Ich bin ein Texaner

Since July 28th is our anniversary and Lisa's birthday, we decided to do a weekend trip to Salzburg. We actually had a hotel in Salzburg, but spent most of our time in St Gilgen. St Gilgen is a small town on Wolfgangsee (Lake Wolfgang) in Austria. Since a picture is worth 1000 words (or more like 5000 of my words), I give you ... St Gilgen There were a couple of things we wanted to do in St Gilgen. There is a musical instrument museum which Lisa read about and wanted to see and there is a cable car up the mountain, which gives fantastic views of the town and lake. The cable car wasn't letting any one else up since they were worried about thunderstorms, so off we went to the museum. There were a wide variety of different instruments from all of the world and the curator could play a large number of them. Strings, woodwinds, percussion and .... others. It didn't matter. He had achieved some level of skill in them all. Here, he is playing a wind instrument from China.

It occurred to me recently when I was talking to my dad (hi Daddy!) that we haven't posted any photos of our temporary place. So here you go! We've mentioned in earlier posts that we're only in this apartment for a few months. We actually just signed a lease on a permanent place, so that will be a post in a few weeks when we move in. Our temporary apartment (wohnung in Deutsch) is ours until the end of November. As you'll see, we have room for one guest, but no more. Here's the outside. Planter boxes are practically a competitive sport in this part of the world. I'm showing you our nice one first (one has flowers, and one has herbs that we're growing from seed, so not much to show yet). I'm posting this photo in "X-Large" rather than "Large" so you can see it, at least a little bit. Clearly there are a lot of apartments here! We're in the tower in the center of the photo, and we're the 5th one regardless of whether

We had company in town this weekend, so I took Friday off and we decided to go see some sights around town and maybe do a day trip. Our adventures began on Thursday evening after I got off work. I came home and we decided to head into Munich for dinner and meandering. We stopped off at the Augustiner am Platzl for dinner before wandering around Munich. We found another gelato place to try, so off we went. Side bar: It would be an interesting exercise to find two points of interest in Munich, say 1 mile apart, and find the walking path between them that passes NO gelato places. We took our gelato and headed down to the river and see what we could see. The river Isar runs through Munich and, while it's no Seine, it definitely adds character to the town. We walked down the Isar to Feuerwerksinsel (Fireworks Island). They have part of the river dammed here and only some of the water flows around the other side of the island. This makes for a nice little beach area. I'm not

Part of getting settled in is finding things that work in your new location. It's both fun and frustrating, as anyone who has ever moved as an adult can attest. The car-buying process is very different here and MUCH more lengthy (maybe we'll talk about that in detail in a future post). We've now made the decision about what car to buy and have obtained insurance. It's in the registration process as of Thursday, and we'll pick it up Monday. A car is useful, but most places in Europe are super bike-friendly. I've been itching for a bike for a couple of years, and now the dream is a reality. It's a reality in almost Pepto-Bismol pink, in my case. Yes, I bought a pink (PANK!) bicycle. No, it wasn't an accident. I'll explain. We went to the bicycle superstore in Munich -- probably a couple of acres of bikes. The store is big enough that you can test-drive inside the store. There's even a small track where you can build up a little speed.

One of the things I was sick of living in Austin was sitting in traffic. I even said, "I don't care if it still takes me 45 minutes to get to work. If I'm not sitting in traffic it is way better." Well, that is indeed the case. It takes me about 45 minutes door to door. But it is a much different commute here. First of all, let me say that my friends that are used to using public transportation will not think anything of what I'm saying. To those friends I say this: I drove my car every day in Austin. I had no choice. I'm not even sure that was even a bus stop within a mile of my office. Cars are an integral part of life in Austin. With that disclaimer out of the way, I will start out with the fact that I turned in our rental car last Wednesday and Lisa and I have done quite well without a car for a week and a half. Really, the only reason we are getting a car is for driving trips on the weekends, the occasional large grocery trip and, of course, travellin

There have not been any posts in a week. What? Why? Well, because. It was a ... normal week. I started work on Monday the 2nd, which means there was a routine. There were small things that came up, but they weren't very out-of the ordinary: I returned the rental car on Wednesday; Lisa soloed a grocery store trip; the air shipment showed up. Exciting things in a way, but not particularly note-worthy. Saturday was spent going to a bike store and trying to figure out which bike to get. We left without bikes, but we have a much better idea what we are looking for. I bought power cables for my computer. Stuff happened. We did do a little wandering on Saturday after the bike store and ended up at the  Alter Botanischer Garten , I will say, the Europeans do know their gardens. We sat outside at a picnic table and sipped beers. It was lovely. So, what is the "non-normal" stuff that has crept into my routine? Well, there are things that Americans that live in large cities do t

Since Robert was taking two weeks of vacation to get settled in Munich and since we got all the paperwork stuff scheduled early in the week, we decided to take a long weekend and go somewhere close to Munich. Lisa's number one criterion was that she wanted to "hike in the Alps," and we both wanted to go somewhere new - this only eliminated Salzburg, but that was something. Poking around, we settled on Innsbruck, about a (theoretical) 2 hour drive from Munich. We found an AirBnB with a check-in time of 4, so we figured we could leave at 12:30 and have plenty of time to get there and get parked and wander a little before check-in. This is where the "theoretical" part kicked in. Traffic was a bit of a nightmare and we ended up stopping twice (once to purchase an Austrian toll-tag and once for a bathroom break). In addition, we had to walk 15 minutes to get the key for the AirBnB and then go back to the car for our stuff. All that to say, we finally got in the roo