Past while recap

Dear Long Suffering Readers: first, I apologize that you have been deprived of Pemulis, gastronomic photography, and other indiscriminate musings on European Life for so long. I personally would like to blame the always-present need for pencil-pushing -- aka work -- for getting in the way of the growing of this creative outlet. It really drains your vital mind power throughout the day and then, when you get home at the end of it all (for one more day), one just doesn't exactly have the gumption to take a seat and start piecing together witty words and phrases for the consumption of the Internets-at-large. That being said, here I am to entertain you all in a 'past while recap' so that you may feel safe and secure in the knowledge that you are up to snuff, as one might put it, on the current machinations of the protagonists of this blog's lives.

Galopprennbahn München Riem

Two Saturdays ago, we attended the Pastorius horse race here in Munich -- the biggest purse (155,000 euros) in Bavaria. There were 5 races throughout the afternoon, culminating in the grand Pastorius. I used my PhD-level knowledge of statistics to devise an unbeatable system. It is in the process of running through the EC patent system and I can therefore not disclose its particulars at this time, but the general idea is to bet on a horse that has no statistical snowball's chance in hell of winning as otherwise you don't really win any money. Overall, we spent a whopping 5 euros each (1 euro per race) but were quickly up to an astonishing 30+ euros by the final race thanks to decisive picks by yours truly and our entourage. With a 1 euro bet on my favourite horse "Pennyking", we were up more than 14 euros!

By the final race, we were feeling confident. We had won money on 3 out of 4 races; we were sizzling! So naturally we bet it all on the final race on a horse that had odds of 34 to 1. If that horse won we would be heading home with over a thousand euros!!! But he didn't win... Oh well...

Deutschland Cup 2014

This past weekend we attended our second Deutschland Cup (see http://grenoblewmd.blogspot.com/2013/11/munchen.html for last year's version). This time the participating teams were Slovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Canada! These aren't just any Canadian hockey players though. In fact, Yahoo! Sports (and apparently most of the North American media that happened to cover it) call them "Euro-Canadians" as these are players who play in the Euro leagues such as in Switzerland or Germany.

The game we went to was on Sunday afternoon and was the final game of the tournament: Germany vs. Canada. The tournament format is round-robin and the team with the best record wins. We were purposely ignorant to the meaning of the game that we attended as it might have had no meaning taking all the fun away. Luckily for us, we attended the only game that Canada actually won. Germany was holding a 2-0 lead after the first period, but Team Canada stormed back to win with a final score of 4-2. Unfortunately, however, since that was the only game that Canada won they finished last. Team Germany were the big winners this year, but it was nice to see Canada squeeze out the win!

Running

Three weeks to go until the Florence Marathon. That means we get to start running a little bit less (until the actual day of the race when we'll have to run a whole lot). This past Sunday was a 30km run that we were supposed to do in under 2h30m. It was also supposed to be fairly easy since we should be going the same exact speed in the race but for an extra 12km / 1 hour. Ouch! Man that was hard. I don't think I'm in the right shape to do a 3h30m marathon this time, but I guess we shall see.

Goodbye and thanks for reading. Until next time...