I asked Alex what that meant, to knock. He told me the audience knocks as a sign of being satisfied with the speaker. It’s very rare that the students don’t knock after a lecture. Perhaps the students felt a little lambasted.

Mr. Mentor did stop the lecture twice to pick out a few students for being rude and speaking over people trying to ask questions. I thought hooray! It was true the class was noisy and I gave up most of the time trying to decipher the conversation through the Deutsche-babble.

Well maybe he did go overboard by tossing a 1-cm piece of chalk at the annoying guy with the white and black checkered glasses. Finally karma has struck! So far I’ve tried three times to sit away from this yammer kid but still he and his female cackling brude vex me.

I must say I’m very please with myself that the gears that work out linear algebra in my brain are turning once again. There was a period or so in the last years when I looked at a derivative or an integral and felt amnesia and nausea. I guess all wasn’t lost. I just needed a refresher.

So after the class let out and a visit to the bathroom, I discovered that I was locked in the building. All doors are locked after 9pm except for the one on Arcis Street, another block away from the subway stop I wanted to take. Mist!

I looked for another way to exit the maze, maybe a door ajar, but found myself several times alone in pitch black hallways. It was the first time in awhile I felt my imagination take hold of me. Don’t ask me why, but I was reminded of Stephen King’s, The Shining. Thank god for modern technology. I called Alex for moral support until I reached some sort of random hall party. geesus. more movie parallels? just keep going. All I wanted was to get home.

There was some relief when I found the library and people that actually looked like students again. I managed my way outside of the building and ran across the Pinakothek museum lawn to the tram stop and sat next to a nicotine addicted lady who ignored the no smoking law at public transportation stops.

Whatever. I’m outside and on my way home, I thought. I pulled out The Gordian Knot by Bernhard Schlink (in German) and sunk into another world until the tram and subway took me home.

Artist: Virginia Jetzt
Title: Das Ganz Normale Leben

Who has a burning desire to fire up the grill this Friday? Chances are most of us have plans for this long weekend (if you have Friday off) but if you’re on the fence come and join us.

Weather permitting we’ll be setting up around 5 pm on the “Isar Flaucher” just south of the Brudermühl bridge on the east bank. (See the map) If it decides to rain we’ll move the grilling to our place and heat up the electro-grill. We’ll provide the grilling equipment. It’s up to you to sport your grilling and beverage creativity. (BYOB)

Most of the time it’s a cocktail of people who show up to anything Alex and I organize. So if you’d like to brush up on your German or English (and maybe Spanish, Portuguese and French) you know where we’ll be.

As always, feel free to bring or pass this invite along to any one else you’d think would be interested.

Hope to see you on Friday.

With a two-week, constant sore throat it finally dawned on me that perhaps I should slow down. This hasn’t been easy because for (1) we’ve been living for the last month without an automobile and (2) I have finally found the ‘energy’ to do everything. From taking up tango, clubbing at the pretensious Null, Acht, Neun, planning day trips to places like Nürnberg (Nuremberg), bike riding to the Schäflarn Monastery, attending a Gypsy Jazz concert, spending weekday dinners at friends’ houses, and traveling to Nürnberg for an evening lecture on an introduction to Business Informatics and back - it’s all been marvelously satisfying and challenging.

That is only half the energy consumption. It is hard not to be distracted by my passions for cooking (we actually have a better oven = bread making), battling with the German way of knitting (faster but prettier?, not sure.) and reading a krimi-novel in German (I’m over it now that I don’t get the deeper meaning. It will come.) Unfortunately, my allergies this year seem to be getting stronger and my immune system is working over time. At some point something has got to give.

I regret a little that I blog about ‘this and that’ so infrequently. Even today we planned a last minute, 90-km, round-trip bike ride to Lake Starnberg (now botched), which would have cut into another trusted blogging bonanza. I have much to recount, impressions to muddle about. All memories once fresh are now lost in my Gedanken soup. Yet life goes on, blogging or no blogging. I wish I could account it all to you dear Readers yet we both know that is probably improbable with this to-do list of mine. From my perspective I can sum up so: life is happy and coming close to ideal as I hope it to be. I hope it is too in your neck of the woods.

This year the city of Munich celebrates its 850th Birthday. This just tickles me. Not much (i.e, sand) in my home state of Florida can even come close to being that young.

It’s only fitting that I’d give a huge ‘ein Prosit’ (toast) in honor of our well-aged beauty of a host city. Locals here recently made jokes that as we celebrate Munich’s birthday at the Oktoberfest: “Wouldn’t it be a treat to have to dish out 850 cents for a liter of beer?” Hahaha…hehe… Get ready to gulp:

Last year the price for a Maß of OK-beer was already at 7,90€. Now it’s announced that during the 16-day festival (20th Sept. - 5th Oktober 2008) the price will be between 8€ to 8,30€ per liter of beer. For Americans, that’s about 13 dollars per Maß at today’s exchange. ooh Aua!

Blame it on the price of barley, so say the breweries. Not to worry. Thrifty Oktoberfest visitors can still get their ‘drink on’ by taking advantage of the fact that in Bavaria, beer is considered a food staple. That’s right. Beer constitutes a major part of a Bavarian’s diet. Along with eggs and bread, beer is also subsidized. That means you’ll pay about 60 cents (+ a tax on the bottle) for a half liter of Augustiner Helles if you buy it at the grocery store. No, you can take your beer bottles to the fest but I’m sure you can workout some pre-game plans. There aren’t any open container laws from what I’ve observed.

So happy birthday, Munich! With the higher prices, I’m hoping during the 16 days of beer mayhem there won’t be so many drunk people peeing on your trees, gardens and subway walls. Yeah. Who am I kidding?

Artist: Funny Van Dannen
Title: Saufen

Invitations were sent via e-vitation. We sent 40 invites through Goovite. I chose this invitation software because it was pretty basic, wasn’t littered with ads, guests don’t need to sign up and email address/invitations are erased 14 days after the party.

Still this form of invitation service is relatively new in our circles. The instructions to confirm were written in English, which also caused a potential problem. Alex presumed our German friends wouldn’t know the meaning of RSVP. But honestly, I didn’t know what the acronym stood for either until I found out that it is French: “répondez s’il vous plaît” for “please respond". Do the French write RSVP on their invites?

In the end, the last standings for Goovite projected 7 yes’s, 1 maybe, and 2 nada’s..the rest just responded by email, confirmed with Alex or were tag-a-longs. I guess I’ll stick with good ol’ email until I can (or somebody nerdy and savyier) develop a similar system through my personal website.

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Here is my wenige Wörter (almost wordless) Wednesday post. I get that in Germany a dozen eggs is a pack of 10. Although most of the time organic eggs are sold in packs of 6. Which is good because my new German fridge is made to hold 7 eggs. Why 7 egg holders, eludes me?