Ich bin ein Texaner

We posted a little bit about this on FB, but there was so much we saw and did in Berlin that it merits a blog post. It was our 30th anniversary, and Robert suggested going away for a long weekend. Our criteria? We wanted to go someplace we'd never been, and we wanted to stay in a place with air conditioning. No small task in our part of the world! We looked at various places nearby, and then Robert came up with the idea of going to Berlin. We found a hotel with AC, and Expedia made the whole thing affordable, so off we went! Hotel front door. I liked the design. Large comfy bed. And did I mention there was AC?? We flew from Munich to Berlin on Friday the 26th. We checked into the hotel and found an Italian place nearby that was well-reviewed. We went early since we hadn't had much of a lunch. The dinner was good, but the ice cream dessert was the star of the show -- a ball of ice cream with vanilla in the middle and chocolate on the outside, coated in cocoa, and ...

This week has been hot. I can feel the Texan eye rolls from here, and I get it. It's much hotter in Texas than it is here. However, in Texas there is an abundance of air conditioning. Here there is virtually none. Not our apartment, not Robert's office, not most stores. There are a few mall-type places that have AC, but you have to go looking for it. Additionally, we spend a lot more time outside here than we ever did in Austin. We lived in a pretty walkable neighborhood in Austin, but I felt pretty virtuous if I walked to lunch or dinner a couple times a week. Here, it's near-daily. We walk to the train station (about 12 minutes). We walk to the grocery store (5 minutes now, but that'll be longer at the new place). If we take the train somewhere, there's walking on the other end. All of that means more time outside. Until this week, that was a wonderful thing. The summer weather was glorious, the trees are green, there's a lot of green space throughout Mu...

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....

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...