Hanging out with Cousin Nate

The start of 2015 has been very, very low key for us as evident from the lack of recent blog activity.  Our 2015 adventures have recently ‘officially’ kicked off with a two-week visit from my cousin Nate, who was travelling around Germany and visiting many of his German friends from the U of M.  This counts as perhaps only the fourth or fifth time I have spent time with my cousin, which just goes to show that sometimes you have to move halfway around the world to get friends and family to visit.

We celebrated Nate’s arrival with the traditional Hirschgarten Biergarten experience.  Although the weather did not entirely cooperate, we were well supplied with food from Aunt Ellen and Uncle Rüdiger.  The spread included Obazda, radishes, sliced meats and cheeses, and about a dozen hard-boiled Easter eggs - which they were still desperately trying to get rid of. 

As a side note, the Easter egg hunt is a very important tradition in my uncle’s family and is only to be carried out using hard-boiled eggs buried deep into the wild forest (see prior blog).  This is not your plastic-eggs-filled-with-candy-slightly-hidden-in-the-backyard kind of game- they take the Easter egg hunt very serious.  So Julie, Nate, and I agreed to eat the remaining Easter eggs (although none of us really liked them), to honor our Uncle Rüdiger who worked hard preparing the perfect Biergarten spread (and so that we could finally be rid of any guilt for not eating them).

The rest of the week, Julie and I spent at work and got to enjoy Nate’s company in the evening.  We shared dinners at the apartment and got into some pretty serious battles in Settler’s of Catan, which Julie ended up mostly dominating (of course).  We also got together at Ellen and Rüdiger’s place during the week to watch the first leg of the UEFA Champions League quarterfinal matchup FC Bayern Munich vs. Porto, where they ended up losing 3-1.  It was a really fun evening of yelling at the TV and enjoying popcorn from my aunt’s vintage American popcorn maker.

On the weekend, we took Nate to the famous Andechs brewery for all of our first time.  The monastery is only about 30 miles from Munich – I am not sure why we haven’t been before.  We, the doggies included, enjoyed a nice afternoon exploring the ancient sights set high up on the hill overlooking the fields down below.  The three of us split a giant Schweinshaxe (pork knuckle) for lunch and enjoyed some of their famous beer.  Rita made friends with the elderly Bavarian man next to us who was nudging crumbs down to her on the ground.  Afterwards we went for a long walk along the Amersee before calling it a day. 

Nate left us on Sunday to visit another friend (he technically has more German friends than we do), and we went to go pick up Logan and Ashley at the airport who were just arriving for part one of their European vacation.  However Logan and Ashley were asleep by the time Nate returned, and left for Paris early the next morning, leaving both to wonder if the other really existed.

Perhaps the most exciting part of Nate’s visit (at least in my opinion) was attending the second leg of the Bayern Munich vs. Porto quarterfinal.  It was a nail biter waiting for our tickets to arrive, which I bought 2^nd hand online (for a lot of money) and only arrived the day before the match after some unexpected shipping delays. 

Anyhow, there was a lot of excitement for this game considering FC Bayern needed at least 2 goals to advance to the semifinals and most people expected them to fall short.  In the end this match was truly unbelievable.  You know that moment in a basketball or football game where one team just starts dominating for a few minutes causing the opposing team to stop the game with a timeout?  Well imagine that level of domination for about 45 minutes straight because in soccer there are no timeouts.  Bayern Munich ended up scoring a touchdown worth of goals and winning 6-1, which meant Nate and I witnessed the most wild and exciting match we could have imagined.  As I write this, however, that game feels less meaningful since FC Bayern was just eliminated in the semifinal by Barcelona (Julie back-dated this blog which is how I know the future).  But still that was one of most entertaining and exciting sports games I have ever witnessed. 

