So…. hello.

It’s been a long time! I’ve been up to a lot since I last wrote here. A trip home to see family…

Bastille Day in paris with an old friend…

And just generally enjoying summer in Munich! Today, fall is in the air and the city is starting to get ready for Oktoberfest. S and I are finally planning our honeymoon and heading off to Italy in a few week and also getting ready for visitors. I’ll try to be better about writing here. It always feels like too much and not enough is happening to write anything worthwhile.

Trip to Tutzing

Last weekend, we were invited to dinner by some friends down in Tutzing, on the Starnberger See . I was pretty excited,  because it was our first time leaving Munich proper since we came here! And we got to ride a real train out of the main train station.

Most people on our train were headed to Innsbruck, but we only had a 30 min ride.

more after the jump…

Word of the Week Wednesday

A funny, interesting, or new to me German word, presented every Wednesday.

This week:
die Schneeballschlacht = Snowball fight
schnee = snow, ball = ball, schlacht = battle.
Totally not seasonally appropriate, but really, really fun to say.

New Apartment: Bed

So, we finally are getting a little settled in our apartment. It’s still coming together, but here is our bed.

We have an American-style mattress (one mattress). Most beds here are made of 2 smaller mattresses to make getting them up narrow staircases possible. They also don’t really have box springs, but rather wooden slats. The pillows are gigantic – 80×80cm. One thing I do really like here is that people usually have 2 smaller comforters, rather than trying to share large ones. S kind of hogs the covers sometimes (or rather, won’t let me hog them as much as I want to), so I think this is a permanent change to my bedding preferences.

Awww…..

My husband brings me home flowers way more often than my boyfriend ever did. If I had known that, I would have gotten married ages ago!!

Sorry, Bunny.

It had to be done.

Hope you had a happy Easter!

New Neighborhood (yay!)

Well, we’re all moved in to our new apartment! We are still lacking in some fairly key furniture pieces and we’re living out of our suitcases still, so I’m going to save the tour until it looks a little nicer! Here is an afternoon we had a little over a week ago. It was one of the first warm days of the year.

This is the large school that is just around the corner from our apartment. It’s really handy because the bells chime on the quarter hours. We had been joking that we never see kids here from about 8-15. But now we know where they are! School lets out early here – at 1pm or so – and the sidewalks are filled with teens and preteens. It’s a pretty cool building with a lot of really cool stone carvings and features decorating the exterior.

Here is a shortcut I found that takes you from the quiet neighborhood we live in to the very, very busy Leopold Straße -one of the main roads into Munich. I like to pretend it’s secret, but the fact that it’s lighted and paved and that there are always people on it makes me think that I’m not the first person to find it!

More walk after the jump…

Krank in Bayern

I have a whole bunch of photos that I want to post from Fasching last week, but I’ve been laid out with a really bad cold. It’s been an interesting way to learn more about how health care works here. For one thing, you can’t just pickup aspirin or tylenol at any old convenience store. You have to go to an Apotheke, or pharmacy, and talk to the pharmacist who will decide what you need. I wobbled my way over there on Friday and was given an effervescent tablet that I’m supposed to take once a day and some capsules of pine, eucalyptus, lime, and I think linden oils to ‘reduce inflammation.’ Sunday, I was feeling worse and then we had a problem. Nothing is open here on Sunday. Nothing.  S headed out to find the nearest emergency Apotheke. On a rotating basis, pharmacies stay open late and on weekends. But it changes every weekend. Luckily, they had touch-screen maps to show him where the nearest was. Unfortunately, it was pretty far away. They gave him some effervescent aspirin tablets with an added decongestant and some throat lozenges.(What’s with the effervescent tablets?)

