Since our previous encounter last month, many exciting things have transpired in the land of hops, potatoes, and occasional imports of rucola from Italy. To begin, the First Lady of this blog had her Nth birthday where N = 100010 (in binary). Amongst the figuratively thousands of gifts that she received, the crown jewel was surely a Bavarian-designed Maloja long-sleeved bike jersey imported directly from the Chiemsee area between Rosenheim and Salzburg. Said article will allow these happy cycling foreigners to head deep into the cold spring-time hills of the countryside without FL herself becoming too cold. Or something. We could probably really use a picture of her wearing that on here, but I don't presently have access to such a thing, so, thems the breaks, as they say.
Another thing that's happened, or at least progressed, is that I'm now essentially a full-fledged real-life boulanger. Like I make bread products from elemental ingredients such as home-milled flour (though it's not actually home-milled yet), bio free range Bavarian chicken eggs, and cetera. In addition to the chocolate cake that yours truly alchemised into edible oil product for FL's birthday, I also learned from my favourite American French-food chef David Lebovitz an approach to make home-made cheese naan bread. It is really something I should brag about here because it's pretty darn good and infinitely better than any of the naan bread I've experienced in the Munich Indian restaurants. And I even have a picture:
Yes, that beautiful (Jamie Oliver lingo) perfectly crafted delicious naan bread seen just above was of my own creation. I combined and I mixed and I folded and I kneaded and I waited and I rolled and I cooked and the end result was that golden delightful treat.
In addition to testing products from our home boulangerie, we have also hired the laid-off staff from the Neuschwanstein castle to make us ice cream. Pretty random eh? You see, every year the Bavarian tourism industry goes through a cycle of approximately seven hundred thousand billion people visiting schloss N. when it's warm out, all the way down to -5 (consisting of the Kitchen staff who are kicked out) visiting during the cold winter and early spring months. So anyways, we threw them some scraps from the experimental doughs that didn't work out and in return they made us the only thing they knew how to make: King Ludwig ice cream.
But back to Sandi's b-day. Although she was as sick as a dog (a dog that's really really sick, that is) we eventually made it out to the hip Ramen noodle place in Munich. Tom has these not quite solid, well let's be honest here -- call a spade a spade, if you will -- and say completely flawed, utterly unreliable, and altogether farcical universal theories of life such as Pemulis liking a band will eventually lead to their ruin etc etc, but here is a real theory that has a greater than 1% success rate and can empirically be verified by your local neighborhood scientist: any major city worth its weight in noodles will have a hip Ramen place where you stand in line with a bunch of hipsters with beards and lumberjack shirts and toques and piercings and extra-tight jeans, and then eat a big bowl of usually over-priced soup. But it's fun and the soup is usually pretty good and actually it's not all that over-priced!
Last weekend there was actually a nice warmish sunny Saturday. And I got a ton done! Since you're clearly interested in all the intricate details, let's begin at the start when I woke up: 7 AM. You see, a friend and colleague of mine has decided to set sail towards greener pastures (greener because it rains all the time there) in the Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue area of Washington state to work in another division of Company X and so, kind gentleman that I am, I volunteered to help load furniture into and out of trucks on the day in question.
We broke long-standing records of moving efficiency and were done by 11 AM. To celebrate the fact that only one of us endured long-range moving-induced spinal hematoma, we headed to the Löwenbräu Keller to enjoy an early Bavarian meal of beer and schweinebraten (a disgusting amount of high-fat pork roast covered in gravy).
Having accomplished more before noon than I tend to accomplish during most entire months, I called up my better half and, being the nice day that it was, suggested a meet-up in Munich's own Viktualienmarkt. We strolled the outdoor kiosks and market stands, drank coffee and ate cupcakes, and Sandi even nourished herself with an authentically Lebanese falafel sandwich (seen below).
But the day was not over yet! Upon arriving home about 15h (and reminding the reader about a certain quickly-upcoming Swedish 140km bicycle race of which the protagonists are dutifully registered), I jumped on the old bike trainer to knock off an intense 1 hour interval-rich YouTube-indoor-cycling-video-led workout. Seeing as that we will surely be racing some manner of triathlon race this summer, we then jumped out the front door for another 1 hour of cardio heart-building exercise with a run along the lovely Isar.
So did you think the day was over now? If you said yes, you would be right, but only if today was opposite day. But then actually I suppose you would be wrong because opposite day is normally seen as a universal thing and so it wouldn't just be you speaking in opposites but also me and therefore me saying that you would be right actually would mean that you would be wrong which gets a little bit confusing so to clear the whole thing up let me just say forget the whole opposite thing and give it to you straight: the day was not yet over!
Following a shower, a shave, and a dash of Dior Homme, I clasped up my Patek Phillipe and we hit the town for nothing less than a meal of Tapas! Of course! First on the menu was naturally patatas bravas with a few litres of Spanish house wine. Something something Hemingway something something.
And now today here we are on the saddest day in Bavaria: Good Friday ("Karfreitag"). In this backward region of the world, Karfreitag is also the infamous "no music" day. There is a law that bans all music in all public places because they're pretty seriously catholic here. This law ruined our plans to head back to our favourite jazz bar tonight, but it does allow me to tell you a funny story about this day. Some bars close down altogether, such as Jazzbar Vogler, which makes sense because the whole point of the place is to listen to live jazz. Other places, though, open and the place is silent. It remains silent until the clock strikes midnight and music starts up everywhere at that exact moment. It's kind of a funny thing. I guess it sort of goes against the spirit of the law, but there you have it...
This brings us towards the end of the post. Sunday, bright and early, we head up north of the city to our favourite European airport, where a charter jet will whisk us away to the sunny shores of the Grecian island Crete (or "Kreta" as the Germans say, and maybe also the Greeks but I'm not so sure about the latter). We will try to remember to take lots of pictures because posting a bunch of pictures as a blog post is a lot easier than writing all these silly words...
Yiamas!!!*
* apparently Cheers in Greek
Enjoy Crete. We listed to "Carey" in Mom and Dad's living room at Easter in your honour.
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