The Lion Report

I think I read somewhere that something like 90% of the blogs created in the last 3 years are now considered dead; i.e. having no posts or updates in the past 3 months. If my blog isn’t dead yet, it’s certainly on lifesupport, so the goal of this blog now is simply to keep close friends and family informed and occasionally entertained and to serve as a semi-permanent, online, searchable archive of our travels, experiences, pictures, thoughts, all that jazz.

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.

(more…)

Here’s a video compilation I made about a year ago for our wedding on Oct 23, 2004. One of the bridesmaid’s boyfriend shot some digital video during the photo session at the Green Park Inn in Blowing Rock right before the wedding. Be sure to turn your speakers on to get “the full effect” with the music. The 2nd selection, Billy Joel’s She’s Always A Woman To Me, was mine and Alisha’s first dance at the reception. The video is a few minutes long and may be a bit slow to buffer and download, espeically if you are on a slow connection.

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’ve added a new Video category to the blog where I will cross-post videos that are hosted on Google Video or YouTube.com. These are both great services you can use to upload and share videos for free - you don’t have to worry about compressing, changing formats, hosting, etc - they do it all for you. Any new blog post containing a video will show up as a regular post, but they will also be accessible using the new “Videos” link at the top of the page, or using the “Videos” category in the category chooser in the right side-bar.

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.

Well I guess it’s time for what has become my monthly update. To start off with several bits of exciting news. When we came to Munich in July with my company, the plan was to stay for 6 months then return to the US. But as I’m sure you’ve noticed from my blog posts, we have enjoyed our time so much over here that when my company offered us the chance to stay for another six months, we jumped on it - so we will be residents of Munich until mid-summer 2006! This will be a great chance for me to continue working with some great engineers at the Infineon headquarters, but Alisha is also taking full advantage of the opporunity and has gained a spot on a professional cycling team from Austria called Elk Haus. She has lots more info on her blog, so be sure to read up on that. She has quite a schedule already, including a month in Australia, a week in New Zealand, and 3 weeks in California, and that’s just through the end of March!

So for now, instead of recounting ad-nauseum one adventure or another that we’ve had, i’m just going to point out several new photo galleries that I’ve added or updated recently. I’ve written descriptions for each gallery, so I’ll just copy/paste those here too. Speaking of adventures, though, 2 galleries that are still missing are our Paris anniversary trip and a weekend trip I took to Prague last weekend. Beteween those two trips I have about 350 pictures, so I’ll have to figure out which ones I want to put online. So in the meantime, enjoy these!
(more…)

Just a quick note - Munich and the surrounding area got its first snow of the year last night. By mid-morning there was 1-2in. 2-5cm. on the ground. The temp is hanging right around freezing so it’s a bit wet and probably won’t hang around too long.

Apart from that, Alisha’s parents are in town visiting for about a week. They arrived Tuesday morning and have been super busy since then exploring the city. We have a busy weekend planned with trips to Dachau and Olympic Park and a 5k/10k road race on Sunday in East Munich (Alisha and her dad are doing the 10k - you can geuss which one I’m doing!). Then on Monday we’re going to try to get out of town and take a look at one of the most majestic castles in Europe, the Newschwanstein.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve fallen quite behind in making updates. Truthfully, I’ve been avoiding starting new posts because they are quite time consuming - between writing, editing, yammering on and on about nothing, adding pictures, etc, it takes a couple hours just to get one post up. So, hopefully I can either find the time to do some more big updates, or maybe I just have to contain myself and write faster and shorter. At the least, I will get some more pictures up, especially from our anniversary trip to Paris.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Alisha’s newly redesigned blog, which she is being more faithful in updating that I am.

By the way - you’ll see the GuestMap has been re-enabled below, so if you’re reading this and still haven’t left your mark, nows the time to do it!

Don’t get your hopes up though - this is just a filler post so this info doesn’t get lost in the minutia of the Belgium post I just made (be sure to check that one out too if you haven’t been here in the last, oh…. 2 months ). Just a heads up that Alisha and I are still doing great, and I still have lots to report and much more coming up. In the meantime, be sure to check out the photo galleries with the following updates:

• Brussels Weekend - A weekend trip to Brussels, Belgium with some co-workers. See the full report in the previous post.
• Giro della Toscona - I got to spend a full week with Alisha’s team in Tuscany, Italy acting as the team mechanic/driver. We had a great time and it gave me the chance to watch a 6 day road-race first hand, which I haven’t been able to do yet with my work and with Alisha’s busy travel/race schedule.
• Oktoberfest - An extended stay in Munich wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the world’s most famous beer festival: Oktoberfest! I had the opportunity to make several trips, and will report on it later, but in the meantime enjoy the pictures.
• Der Lange Nacht - This is certainly one of the more mundane photo-galleries so far, but what the hey. We partook in the annual Munich event Der Lange Nacht der M√∫nchener Museen (The Long Night of Museums), a night long tour where over 90 museums and cultural centers in Munich open their doors for visits using just one entry ticket.

