It's cold here

Wow Germany has a lot of rules. And a lot of paperwork and a lot of regulations and things like that. Somehow it has already been two weeks since we arrived! That is craziness. In one week we'll go to Prague for a week and then a week after that we plan to go to Berlin for the long weekend to see Blaise's photography exhibition (and go to the Egyptian museum, of course).

I didn't have to steal Svetlana's Brompton Folding Bicycle because I bought my own. Well, in fact, I ordered my own and it won't come for another 4--6 weeks but in the meantime I get another one so in effect I really do have one so that's pretty cool. The metro here costs like five hundred thousand dollars or so and even though it rains a lot I've been biking to work so essentially the bike has already paid for itself nineteen thousand million billion times over.

One really good thing about Munich is that there are lots and lots of Italians here so that means that there are lots and lots of cafés where they make really good coffee. That is especially important right now because our poor poor Saeco Syntia is in a cold dark box in an anonymous storage warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Munich.

Germans don't like credit cards and they pay for everything in cash. This is kind of dumb in my opinion and we don't have bank accounts here yet and there's a maximum foreign withdrawal limit on our French bank account so we have been having problems eating and stuff like that but I guess we're getting by. People carry around huge wads of cash because they know that nowhere takes credit cards. They are not so familiar with the utopian cashless society that Wired magazine promised us something like fifty-five years ago. I mean it's nice to have the option to pay in cash so we can be anonymous from the NSA and all that, but in general it's nice to not have to carry the stuff if you don't want to.

Work is very confusing.