Sunday Morning View From Your Biergarten

Sunday morning breakfast in the beer garden listening to church bells from every corner with a wheat beer, pretzels, and the white-wurst that is well known in these parts. It's not quite coffee & talking-heads politics on the leather couch, but it's familiar and what you do in these parts.

I managed to 'sneak' into Munich for my next work assignment, and surprised the snot out of Franz by turning up in his restaurant on arrival on the Sunday the ninth with out so much as a word. I sat at the bar, ordered a beer, chatted with his colleagues, waiting for him to show up from the back, eventually one of the coworkers saw Franz working in the back and asked him why he didn't let them know I was in town.

"David? Which David? Here?!!??" Heh. Success. Pretty much threw him for a loop for most of the week, although there wasn't much of a week to speak of. I was busy with work in a suburb of Munich, he went to Austria to see an opera in an ancient Roman quarry, and between it all, the first week of my business trip here flew by. I had a British coworker with me for the first part of the week, and the second part of the week was busy with getting re-situated from the suburbs into the city. Franz & his coworkers threw together a great dinner with the coworkers both last week and the first week, so good impressions were left all around, though long dinners are not conducive to my original plans of being in the gym every evening. Scheiße.

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<<<--- Franz and co-workers polishing the brass before opening for the day.

Last weekend flew by with a street-party on Saturday, and a Sunday on the bike pedalling up and down the Isar. The city was empty, but the banks of the Isar were full with Müncheners escaping the heat. I didn't join them on the banks, rather opted to pedal over to the Michaelibad to swim some. Bad idea - everyone from Munich that couldn't make it to the Isar was at the pool. The water was refreshing, but the crowds were insane.

Last week was a week of routine - 7am up, at work by 8:30, work in an unairconditioned office till 5 or 6, then home for an evening of TV and bread and seeing what crisis popped up on the accounts back home. The office has been a bit grueling.. while the temperatures outside are pretty nice by Texas standards, the south-facing office becomes a sweatbox in the afternoons with no AC. All of us have sweatstains by 3pm, and we're all going through the bottles of water like there's no tomorrow. This week might have things be a bit more moderate, we'll see. Today's starting off well, and I've got a bike rented, so I can run with the locals out to the river, though Franz wants to do a biergarten in the afternoon as well. We'll see what happens.

At home the good news is Chaz has things keeping him busy, and there are some job interviews coming for him, so he's keeping up with things there.