We ended our week with Nate by celebrating in the traditional Bavarian style by going to Frühlingsfest, our favorite beer festival of the year.  Ashley and Logan, back from their other travels, joined us as well.  We started out by cruising around the fairgrounds a bit and then taking a ride in the Ferris wheel.  Later we played a round of that ski ball horse racing game, where you nudge along your toy horse forward along the race track by rolling a ball into holes at the end of a ramp (makes sense right?).  It was a pretty tight race between all 5 of us, except for Ashley’s defected horse that was not moving at all.  To everyone’s surprise Logan, who is not known for his talents throwing a ball, ended up winning and taking home the obnoxiously big orange stuffed dragon.  We then settled at our table in the Hippodrome tent, toasting our giant beers (and Ashley her water) and dancing on the benches for the rest of the evening. 

Nate rocking it in Rüdiger's old Lederhosen!

The following day we said goodbye to Nate and the four of us (Julie, myself, Logan, and Ashley) took off on our Scotland vacation.  We had a really great time spending quality time with my cousin and it was nice to learn more about the Hoff side of my family.  Thanks for coming Nate and good luck in medical school!

6 blogs in 1 for the month of May

As the month of May draws to an end, I realize that we have completely ignored the blog the past 30 days.  On one hand – we haven’t done anything particularly special worth dedicating an entire blog post to.  But on the other hand - we have yet to skip an entire month of blog writing since we moved here.  On that note – this won’t be the most interesting blog entry written so far, but at least we will have some memory to look back on for this month.

One thing we (maybe a bit more me) did this month – take lots of photos.  One reason is I am obsessed with a new app – Foap – where people can sell their own pictures as stock images.  So far Noah and I have sold 15 photos at $5 each.  Honestly the thrill of getting the email saying a photo has sold is way disproportionate to the fact that I only made $5.  Whatever – now Noah and I can each say we have ‘published’ our photos for money.  We also like to joke that the whole family (us and the pups) are now models since some of the sold photos includes us.  The point of this is to explain why, exactly, this post will be full of photos of the ‘mundane’ activities too.

Moving on – one thing Noah and I finally did was to go out into the countryside a bit to photograph the beautiful fields of rapeseed.  It is hard to believe that this is only 30 minutes from our house!  Technically this was the last weekend in April, but I will throw this in since I love some of these pictures. 

The first official weekend in May was spent updating our cheap 100EUR Ikea ‘dog’ couch.  We call it the dog couch since technically we bought it for the dogs.  Specifically so they have a way to jump up into the bay window and stare out the windows like a couple of cats.  I have decided I needed an update to the living room if we will be here a few more years, and this includes changing the color scheme.  Instead of red/black, I wanted to lighten the living room up to a blue/yellow combo.  This included turning the white/cream dog couch yellow with the wonderful help of Aunt Ellen and her trusty sewing machine/staple gun.  I think the three of us did a pretty dang good job! 

Before and After.  I even made the pillowcases (with Ellen's help, of course)!

The next two big projects that we (ok this time, more Noah) have been tackling in May are working to replicate 2 important food items that are a bit harder to create.  Noah is a great cook, but up until now we have been dependent on Texan visitors for our flour tortilla source, and have utterly failed at replicating a good homemade pizza.  After a handful of batches, Noah has perfected a delicious tortilla recipe (since there are no Texan visitors on the horizon), and we are still working on our pizza recipe.  Though we both learned that a pizza stone is a KEY component in better homemade pizzas. 

Our social outing of the month was to hit up Frühlingsfest with some of our Penzberg pals. This year we had 2 tables reserved, which made it all more comfortable than last year (when we had everyone crammed into just the one).  It was a fun night even though it was incredibly hot inside the tent (which explains the sweaty photo of me on the right). 

The big event of our May (and has been since 2010) is our wedding anniversary.  This year we celebrated our 4^th by going to a delicious French restaurant, Rue des Halles.  We followed this by driving down to Lake Starnberg with the dogs late at night with hopes of catching some of the potentially huge, first ever, Camelopardalid meteor shower.  That ended up being a bust in that 1) the predicted high activity would have been 8am the next day German time, and 2) nothing really happened anyways.  Regardless, it was nice to lie out on a dock and stargaze with my favorite person ever and our two favorite dogs.  

