Oren and Erin's Visit, Part 1

We had a great day yesterday trying to keep jet-lagged Oren up. My buddy Erin had come into town Monday night for a couple days in Munich so I had lots to show them. We walked around Munich - saw the synagogue, St. Jakob's platz, Marienplatz, Asamkirche, Sendlinger Tor, Frauenkirche, Odeonsplatz, surfers in Englisch Gartens, Viktualienmarket, and got some pretzels along the way. It was a beautiful day for a walk around town. We finished off the day meeting with our aunt Na'ama at an Italian place in Schwabing.

Erin with her small beer

Erin and Oren with their brezen

Erin and I on the old school U-bahn/subway

Biking to Work!

I took advantage of the glorious weather we're having and biked to work today! As many of you know, Greg biked to work when we lived in Aurora (or walked) every day. Now we've switched roles as I hope to bike to work here in the spring, summer and fall (although not on rainy days if I can help it). Today it took me 40-45 minutes one way and almost an hour on the way back because I got a little crazy and tried a new route. Maybe the new route wasn't such a good idea.

The bike lanes here are fantastic and numerous outside of the old city center (which I have to bike through every day). There everything twists and turns, and bike lanes are fairly nonexistent. Oh, and don't even get me started on the tourists - it's like people forget how to look for bicycles or even cross a street when they're not in their home country. Look left and right, and if there's something fast coming at you, don't cross! I need a good bypass to the old town.

Just in case you forgot what my awesome, old school bike looks like, here's a picture in front of the Alte Pinakothek

One gear,baby, one gear!

Saturday at the Flea Market

We spent a great day yesterday at the Theresienwiese flea market. This was not your ordinary flea market - it was massive! To give you an idea of it's size, I believe they wrote in the newspaper (I was too lazy to look up all the words this morning) that there were 2,000 stalls and 20,000 people expected at that market. It was packed, but it was fun to see all different kinds of people walking away with cool stuff. Greg was especially jealous of the antler paraphernalia (chairs, tables, the usual wall mountings).

It was a beautiful day and we rode down on our bikes with my fellow flea market afficionado, Treas, and her daughter Roishin. Treas scored a few more tins for her collection and a set of beautiful green crystal champagne flutes. I found a perfect-sized old Spanish tin for my increasingly unmanageable earring collection - the tin was originally for drill bits. I like the juxtaposition of the tough exterior and girly interior. I also grabbed a nice lace dolly that I'm going to take apart soon to make lace appliques.

All in all, we were there 2 hours and covered maybe 1/6th of the flea market. It was that huge! It was really fun to be out on a gorgeous day. Since Germany doesn't have as many accessible charity/thrift stores like we do in the US, I think this is how they shop for second-hand stuff. It's now the season for flea markets and every neighborhood has one in the spring.

The apartment building tenants pool all their items into their courtyards on the selected day for that neighborhood and people come around. Apparently, our neighbor was saying that our courtyard is one of the less pretty ones around here and people look down on it when they come by. Maybe I'll take charge this year and artfully display our wares so they overlook what I think is a perfectly fine courtyard. We'll see who dares to make fun of our courtyard then!

Israel Pesach Recap

This trip to Israel (Greg's second!) was much more family-focused than before. Although that didn't mean that we remembered all the young cousins' names right away by looking at them... oops, what a bad cousin I am! It gets hard when you have 15 cousins on one side.

Highlights of our trip:

• Great food and desserts forced upon us by family.
• Knowing there wasn't much more I wanted to do on the Eilat shore than read my book, take a quick beach nap and have a lemon popsicle.
• Checking out the ancient copper mines and sandstone arch at Timna.
• Walking outside our door to pick fresh lemons, oranges, pomelas and shesekim (the last two were my favorites).
• Catching up on American movies we'd missed with my aunt and uncle, Dari and Arie.
• Running into two brothers from my high school/college days by coincidence in Jerusalem of all places!
• Meeting the mini-cheerleaders of the Kibbutz Elipaz as they cheered on their dads and family in a soccer game against the German youths we were traveling with. They were about 8 years old - the best part was when Greg grabbed one of their pom poms and showed them what was what!
• Figuring out the map of Tel Aviv and getting to Sheinkin street on our own for a little indie shopping (even though my favorite store had closed :-(.
• Walking around in my flip flops every second I could!
• Chilling out at a bar called Rosa Parks with my cousins Dana and Noa... the bar even spelled Rosa Parks in Hebrew! Check out our photos for a look at the bar napkin, if you don't believe me.
• Being taken to one of the best falafel and hummus places in Jerusalem by my grandma - just in the Damascus gate in the Old City. Then, tasting za'atar straight from the bin!
• Discovering the fabric street of Tel Aviv - I've got to start planning my fabric buys for next time.
• Greg's personal favorite was probably Jesus smoking and sitting in front of a sign saying "I've arrived" in Tel Aviv.
• Lastly, who can forget the Pesach (Passover for the Americans) with 37 people attending?! We got through it in about 30 minutes and with champagne steadily supplied to me by Dana.

Enjoy our photos:

Israel

In case you missed them (or if you didn't know us then ;-), here are pics from our last trip to Israel, December 2007:

Israel 07-08

Entertainment in a foreign country

I decided now was the time to step back from all the travel updates and give everyone a picture of our lifestyle in Munich from a technology standpoint.

The first thing I'll just go right ahead and say: we don't have a TV. Granted, Greg and I didn't watch that much TV in the States either. Now, we have to use our laptops as TVs when we want to watch something. But the US television companies added another hurdle: a lot of them don't allow people overseas to watch shows online on ABC, NBC, certain videos on YouTube (shame on you, Sony). Hulu doesn't work overseas either.

Greg subscribes to the nightly news on iTunes, we borrow DVDs from the school's library, and sometimes we go see English movies at the cinema months after they've been released in the States. But other than that, we're really out of touch with American TV right now. Thank god, Facebook, Skype and Google work overseas!

Speaking of Google, when it's feeling cranky or mischevious (not every day), Google will switch me to its German sites. For as much as Google knows about my personal life, it doesn't seem to get it that I rely on the Google Translate toolbar to automatically translate German websites as if my life depended on it.

One moment I'll be happily searching on Google in English and the next moment, I'll be having a serious, swear-word-filled conversation with Google about how to find the link that will let me get directions to where I want to go. Google is not always on my good side, to put it simply. I won't even go into what happens when I try spell-checking an English e-mail while on German gmail.

Lastly, I have no clue how I've survived this long without Yelp. There's an expat forum called Toytown, which has been very helpful, but Yelp is in a league of its own.

So the moral of this blog post for those in the US, please enjoy all the entertainment options and social media stuff that us poor people abroad have to do without!

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!

The Broomsticks were out!

On the way to my German lessons this morning, I passed by the street cleaning crew. Of course, their orange suits made them stand out, but what really caught my attention was their cleaning equipment - witches' brooms! No joke - the old twigs bundled together into a makeshift broom are how Munich's official street cleaning crews clear the streets of almost nonexistent street trash. I was just hoping one of them would hop on and pretend to fly away all the while cackling, but alas, that never happened. Thankfully, they were focusing on their job to clear away the pebbles Munich uses instead of salt on their sidewalks when it snows. Not pleasant to walk on those with any shoe even remotely not resembling a hiking boot. But so much better for the environment.

Back to the clean-up crew: they also get to drive around in these little bitty cleaning trucks with their witches' brooms sticking out the back. I don't know how many could fit in there, but sounds like a pretty fun circus scenario. I don't miss our car, but I wouldn't mind taking one of those out for a spin. I bet it turns a tight wheelie and parks great.