - it was a good way to spend my last weekend in Germany. Time to cheer on Deutschland in the upcoming quarter-finals game with Argentina on Friday!

Update: Here I am hanging out with some of my Spanish friends after the race.

Inevitably, the topic of politics, and more specifically, American politics, came up. Hey, this should be fun, I thought - I’m up for a little Bush-bashing with a table full of drunk Frenchies! I was completely taken off guard, then, when the father challenged my positions on American policies and politics more severely than anyone else in Europe has. It’s not that he was an ardent Bush supporter or anything, but he was very hesitant to pass judgement on what was going on in America. He said that since he’s not in America and doesn’t know its people or is involved in its government, he is unwilling to criticize what he doesn’t know enough about. He was confident that Americans are able to take care of our own government by ourselves and democracy in action (or democracy inaction, as Jon Stewart is fond of noting) will prevail for the best solution.

I mentioned this to another French coworker, and he said that’s quite typical for French people. They are very opinionated and vocal about what goes on in France, but are generally very reserved about speaking out about politics in other countries where they are not fully informed of local situations. So mark this up as another typical European stereotype many American have that turns out to be flat wrong (in addition to my assumption that I would always be able to tell a Brit apart from and American, and certainly a German apart from a Brit, given their accents - both of which have been proven false). Remember that next time your Congressman tells you to pour your French wine down the toilet (that you already paid for, mind you) or that we should be eating patriotic Freedom Fries.

À votre santé, mon ami!

I took off work a little early and headed to Augustinerbrau Keller with my friend Andrew. It was a bit crowded, but we manged to find a place to stand for the 2 hours and peer over other’s shoulders while Deutschland beat up on Costa Rica, 4 to 2.

After a nice game of football, it’s time to fill up on some good Chinese food, where, of course, you must take the requisite picture with the enthusiastic group of Asian tourists decked out in native German soccer gear.

Afterwards, I headed to Marienplatz, Munich Center City, about 3 blocks from my apartment, where the victory celebration was in full swing. What was fun about the celebration though, was that it was more of a welcoming party for all countries and cultures, rather than a victory celebration for Germany on opening night.

Of course we had our German partiers:

But there were also contingents from Mexico:

Brazil:

various European countries:

and Iran:

And while wandering through the crowd I heard lots of people speaking English, many of them American English, I didn’t see a single US, England, or Australian flag….

Oh well - check out the rest of the pictures in the gallery, and check back later for more World Cup adventures, including a view from the Dutch perspective, as I visit Amsterdam next weekend!

This is what it looked like in the city Tuesday morning (I fogot my camera before leaving for work, but ganked this picture off of someone’s Flickr gallery)

But after 9 months of hearning nothing but complaining and excuses about the weather from all sorts of Germans, I finally got a rational and reasonable response yesterday at lunch. I asked a fellow engineer about snow in April, expecting to get the usual “oh no, this is highly unusual”, but instead got: “Well, I suppose there’s always the distinct probability of snow into April. I guess it’s just that most people are tired of the long winter, and wish for Spring to show up to get outdoors.” So, upon hearing that rationale, I decided to suck it up and return to my usual stoic disposition, and quit complaining about the weather myself.

I did get another shock on Tuesday morning, though. Upon seeing the snow outside, I checked my watch to see what the date was and was greeted with an unplesant message. Apparently as I was adjusting my watch last week for daylight savings time, I accidentally changed the day read-out to German abbreviations, instead of English. So on Tuesdays, or known as Dienstage over here, instead of “Tue”, I get this:

DIE!! AAAHH!

Anyway, enough of that boring business. Not much else to report, but I did put up another photo album of my trip to the Starkbierfest last week at the Paulaner bier hall. Now the German’s aren’t going to get any awards for creativity when it comes to naming their beers. I’ve mentioned the most popular beers before - Helles, Weiss, and Dunkel. Those words literally mean “light”, “white”, and “dark” in English. Now to add to that list is a special brew made only once a year, Starkbier. Or, AKA known as “Strong beer”. How creative! Starkbierfest is kind of like the Spring version of Oktoberfest, but instead of everyone gathering at the carnival grounds, it’s up to each brewery to stage their own festivities at their own bierhalls. And as I mentioned, starkbier is only brewed once a year for this event, so you can’t get it any other time. That’s probably a good thing too, since it contains a good bit more alcohol that the other normal beers, and it’s drank in 1 Liter size steins of course. A couple/few of those will put you under the table for sure.I snagged a minute of video while I was there to give you a bit of a taste of the atmosphere. If you’ve ever wondered what 2000 drunk Germans (well, and a fair share of Americans, Brits, and Asians probably) looked like singing the original version of 99 Luftballoons, wonder no more!

