Week 39: Munich

We spent the last weekend in January in Munich. I was in the area for work for the end of the week, then headed out to Austria on Sunday late in the day, so it was a convenient trip. Jason flew down from the Luxembourg airport (he, like me, is now converted to flying Luxair--you get a sandwich, a real, good, sandwich, and a drink on a one hour flight in economy--the only way to fly!) and we met up at the apartment that we rented through AirBnB (if you aren't familiar with AirBnB, it is a site where people can put their extra rooms or even their whole apartment up for rent for a day or a month--we've used it a number of times here in Europe and it is pretty great). The apartment happened to be over a yoga studio. This was our second apartment rented through AirBnB that was over a yoga studio...the lasts one being in France. I wonder if that is a hint from the universe...

For our first evening, we walked around Munich near the Marienplatz and came across a rather good group of street musicians. More of a street quintet. It is hard to see in the video but the flute player appeared to have a broken finger. Talk about suffering for art. After we watched the group for a bit, we found some food that is hard for us to find in our hinterland: Japanese noodle soup. It was good and hit the spot on the chilly night.

The next day we walked over to the Bavarian National Museum, which is one of my favorite types of museums: those with rambling halls and a wide variety of a stuff that is well curated. We spent about 3 hours checking our the wide variety of stuff: from a Tiffany lamp to the statue of Death shown in the photo below. Death, here, is from a clock tower and the bone in his right hand rang the bell. I kinda want this in my living room.

Death Rings for his Supper

We took a walk from the museum to the downtown area, passing by one of Munich's larger parks. I had remembered reading briefly in our guidebook about the fact that you could go surfing at one of the parks. They have an artificial wave built up on one of the streams, and people grab their little surfboards and go at it. I was not expecting, though, for anyone to be out this time of year, especially in the 20-25 degree F weather that Munich was seeing that weekend. Well, as you can see in the video below, my expectations were wrong. These guys were out in their full-body wet suits, many with hoods, to surf in weather that was only borderline-good for being outdoors.

We spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Deutsches Museum, which is another museum of my ilk, with a huge amount of exhibit space and well curated collections. I was reminded of the Henry Ford Museum, which Jason and I had visited about a year ago in Dearborn, MI, but the Deutsches Museum was organized far better than the Henry Ford and did not have a vague smell of hot dogs from the Wienermobile permeating all the exhibits.

For those of you who are a fan of the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science in Boston, the Deutsches Museum had a bit of a smaller venue, but a similar show. We walked in in the middle, just as the host was getting his last shock in his Faraday cage (the ball on the left in the linked photo). Don't worry folks! He was fine--the Faraday cage protects you from the shocks. Once the host climbed out of the cage, there were a series of high voltage demos, that went as follows:

Host: "Achtung!"

Crowd: (Covers ears)

Electricity: "ZAP! POP!"

Displayed Item that was Just Hit by the Electricity: (Catches on fire)

which is always a good time. 

Week 22: A Weekend in Paris

I have been traveling quite a bit for work lately, and headed back to Beauvais, France this past week. Jason and I decided to take advantage of my work trip and spend the weekend in Paris. I took Friday afternoon off and visited the Musee d'Orsay before Jason was able to arrive early on Saturday morning. The museum itself is quite a site. It is an old train station and has a fantastic interior. A great place to sit and people watch.

I was especially excited to see their Van Gogh collection, as earlier this year there was an episode of Doctor Who which revolved around Van Gogh. There were at least two paintings featured in the episode that I saw: The Church at Auvers (I was unable to find the demon in the window, but I think that happened in an alternate timeline) and Bedroom in Arles (the third version--oddly enough, this painting also appears in my German textbook, in the section where you learn the vocabulary for furniture). I was thinking that Starry Night was there as well, but it turns out it is in MoMA.

Resting my feet next to the Seine

I met a friend of mine for dinner that evening. We were both on time (or close to), but managed not to find each other at Place Saint-Michel for about half an hour. Luckily we didn't give up. We had an excellent Tapas dinner, then walked around a bit to find some ice cream.

Jason arrived on Saturday morning and we planned out our day, wanting to hit a few things few things we didn't see on our last trip to Paris two years ago. Our first stop was the Catacombs. Under Paris were a number of limestone mines, which resulted in a vast series of tunnels. As the city was expanding during different points in its history, a forgotten graveyard or mass grave would be found. Instead of halting construction, the bones would be moved to the catacombs. Here you can see *piles* of bones from different points in Paris's history. There are plague bones and revolution bones and...and...and...lots of bones.