Also coming soon to the photo-gallery are pictures from a weekend trip we just returned from to Lindau on Bodensee - a magnificant little island town on a lake (the “Boden-see” or Boden Lake) were we spent our one year wedding anniversary - October 23, 2005! We had a relaxing time. Well…. if you call a 5 hour ride spanning 4 countries “relaxing”, that is. But no - it was great, but next weekend is going to be even better for a belated anniversary trip. We’re taking advantage of a German public holiday next week (i.e. a free day off work) and are taking a long weekend trip to Paris for 5 days! We’re looking forward to it very much, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty to report, including pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Moulin Rouge and more.

In the meantime, it is Fall in Bavaria. The weather is getting nippy and the fall colors are here. Actually, the weather in Munich is almost identical to that in Boone. Weather.com shows that Boone is about 2 degrees warmer in the summer and 2 degrees colder in the winter, so we feel almost like we’re at home. Even moreso than the weather, when you go down into the foothills of the Alps, the scenery is amazingly similar to the North Carolina mountains. In fact, on a bike ride last weekend at the base of the Alps, Alisha and I were riding along a curvy country road with an old wooden split-rail fense on one side and bright orange and yellow leaves falling all around, and at the same time we both said “this looks so much like North Carolina”. If I had taken a picture, even a true Boonie would have had a hard time distinguishing that location from a spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

So, check back later this week for pics from Lindau, and maybe another post about Oktoberfest or something. Otherwise, we’ll be in touch after our Paris adventure!

From the looks of it, it’s been a good 7+ weeks since my last real update. I’ve just been testing you to see if I had any real readers left, and according to the comments on the last post, I have at least 5, so that’s enough reason for a new post I suppose! Well it certainly has been a busy several weeks at that, and we have some big plans coming up too, so I’d better get as much out now as possible.

The first big adventure was a quick weekend trip to Brussels, Belgium (home of Dr. Evil, if you recall) with a couple workmates having found some cheap Lufthansa flight specials. Before leaving for the trip I had to give myself another geography lesson as a reminder of exactly what part of Europe I would be headed to - for the life of me I couldn’t picture Belgium, much less Brussels, on a map. Turns out it’s the little country nestled to the West of Germany, Northeast of France, and to the Southwest of The Netherlands with a short bit of coast line on the North Sea, just a short hop over to the UK. After looking at the map I had an “oh yeah, I knew that” moment as I realized, oh yeah, I knew that. Brussels, the country capital is just to the north of the very middle of the country, which I found out later, is deeply and bitterly divided across an east-west line based on how the different regions prepare mussels with french fries, the country’s most popular and official national food.

Brussels, it turns out, is also the official capital of the European Union, as that’s where the European Parliament meets. You can see pictures of the EU buildings the Brussels Weekend photogallery - they’re the huge silver, reflective glass and steel buildings constructed among otherwise Gothic and Baroque architecture of the rest of the city (ok, I just made that up - I don’t know how the rest of the city would be classified architecturally, besides “old”). You can imagine that has ruffled some feathers in Brussels and elsewhere as to what the European Union represents: is it a union of many of the oldest modern (”oldest modern”? What does that mean?) civilizations on earth that should be represented by traditional cultures and architecture, or is it a coalition of ultra-modern countries that are banding together to fight for relevancy in a world dominated by American pop-culture, and increasingly by Asian commerce and trade. I don’t know much about the EU, but one thing I do know is that they don’t know the answer to that question themselves. I made that question up just now, by the way - feel free to use it if you’re looking for a topic for a thesis or dissertation in European Studies. Oh yeah, you may recall in one of my first posts about my trip to Strasbourg, France in which I called it the European Union Capital. Apparently I was mistaken, as any Belgiumer will tell you that the dinky town of Strasbourg may have a couple insignificant EU buildings, but the real EU headquarters and buildings, no matter how shiny and garish, are in Brussels.
(more…)