]]> http://joelion.com/archives/44/feed http://joelion.com/archives/41 http://joelion.com/archives/41#comments Sat, 25 Mar 2006 18:38:07 +0000 joelion http://joelion.com/archives/41 I’ve managed to completely botch-up my photo gallery attempting some (unnecessary) upgrades today….

I’ll try to get it up and running again by the end of the weekend

For a little aside here, I’ll remind anyone who missed all my posts from last summer that when the weather is good here, most dining seems to take place outdoors. Between the time I got here in July and when the weather started going bad in November, probably 80% of my meals were outside, either in a garden or park, or in an outdoor seating area. Most cafes and restaraunts put tables all over the sidewalk or in adjacent squares to their location, and it makes for pleasant dining. Also, as I mentioned in the last post, European’s seem not to mind standing outside in freezing temperatures, as long as they had a group of people, and food and drinks. Well, with temperatures soaring into the low 40’s today, the cafes apparently have collectively decided it is time to break out the outdoor tables and chairs! As evident from this picture of a cafe at the end of our block, the locals seem to be more than happy to once again start eating outdoors again!

So anyway, I’ve added a new photo gallery of some recent snow and a very cold and snowy St. Patrick’s Day festival. Also, my brother Todd and his girlfriend Becca spent a week here in Muinch over their Spring Break. They left 70+ degree weather in Raleigh (and returned to 80+ degreesǃ∂.) to spend 8 days in the cold and snow. The first weekend of their trip, Southern Germany was slammed with the largest snow storm in 20 years, dumping over 20 inches of snow in downtown Munich. The snow made it a bit difficult to do all the normal tourist stuff, and we even made a foolish attempt at taking the Die Bahn (regional train) for a day trip to the Linderhof castle. I was thinking “what’s a little snow to a 50 ton train?” I failed to account for ice downing trees and debris on the tracks, and we ended up stranded for 6 hours in a Munich suburban train station before finding a cab back to town. By the next day the tracks were cleared, and they managed to escape to Vienna for a few days, where the weather was at least slightly warmer and there was considerably less snow.

The weekend after they left, there was an early St. Patrick’s Day celebration downtown. I kind of overslept though the parade, but did make it to part of the after-parade party. A couple days of rain had cleaned out most of the snow, but by Sunday afternoon it was well below freezing again and the snow arrived just in time for the Irish jigs on the main stage. There was still a pretty good crowd, because one thing I’ve noticed about Europeans (taking experience from Munich, Austira and Prague though the past few months) is that they don’t mind standing around outside in freezing temperatures and horrid conditions, as long as they are with a big group of people and have something alcoholic to drink. In this case it was cold beer, but around Christmas the drink of choice was Gluwein, a very tasty heated, spicy red wine drink.

Since I got here last summer, I’ve heard from Germans how unusual all the weather has been. When it rained for a week in July, it was “oh no, this is highly unusual. We never get this much rain.” Then it got hot in August and we heard “this is very hot. It never get’s this hot usually.” The first snow came in November and there was “wow - we usually don’t get snow until Christmas. January and February is when we get the most snow.” When it snows for 10 days straight in January I hear “don’t worry. It never accumulates more than a couple centimeters in the city, and it’ll be over by the end of February.” So of course when we got almost 2 feet of snow in the 2nd week of March, the disclaimers were coming like crazy. I’m beginning to think Bavarians are in a constant state of denail, with their idea of perfect weather only existing in their own mind.

They may be telling the truth though. Here is what St. Patrick’s Day looked like in 2005:

And this year in 2006:

But weather aside, thinks are still going well. We have about 3.5 months left in Germany before heading home. I’ve been cutting back on the travel recently, but hope to get some more trips in when the weather turns a little nicer. But Alisha is making up for my lack of travel; in the past month and a half she’s spent time in Tuscany, Vienna, Australia, and is now on a 4-week stint in California. Check out the impressive schedule she has here.

I’m slowing trying to populate my video section, so here’s a short clip from the St. Patrick’s Day festival this weekend. Maybe one of these days I’ll get up the pictures and videos of or anniversary trip to Paris (hopefully before our 2nd anniversary arrives!)

If you haven’t already (and of the few people that read this, I’m sure most of you have) you can check out our wedding photo gallery on our wedding site.

I also uploaded a second wedding video to YouTube. It is a compilation of our engagement portraits, and I made it as kind of a joke, just fooling around with iMovie on my new Mac. The music has some, ummm, questionable lyrics, so some in my target audience may not wish to view it, or maybe just turn your speakers down if you don’t want to hear it. Let’s just say, if I say the words “50-Cent”, and you think I’m talking about a silver coin, then the music probably isn’t for you. If you’re down with the G-Unit, however, check it out!

I have several videos taken over the past year, but I’ll start off with a short clip of Dave snowboarding at Ski Welt last weekend. Check out this gallery to see all the pictures from the weekend.