Jason and some bones

We walked around a bit and our next stop was the Pantheon. It is a very cool building and we arrived just in time to take a tour to the top of the building where you can look out, see all of Paris...and eat it.

The best part about Europe: The opportunity for forced perspective shots

Our final stop before resting up for the evening was the Pere LaChaise Cemetery. No, baby-boomers, we did not see Jim Morrison's grave. We actually wanted to, so we could compare the level of vandalism there to that on Oscar Wilde's (see below), but the cemetery was closing, so we couldn't make it. We'll look for it on our next trip. Oh, and we ran into Chopin's grave quite by accident. It was a quite lovely place.

So much lipstick...

 Saturday turned out to be "Blanche Nuit" (White Night; a slang term for an all-nighter), where Paris had many of its museums open late into the night and had a variety of public art exhibits set up across the city. Everyone was out and the weather was beautiful. We saw a couple video installations in churches, but otherwise just walked around and enjoyed the crowds. It was a great time.

We wrapped up the weekend by again meeting with the same friend I had met for dinner earlier that weekend. We all saw an exhibit on Giacometti and how he was influenced by Etruscan art (the Etruscans were in Italy before the Romans--the Romans thought they were weird, and they had a different language, customs and technologies from the Romans, plus no one knew where they came from; we decided they were either aliens or time travelers; add your vote in the comments). I only knew of Giacometti's work by sight and had very little knowledge of the Etruscans, so it was a beneficial exhibit to see on two fronts.

We had a great weekend and were back home in about 3 hours (2 hours by TGV and 1 by car). We'll have to make some time to do it again in the future!

Week 2: Belated Norway

I apologize for the delay in this post. After getting back from Norway, we’ve been doing a bit to get our new (and rather empty) apartment in order. In other words: I have a valid excuse. The apartment is nice and big, though not very bright. I’ll post some on it in my next post. This post is all about Norway.

As many of you know, part of my job requires semi-regular travel. Often this is to places in the Mid-Western US, but with my relocation, (hopefully) more of my trips will be locally here in Europe. And last week was my first, to the suburbs of Olso, Norway.

I came into Olso rather late from Frankfurt through Amsterdam. The Amsterdam airport, at least in the central part, is one of my favorite airports. Very often in European airports, little is located near the gate. Some times not even seats. They instead centralize all the shops, seats and activity in one area of the airport. While this can be a horrible and crowded experience (I’m looking at you, Heathrow), Amsterdam does it very well. The central waiting area is airy AND quiet. You don’t feel like you are part of a crush of humanity. You feel more like you are wondering around a European market square.

From the Olso airport, I took the express train (Jason’s favorite part to the trip, I’ll get to that later) to the suburb where I would be working. I arrived well after mid-night. The express train wasn’t quite express, as they were working on the tracks and put us on buses for the last few stations. Everyone was very helpful and spoke great English, so this was little more than a small annoyance.

I’ll skip the work week, with just a couple quick mentions of items:

How to Live in 100 Square Feet?

• Norway is super expensive. Think $10 drafts and $40 for Indian food dinner for one.
• Oslo is north. Very far north. Sun rise was at 4ish, and set was around 10pm.
• The building I was working in was *beautiful*. Lots of glass and steel. No wonder Norwegians are so happy. Being this building’s janitor would make me happy to be a janitor.

Jason met me in Oslo on Friday night. On Friday afternoon, my coworker and I wondered around Oslo a bit. I then checked into the apartment hotel IKEA showroom where Jason and I spent the weekend. (It was really nice to have that furniture to try out for a few days, as we have an apartment to populate with such things.) I met Jason on the street outside our hotel on Friday night. He was raving about the express train. He wants to bring one to every city. I will let him explain further, if he desires, in the comments.

All I could think of is one of the last scenes in
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age

We really only had the full day on Saturday to see Oslo together, but with close to 18 hours of daylight, that was plenty of time to get a taste of the city. We hit up the following sites:

• Gustav Vigeland Sculpture Park: This is a wonderful site. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
• Aker Brygge: A walking area, by the docks with cafes. Perfect for people watching. We had lunch here and saw some one try to move their power chair in among our cafe’s crowded tables. Yes, Virginia, the rest of the world has winners too.
• Akershus Fortress: A site with history back 800 years. We got to see the dungeon!



Jason Impersonating a Statue

• Oslo Opera House: The only opera house I’ve been where you are encouraged to walk on the roof.

There was definitely more to see, but in our time there we got a nice taste of the city.