Today, he talked me into going to the doctor and he called a couple in Garching, the small town we’re staying in now, to find one that could see me today. It didn’t take him long, and soon I was trudging up Muenchenerstr trying to find the praxis. The doctor was a kindly older german fellow who spoke english. He rapped my forehead with his knuckles and prodded my cheeks, and listened to my breathing for a very long time. Then we went and sat in his cluttered office and he typed up his prescriptions. I asked if I needed to pay and he chuckled heartily – ‘Ha! Ha! This is not America! No, we will send you an invoice.’

I went to the Apotheke to get my prescriptions – an antibiotic, a nose spray, and a bottle of some sort of opiate drops to help me sleep. I’m pretty sure they don’t give out big bottles of opiates to new patients in the US. And, the antibiotics are only prescribed in 10 or 12 pill quantities, not the big bottles I’m used to.   The pharmacist threw in a couple of hot vitamin-c drink packets for me. I guess I look as bad as I feel!

Another interesting difference to me, is that all of the medicine so far has been pleasant tasting – the lozenges and effervescent tablets have tastes slightly fruity and not at all like ‘Medicine.’ I know they would have tasted horrible in the US – why is this? Because we don’t think something will work unless it tastes medicinal? So that kids won’t take more than they are supposed to? What ever the reason – the taste (mmm…! cherry!) and the quantity (‘here’s your big bottle of liquid morphine derivative and here 10 small antibiotic pills!) differences seem to speak to differing sets of values and worries when it comes to medicine.  Hope you all are feeling well!

A Night At The Movies

Last Friday, we bundled up and headed out to the movies. There is a cinema where they show movies in their original language, meaning that many are in English. We showed up, unsure of what they were showing and found that they only have 1 screen and that the movie was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The tickets were 8.50 euros (a fifty cent surcharge because it was a long movie) and we had the option of paying 2 euros more to sit on the balcony. We were handed our ‘parquet’ tickets and discovered that we had assigned seats. There was, of course, beer available for purchase, but we went with the more traditional coke and popcorn. Here, they serve it with either salt or sugar, but popcorn with sugar is the standard. Whenever I’ve asked German friends about it, they shudder at the thought of salted popcorn. S asked for salt, and they must have figured that since he was American he liked a lot of salt, because it was very, very salty popcorn.

We filed into the theater and found our seats. It was kind of nice having assigned seats because we didn’t have to have that back and forth about where each of us wanted to sit. The previews were short and the movie started. We both thought it was funny, because people kept accidentally kicking over their empty beer bottles, so it was kind of like being back in college. After the movie, large doors in the back were opened and we were sent right out into the snowstorm.

As for the movie? eh. It was ok, but I’m pretty surprised it was up for an oscar. It kind of felt like a paint-by-numbers oscar effort.

The Great Apartment Caper

Theresienstr. 3-Zi.-Whg., 4.OG/Lift, ca. 62m2, Parkett, Balk., sof., 800,- Euro + NK

We’ve had to learn a whole new vocabulary in our hunt for an apartment. The listing above is actually one of the clearest I’ve come across. Most are way more inscrutable. Apartment hunting in Munich is notoriously awful. There is a pretty short supply and a lot of people looking. If you see a listing for a really great one, you’d better call quick! Sometimes they’re pulled off the internet after only a few hours because so many people have already called. Then you go, cattle call-style, to an open house where you fill out an application that details your financial information, lists your nationality, and anything else they feel like asking you. So far, we’ve seen I think 8. We’ve applied for 4 and were offered 1. The one we were offered was a great apartment in a dullsville neighborhood and was only a 2 room. All this tramping around and looking has made us realize that we really need a 2.5 or 3 room apartment.

In Germany, or at least in Munich, they don’t count the bathroom or the kitchen. So, a 2 Zimmer Wohnung (2 room apartment) is the equivilant of an American 1 bedroom. After getting spoiled over the years with such spacious apartments, we are pretty sure that we would drive each other batty with only 2 rooms. Unfortunately, this realization has meant that we’ve needed to up our budget significantly. AND most of the 2.5 room to 3 room apartments we can afford are on the top floor. In buildings with no elevators. Which means the prospect of facing this everyday: