Monday was a quiet day - went to college, sorted out a Schein (didn’t get it, but it’ll be posted out to me, and I know the mark). Only one more Schein to collect, and that’s due next week sometime. We wandered around all the places we hadn’t yet been - the English Gardens, the university (both in Oettingenstr and the Hauptgebaude). Dad was most impressed with the Hauptgebaude - it’s a pretty stunning place!

We saw the memorial to the White Rose group, the church in the Olympic village, and the place where the Israeli team lived during the 1972 Olympics. We went up to the terrace and saw Munich by night - the Allianz stadium looked just weird.

Tuesday was quieter - tidied my room, bought a good sweeping brush & dad swept the carpet… We just generally pottered around until it was time to go out to the airport. The U-Bahn was late, but it ended up working out for us, because when we got to Marienplatz, we only had a four (instead of 16) minute wait for the S-Bahn. At the airport, we checked in with 39.4kg luggage (from an allowance of 40kg, between us) - I was most impressed! The check-in guy was really nice, and I was able to help out when he was telling the man in front of us “Follow the Set signs - for Zentral Bereich”, translating “Set” to “Z” It still amuses me that the Germans don’t distinguish [s] and [z], and are quite happy to make voiced sounds voiceless at the end of words

Anyway, we got through the check-in just fine - and dad asked about the lounge, wondering whether he’d be able to bring a guest… The guy paused just for a second, but decided that yes, that’d be ok, and filled out a voucher thingie for dad. We headed off to the supermarket first, and dad reckoned the voucher was actually only good for him, but never mind.

Going through security broought a little bit of fuss - they wanted to look at the walkie-talkies in dad’s rucksack. Trying to get them out of the box (these were new ones, bought for one of dad’s friends) was a bit of a nightmare - but the tension was broken when I suggested to the guards “If only we had a knife…”

We went up to the lounge, and sure enough, the voucher was only for dad - but the check-in guy had called ahead, and sorted it all out Wow, was it cool. Comfy leather armchairs, free bar, nibblies, newspapers, and (as I discovered at the last minute) a bank of computers down the end with free internet access… Man, I could get used to that!

The flight went fine - we landed about half an hour early, and were nearly the first off the plane (my first piece of airport German is “as far forward as possible, please” :)). The baggage carousel started moving just as we got to it, and our (2) bags were (within) the first (3) to come out. Yay!

Colm picked us up, and drove us home in his very swish new car (’04 Nissan Micra - navy blue). It was a lovely comfy car - with the only complaint being the scent of Toilet Duck from the no-smoking-sign air freshener I’m assured this has since been removed, and I’m looking forward to playing with the buttons soon (I’m officially in charge of the radio/mp3 player :)). He came in for a bit, and fixed up dad’s Ubuntu install - dad’s new computer is well shiny.

He gave me my Valentine’s present - a pretty Swarovski vase of red roses.

He also helped me unpack the dictionary - twenty volumes of wordy goodness Despite the size, the print is still quite small - smaller than I had imagined. The books are larger but slimmer than I had expected, and they’re Oh-so crispy new Bookie Five!

Now I’ve unpacked (in record time, for me), had some sleep, and am looking forward to the week ahead I’m so glad to be home!

Hello from the posh lounge at Munich airport, about to board the plane now. More later on how I ended up here

So, this is an interesting exercise that diamond alerted me to…

The Johari Window
(mine is at http://kevan.org/johari?name=noirin - please do fill it in) and the Nohari Window (http://kevan.org/nohari?name=noirin - likewise) are designed as tools to help people understand interpersonal communication/relationships…

I like these kinds of things, and this particular one strikes me as interesting. Indulge me

A bowl of leeches in the window of a pharmacist’s shop near Stachus - eww!

85% cocoa chocolate (dad got some) - I didn’t know you could get that chocolatey!

The Allianz Stadium from the top of my building - it’s red tonight, and looks weird in the dark, from afar.

Apologies for the length of this post - dad’s been here, and internet connectivity has been almost none, for the last wee while. I’ve slowly been catching up though, and here’s a brief (!) overview of what’s been happening in the interim

Wednesday started slowly, with a quiet breakfast at my place, a bit of tidying up, and packing for the ski-trip. We headed straight out to Hauptbahnhof, where we left our rucksacks in a locker, and then back to Marienplatz, for a little wander. We saw a bit of Mass at the beautiful Alte Peter (St Peter’s Church), where they clearly haven’t heard of “Vatican II”, and then went to the Frauenkirche (the Cathedral), where they have for sure!

We decided the Devil’s Footprint didn’t fit either of us (he stamped with glee when he saw the Frauenkirche - what foolishness to build a church where you can’t see any windows!), and had a look around a little cryptal chapel. Going in to the chapel as we were coming out were a German family. The little girl asked her mother with a slight note of fear “The cellar?” (in German) - when the answer was affirmative, she gave one of those looks, and said, sotto voce, “Uh oh. It gets worse!” - I nearly cracked up, as did dad after I had translated

Unfortunately, we had just missed the Glockenspiel as we came out of Alte Peter, but we’ll get it another time. Other than that, we saw all the things I wanted to show dad - Dallmayr’s, the Viktualienmarkt, the old & new town halls, and so on. Back at Hauptbahnhof, we got drinks & sausages to keep us going, collected our bags and headed for the train, where we got comfortable. It got fairly full by the time we had done the first few stations, but we had our seats, and were fine

On the way up from the station to our hotel, we saw a ski-hire place, so knew that would be easy to organise; we checked in, went to the nearest ski-lift to get our lift passes, and decided to hire skis there instead. Thus kitted out, we returned (leaving the skis in the locker room) to the hotel, wandered around town, relaxed, had dinner, and went to bed.

At breakfast on Thursday, we made a little picnic, before heading out to the slopes (having forgotten our picnic!) - it was a bit grey, and was raining by the time we started skiing, but once we were underway, it was no great problem. I relearnt how to ski pretty quickly, under dad’s instruction, and we did a few hours - all on red runs - before coming back down for some R&R. My turns were closer to parallel than they had been before, and overall, it was good fun. I had one fall, trying to avoid a Very Big Chasm, and wrenched my shoulder a bit, but otherwise all was well. Our clothes were wet through by the time we got down, but we devised various hanging mechanisms to get everything over the radiators, and I settled down for a snooze. We went out again to dinner, and straight to sleep afterwards.

Friday morning was similar, but once we had picked up our skis & boots, we got on the Zugspitzbahn, and then the Zahnradbahn, up to the top of Zugspitze. It was beautifully sunny, but there were a few wind-storms that made it a bit unpleasant right at the top. The runs there were slightly longer, slightly more red, and very, very powdery. I don’t care what people pay big money for, I preferred the other stuff

There were a lot of “off the edge of the world” moments, which I wasn’t so happy with, but once we’d done a few hours, I was feeling more comfortable. We had our dinner up the top of the mountain (after a bit of chaos, and much use of the walkie-talkies, to find a seat), during which time the sun came off the mountain, and the wind picked up. We planned to do a few more runs, but discovered that the contrast was completely gone - dad ended up off-piste, up to his oxters in powder snow, and took a while to get out. We couldn’t see the moguls that were developing either, til we were going over them! It was very hard to make out the lie of the land in general, so we gave up and headed down.

We made best use of the sauna, ice-room (tiled room, with the upper half of one wall open to the snow outside), pool & steam room, and then had our picnic for dinner - taking it easy

Saturday morning was just insane. We were waiting just over an hour before we got into the cable car to go up to the top - and the slopes were fairly busy once we got there. Nonetheless, we had fun, went up, down and round about until we had had enough, and very happily took off the ski boots for the last time! The relief was fantastic I have three icky pressure-blisters on my right leg, which are currently driving me nuts

We wandered round the town - got a present for Grandma, and posted Rosie’s birthday card - and generally enjoyed the sights. Sunday morning was a leisurely breakfast, easy check-out, hanging around in the train station for a bit, and then back to Munich. We came straight home and crashed for a bit - catching up on email and home, talked to Mum & Rosie, and then rang Grandma to wish her a happy birthday.

We headed out early-ish for the opera, which was starting at 5pm. Because of the strike that’s going on at the moment, it was being held as a concert - all the performers were in formalwear, the chorus was seated on the stage, the backdrop was of the opera-house itself, and the soloists were the only ones who really moved at all. Even then, the acting and so on was gone - so I was most grateful for the surtitles!

The music was absolutely fabulous though, and from where we were sitting, we really got better value by it being a concert performance We were right up “in the Gods” - under the ceiling of what is not a small concert hall! It was great though - and the two oompah-loompas (brass players in traditional costume) in the Weisses Brauhaus afterwards really rounded off the evening!

Time to go out and collect pieces of paper (Scheine for some of my courses) soon, so wish me luck!

So I headed off to the airport bright & early this morning to pick up dad - lucky I did, because I got there 20 minutes before his flight was due in, and five minutes after it had landed! I was only waiting a few minutes before he appeared, and we headed off home to unload luggage.

We relaxed a bit with beers at home, and then went out to see Dachau. There’s really not much I can say there - I’ve visited several concentration camps at this stage, and it’s an experience I think everyone should have at some point. It’s really incomprehensible what people are capable of - and it’s important to remember what happened so recently, and be aware of what’s continuing to happen around the world today. It’s shocking, moving, terrifying.

We headed into town afterwards, via the electronics shop, where we picked up some walkie-talkies for the skiing, and then went on to the Weisses Brauhaus for beers, a plate of sausages (various - the Debrezinger were the nicest though!), and some apple fritters. Yumminess

I’ll be offline for the next few days - but should be having lots of fun! Yay

… can bite my ass.

That is all.

Mmmm, yummy

I’ve just had a gorgeous brunch of fresh orange juice and home-made potato bread. It’s super easy to make, and soooo tasty. Two spuds, ‘baked’ in the microwave (yeah, yeah, I’m a student), mashed up with a lump (25g) of butter, and then mixed in with some flour (50g) to make a dough-y consistency, and there you have it.

Split the above mixture in two, flatten the dough out into patties, and fry ‘em up (you don’t need to use any oil in the pan - they’ll do just fine without) - tasty goodness I added some garlic to the second one, but didn’t notice the taste difference - will try more next time! I ate the first one with just a little salt - it was delish! The second one went down really well with some pesto from Fox’s, couriered over by Colm

All in all, a fantastic brunch. Man, I’m glad the semester is over!

I am not a happy girlie.

First, Safari keeps on crashing. Every time I do stuff with more than two or three emails in Gmail Google Mail (I don’t get Gmail anymore. I’m in Germany. I don’t get Google Video either. WTF?), it crashes. It crashes other times too, but that one is the most annoying. Another WTF?

So, I switch to Firefox. Not a happy girlie. I liked Safari better - it looked better.

But that’s not the half of it. This stupid “Google Mail Chat”. A seriously big WTF there. I want email. Especially for things like list mail, I like Google Mail. I don’t want chat. I have chat, it’s called IRC. I have a way of keeping what I want - it’s called logs. I even have a great way of sorting (folders) and searching (grep) my logs. I don’t want Google Chat, Google Talk, or anything like it.

I had my mail all set up, I got rid of tags I wasn’t using much so that everything fit onto one screen, it was all working fine and looking good. And then they started screwing with it. First, they messed up the look’n feel. My labels were in bigger text than other stuff. Another WTF.

Then, they started ocassionally asking me if I wanted to do the Chat thing. There was no “opt out” - only “opt in”, or “don’t opt in” - so I “don’t opt in”‘d. But now, without giving me the chance to “opt out”, they’ve signed me in to Google Mail Chat, or whatever they’re calling it today. I have requests from people I don’t even know, to be allowed chat with me. I sign out, hide the thing. I don’t want it. But it’s there, above my labels, “above the fold”, as it were, and I can’t get rid of it. Best I can do is put it below the labels. Honestly. W.T.F.!?

Google, thank you for your help with my mail. I could do all the things you do in mutt, but you make it easy. But seriously, stay out of my chat. Leave me alone there. Don’t give me chat I don’t want, don’t clutter my screen. Just do my email, do it well, and leave me be.

Digital Rights Ireland launched three months ago, and has been doing Trojan work since then. Now, they need your support.

If you can afford a subscription of €120/year (or €60/year for concessions), you’ll be officially regarded as a DRI Supporter - but even if you can only afford a tenner, your support will be much appreciated.

Thanks!