Santhi and James in Town

We had a wonderful weekend with my "uni" buddy (slang for "university"), Santhi, and her boyfriend, James. James was speaking at a physics conference in Regensburg and so they stopped over for a few days at our place. It was so much fun having the two science geeks around, especially for Greg as he needs an outlet to geek out with and I just don't love science as much. The first day I gave Santhi a mini-tour of the city and the beautiful English Gardens. The next day, we went to the Pinakothek der Moderne and found the hidden monster. There's so much cool stuff to see in the Pinakothek der Moderne from the design elements to the German Expressionist painters to the ultra-modern paintings and sculptures to the 80's-looking jewelry design.

This is one of my favorite painting collections - it's so whimsical!

And who doesn't love twisted metal?!

We picked up James from the airport later and gave them a tour of central Munich, running into St. Jakob's platz synagogue many times. We weren't lost per se, just seemed to have to backtrack all the time to show them cool things. Near the Viktualienmarket, we checked out a local beerhall, the Hacker-Pschorr beerhall, which was much nicer than the normal ones. Good for a quick beer and breze before dinner.

Monday Greg and I had to work so without our local knowledge, our guests managed to get themselves lost on the mass transit systems and wound up in Dachau for part of the day. They made it back in one piece and have now continued on their way to Regensburg, Zurich and Geneva. It's so nice to have visitors and to see a familiar face.

There'll be more familiar faces in our near future as we're heading to Israel in a couple days for 2 weeks!!! There'll be lots of eating, swimming in the Dead Sea, heading to Eilat and the Red Sea, and then figuring out my Israeli passport issues. Stay tuned for pics and narratives of our adventures there!