 

Now I will end this random May blog with a bunch of some super cute (in my opinion) photos of the girls on the yellow rug/couch.  Plus you can see them post-haircut - they are both so much smaller without all their usual fur.  And the main reason that there are more of Sadie than Rita – Sadie sits and isn’t bothered by the camera.  Rita runs away. 

Time to run!

Welcome to the Hotel Weiss (such a lovely place....)

Last week, Hotel Weiss officially opened for the 2013 season with our first visitors this year – our friends from Phoenix, Stacy and Adam (though none of us live in Phoenix anymore as of 1 week ago).  They are the first of 11 total guests over the next 3 months – or at least those are what we know of today.

They landed around lunchtime on Tuesday, so I took them for some tried and true good jet-lag lunch food – döner kebap over by Rotkreuzplatz.  This is the same place we have taken a few other guests – including my mother, who took this awkward photo of one employee with the döner:

Noah made it home early from work, so we picked up some chicken from the Tuesday chicken cart and headed over to Hirschgarten’s biergarten for dinner and beer.  We all Noah lucked out in that Hirschgraten was showing the UEFA Dortmund vs. Real Madrid semifinal game on the big screens.  Stacy and I started with our backs to the screen, but had to eventually turn around - it just became too creepy to have all those faces staring our way.  

The next day the pups got to join us for a pizza picnic in Hofgarten followed by bocce ball in the Englischer Garten.  Sadie became obsessed with a woman riding horse around us – I had to keep her leashed up or she would have tried to become friends with the horse – and most likely fail miserably.  And while I kept her from that danger, it might have been my fault one of the bocce balls hit her in the face.  I have never felt so guilty in my life – I think I was more upset about it than Sadie was.

We spent the evening over at Frühlingsfest for more chicken and beer, and again… Noah was able to watch the UEFA FC Bayern vs. FC Barcelona semifinal game in the beer tent!  The place definitely had a different atmosphere with the game playing (as we were there the Saturday before with some international friends… and 1 authentic German), but it was a very happy one with FC Bayern winning 3-0 and clinching a Germany vs. Germany UEFA cup final.  We also got surrounded by a German boy band ‘flash mob’ – but not sure how flash mob it really was when there isn’t much room between the tables for their few dancers.  And a huge shout out to Stacy and Adam for partaking in the traditional Lederhosen and Dirndl!  Now they really need to come back for Oktoberfest to get their money’s worth out of it!

Thursday we stayed in the city center spending money… what else can you really do in bad weather?  We continued our theme of daily German food at Zum Franziskaner – this time treating our guests to an eclectic combination of Weißwurst, authentic Wienerschnitzel, and Kaiserschmarrn.  While all three authentic German/Bavarian food on their own – I don’t think they really go together.  But no one complained.

We switched things up for dinner and went to a Greek restaurant.  Our old Munich friend Laura joined us, so Noah and I were able to toast her goodbye (again) at dinner.  She found a job in Cincinnati and was here in Munich to finish up her last 2 weeks at Intel.  That just means her and her soon-to-be husband need to come to Munich on vacation, instead of business trips.

Our plans for Friday originally included walking through the Partnachklamm Gorge, as we had heard cool things about it.  We even pre-booked one of our car sharing vehicles for the day.  Unfortunately for us, they decided to ‘close’ the gorge for the week for maintenance, and it would open again Saturday.  But we had a car for Friday – not Saturday!  We decided to be resourceful and just find another place to visit with the car.  Solution: Eibsee and Zugspitze!  

We began with a nice 7km hike/walk around the Eibsee – a lake at the bottom of the Zugspitze mountain (which, by the way, is the highest point in Bavaria – the mountain, not the lake).  Here we made fast friends with the ducks, who clearly are used to people feeding them.  At one point we stopped to look at the lake on a small hill, and this little duck came walking all the way up the hill to try to beg.  Impressive little climber!  We also found a rock shaped like Texas, so naturally I had to stop and give it a photo shoot.

