Zach and Kristin come to Germany / I become a celebrity!

Last weekend we had a visit from my brother’s old college roommate and his wife, who going forward will be referred to as Zach and Kristin (makes sense – those are their names).  This is the guy who almost 9 years ago opened my brand new copy of the movie Dodgeball, intended as a Christmas gift for Julie, so that he could burn a copy for himself.  Oh, and this was our first Christmas together.  Although I’m sure Julie would not put it past me to buy her a used DVD as a gift, I knew I found a special girl when she could laugh at the whole thing.  Otherwise, our two visitors might have found themselves staying in a hotel.

They quickly became one of our favorite guests when they showed up with macarons from the French “Weiss Chocolate Shop”.  I was lucky to try two of the ten – as before I knew it Julie had eaten most of them.

Anyways, all you need to entertain a couple of Texas State University graduates is the best beer in the world and perhaps a river to hang out on a sunny Saturday. Together we had an absolute blast while enjoying our long overdue “summer” weather. 

After work on Thursday we met them for an open-air concert to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the Residence courtyard.  I’m not sure what was better, the music which brought back classic jazz band memories of my years playing the trumpet or the ambience of sitting in the royal fountain courtyard with blue skies.  I know they enjoyed it too because they bought a CD and got it autographed by the band’s pianist and MC.  This was actually our first concert of this sort here in Europe, even though I’m sure they think we do cool stuff like this every week.

We spent Friday evening in Hirschgarten enjoying our first smoked Steckerlfisch of the year and the various delicacies Zach and Kristen picked up earlier that day from Viktualienmarkt.  It sounds pretty trivial, but considering this was just the second time I could wear shorts this year, it was really awesome to be able to sit outside and enjoy some nice weather.  Sorry, the redundant references to the weather are probably annoying by now.

Saturday we planned an all day ‘river event’.  This is essentially our code for hanging out, grilling, and swimming along the Isar river while trying to avoid the blinding images of naked men sunbathing on the other side of the bank (complete with sunscreen and oils too).  Despite (or because of?) the nudity, we were having a great time grilling some sausages and cooling off in the water.  Of course, I was the only one to get all the way in the water, which is quite cold and reminiscent of Barton Springs in Austin. 

Towards the end of the day we noticed a camera crew stomping around our base camp.  They had approached Zach and Kristen while we were sitting by the water, so we got up and went over to rescue them from any unnecessary German interrogation.  They asked us if they could film the sausages on our grill, and then it expanded to asking if they could film Julie and I eating a sausage.  They were from RTL TV network (think ABC, NBC, etc), and told us it was for the 15-minute update news at 6:45 that day.  We weren’t really expecting to make the cut amongst the many other, more probable German groups, which we saw them film after us. Regardless, we got back home in time to flip on the news and record the segment just in case.  It turned out we were the ‘feature stars’ at the end of the 2 minute segment, “Wurst in Deutschland”, and we all watched as Julie delicately fed me a bite of sausage to highlight just how wonderful and romantic grilling sausages along the river are.  You can see the video yourself here. I don’t know if it gets any more cliché than a couple Americans featured in the news eating sausages in Germany.  Thank God they did not broadcast our voices and stupid responses to the question “how did the sausage taste?”, because we were both regretting our “sehr lecker!!” and “unglaublich!!” broken German answers.

After our German television premier, we took Zach and Kristen out for Indian food for dinner, which is becoming a theme for our visitors and demonstrates our ever growing “burn-out” for German food.  It is no coincidence that the Indian restaurant is just a few blocks from the delicious Sarcletti’s Ice Cream shop.  We said our farewell to them the next morning as they set off for Vienna.

Meanwhile, I was asked to be interviewed for the DAAD (agency sponsoring my fellowship) quarterly magazine. My weekend of fame extended into the week as they sent a professional photographer to my lab for a photo shoot.  My efforts to schedule this while my coworkers were at lunch failed since we got off to a late start, and I was subject to everyone standing around making jokes and laughing at me while I tried to focus on not looking stupid for the camera.

All in one week I had a feature spot on the news, an interview, and a public photo shoot. Autographs are now available upon request.