Ah, the finer things in life. Or maybe not. So here’s my rant. A local grocery store is having a special on all things American starting next week.

Sadly, one look at the specials listed on their advertisement the impression is clear: American cuisine equals junk food.

Germany’s image of a typical American’s diet is a hard but overstretched reality: Millions of Americans starting their days off with either donuts, muffins, bagels or pancakes and sometime within the week hot dogs, hamburger buns, popcorn shrimp and platefuls of barbecue spare-ribs will be consumed.

But the hunger doesn’t stop there. We’ll gorge on american pizza and sandwich pickles, guzzle down blueberry and cranberry juice, and we aren’t ashamed to dip our grubby index fingers into an open jar of peanut butter and once our digits are clean we’ll lean back and smack our lips together in sugary nirvana.

But of course, you couldn’t let us forget the American all-time diabetic favorites: jelly beans, marshmallows and brownies.

It really is all too much. Behind every unhealthy and poor, nutritionally valued food substance you smugly decorate it with the American flag as if to say, “This wasn’t our idea.” I’m half embarrassed. Sugary items, refined grains, starchy and sodium polluted snacks: Is this what America really has to offer to the world? Or is this what you really sarcastically think America has to offer?

Okay, so maybe it’s true we eat individually almost 300 tortillas and 23 pounds of pizza per year*. We know these junk foods, those you want to sell so badly here, are bad for us, for you, for everyone. But this food is in the US, we developed it and now it’s an addictions we have to deal with. So I’m baffled. Why, Germany, with the negative stigma these food carry, why would you feed this food to yourselves?

Okay. I’ll give you some credit. I myself am having a hard time thinking up of typical or commonly known American foods that would be consider mildly healthy. How ’bout them tortillas? Or pecans and cashews? It’s not on your list, but how about soybeans?

Yet, I forgive Aldi. Germany may have a weakness for life’s seductions. Who can fault them or us? And anyone who believes scones are American is clearly confused.

Breakfast on our balcony. Alex makes a heart in his tea.

Grilling for two on the Isar river. Things we (I) forgot: fire and plates. Time to cook: 35 minutes. We watched a group of three try get their fire going for over an hour. I’m now a believer of Metzger steak, esp. with Bärlauch marinade. After dinner, I heated stones over the hot coals. I handed one to a cute older couple.

Eva and Me - City Mädchen. Behind us is Rapeseed (used to make canola oil). We rode to Lake Starnberg and then over to Schäflarn. More highlights on my travel blog to come.

One of the wonders we discovered on our bike trip of the terrain between Munich and Lake Starnberg. We also saw a frog crossing sign but missed the photo op.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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