After the 7km hike/walk, we took the cable car to the top of Zugspitze, which left both Stacy and I rather uneasy.  The mountain is 2,962 meters above sea level – or an elevation gain from the bottom of 1,950 meters.  Whatever way you look at it – you are going very high, very fast.

Once at the top, you take an elevator up 3 floors to get to the actual summit.  It is amazing how tiny Eibsee looked from up here.  After stomaching all I could handle of the heights, we moved to Deutschlands höchster Biergarten (Germany’s highest beer garden) for lunch.  I can say I had a real beer at the top of Germany – no Radler for me that day!  

For our guests’ last day in Munich, we decided to focus on the biergarten experience (again).  We first went into the city center to hit up Viktualienmarkt – the large open market near Marienplatz – to pick up a nice lunch spread.  After a quick detour to see the Hofbräuhaus, we hopped on the Ubahn up to Olympiapark, where Rita and Sadie cuddled in the small space between the seats.

Once there, we somehow managed to hit up two separate biergartens.  We did split them by stomping around the park grounds and making it to the highest hill there for some nice views of Munich and the Alps.  It was also nice that Stacy and Adam had one day of beautiful weather in Munich – how we wish it was every day!  Sadly this marked the end of their Munich leg, and we woke up Sunday to an empty apartment.  Well, not too empty – we had two waggly little dog butts to greet us in the morning.

In 9 days, Hotel Weiss will welcome my parents, and we will do it all over again!

Frühlingsfest!

Spring (Frühling) is here!  Baseball season is underway (we are streaming the Dbacks over the internet), the flowers are in bloom, and the Biergartens have come to life.  People here find all kinds of excuses to drink beer and the arrival of spring happens to be a big one!  Frühlingsfest, the little sister to Oktoberfest, recently took place in Munich so we set out in our Bavarian outfits with our friends to welcome in the spring.

Of course the ladies looked better:

Frühlingsfest had the feel of a typical State Fair in America (or a rodeo for those Texans) complete with tons of sketchy rides that spin, a Ferris wheel, lots of junk food (including cotton candy), people in costumes, and beer.  We played it safe and took a ride on the Ferris wheel.

One of our favorite sightings was the super American cheeseburger (nobody ate one though)!

After cruising around for a while we made our way into the soul of Frühlingsfest, the larger than life beer tents.  These things are really incredible and gave us a small taste of what Oktoberfest might feel like.  See for yourself:

We weren’t able to find a seat in the blue Augustiner tent, but had better luck at the Hippodrom (Greek origin meaning horse tent).  We first sat down to a relatively mellow crowd around 7 p.m., and it was comical how you could significantly notice the energy level increase hour by hour (the beers only come in one size, 1 liter or around 32 OZ).  At first there were a few people up dancing to the traditional Bavarian music, but by 10 p.m. everyone is up dancing on the benches and the music has evolved into international pop classics (many American- Sweet Caroline, I’ve Got a Hangover….Oaaah, etc.):

A group of 16 year olds showed up at our table (yes, I asked them their age) and were carded before being given their giant beers (rightly so).  About 4 sips later, they were pretty drunk, and naturally I made pretty good friends with one of them.

We closed out the evening playing some carnival games.  Eddie is a soccer player so naturally he won his girlfriend a stuffed animal toy with his skills.  Hoping to keep pace with Eddie, I became really competitive at the old western shooting range.  I hit about 13 out of 15 targets while the others kept wasting their ‘shots’ on some silly, practical joke water cannon that shot water on the passersby.  Well the joke was on me in the end because it turns out this was a non-contest game and there was no prize to be won.  I put up about a one minute argument with the game attendant before I got through the language barrier to realize there was no prize.  At least I’ve still got a pretty nice shot though!