Lazy 4-Day Weekend

Friday and Monday are official holidays here in Bavaria (note: Bavaria has more holidays than any other German State-- suck it Berliners!), and the weather has been freakishly fantastic-- almost makes me forget what a long, brutal snowy winter we had. I took advantage of the sunshine to nip around the corner to my local wannabe Irish bar for a pint and a read in their just-opened biergarten (beer garden). That's my new Barcelona guide next to the pretzels and Murphy's Stout, and this upcoming trip looks to be pretty fun. Off to tidy up the place-- B is on her way back home!

Jakob Daniel Burgschmiet

This smaller statue and fountain is a bit off the beaten path, located in front of an apartment complex off of... wait for it... Burgschmietstrasse (Burgschmiet street). Burgschmiet was a local sculptor, artisan and teacher whose works dot Nuremberg and Germany. Burgschmiet also started the Lenz Metal Foundry in 1829, and it's still there today just down from this statue. For photos of some of the foundry's bronze works click here.

Nuremberg: Records Broken Here

I get my hair cut in the not-terribly-close city of Lauf an der Pegnitz (good hair cutters, like good mechanics, are worth tracking down). Lauf is some 25 miles away so I take the train out there every 5-6 weeks or so. While waiting in the Nuremberg train station, they were setting up for the world record attempt of the longest chocolate fruit skewer in the world. The Guinness folks were there, the table was being set up and the excitement was... nonexistent, to be honest. To be fair, I took this photo of the poster some 2 hours before the Big Event so maybe folks were getting psyched about it in private. Never did see the end result, but if this dull YouTube video of the event is any indication, I didn't miss all that much, other than maybe a tasty sugary snack afterwards. I can't find a shred of news about this event-- talk about under the radar world records!

Trompe L'oeil

It's not all that often I can pull out the arty French terms I learned in college-- that Art History degree IS finally coming in handy after all. "Trompe l'oeil" is a term that means "deceive the eye" and here's an example of an otherwise bland apartment building in the southern part of town gussied up with faux monkeys and art supplies. Even the trim below the second floor windows is painted on. Really well done-- click on the pic for a better view. I snapped this on the way to a restaurant named "Premium Junkfood" which featured all sorts of stuff that's bad for you from double bacon cheeseburgers to deep-fried Snickers bars.

Lunch With A View

Click on photo for larger. That was my view the other day as I sat down to enjoy my falafel sandwich (extreme foreground) by the fountain of St Lorenz Church. Those are the spires of St. Sebaldus Church center-left, and the Kaiserburg (Nuremberg Castle) center-to-center-right. As far as the falafel goes, it's no L'As du Fallafel (heck, it's not even Fat Kitty Falafel-level good), but tasty and cheap nonetheless-- lately, I've been averaging a visit there every other week, and they know me by sight now-- I'm the guy who asks for it sehr scharf (very spicy), somewhat of an anomaly around here. As you can see, the streetside views are pretty good too.

Supermarket Find, WTF Edition

Puerile week continues here at TAE, with, um, this stuff. There isn't a whole lot I can add other than Milch is German for "milk," which makes this ever grosser-sounding than it already does (South Park fans may recall the use of the word "milch" for something else entirely-- see the "Oprah episode" for a refresher).

Anyway Dickmilch is a bit of an odd item already, and I'm not sure it has any American counterpart. Basically it's thickened soured milk, and falls somewhere between sour cream and yogurt. I see a Canadian food services company selling this as "Set Milk," and suggests to use it as the starter or base for buttermilk or Gouda cheese.

Going Solo

B left this morning on a business trip to the USA. Under normal circumstances, I'd be a tad jealous, but after viewing her itinerary just for today [Nuremberg to Paris, wait 5 hours; Paris to Detroit, wait 2 hours in that vacation paradise (sorry Cliff); Detroit to Knoxville, TN-- that's over of 22 hours of planes and airport stops], and realizing that this is just the first leg-- after 2 days on the ground in Tennessee it's off to Atlanta for a couple days, then a brief jog to the west coast before coming back here to Germany all in a 9-day whirlwind-- I'm glad to be holding the fort here. In fact, the only thing that grinds my gears is that she'll be staying a mere 0.3 miles from a Waffle House, the southern restaurant chain which holds a siren-like call on me-- I ask: where else can you get a steak dinner and a hot fudge sundae at 5:00am, or a chocolate chip waffle and eggs over easy at 11:00pm? Anyhoo, while I have some work to keep me busy, I rather suspect that the dishes will pile up in the sink, the pizza guy will see me regularly, and the dust bunnies will grow to tumbleweed-like dimensions around the manse. B will be impossibly busy, but did hold out the faint hope that she could maybe do a guest post on the road. Safe travels my dear, and I swear the place will be reasonably clean upon your return!

When "Free" Plane Tickets Cost $200

So B and I are heading off to lovely Barcelona (pictured) in a few weeks-- our first "real" holiday this year, the end of a very busy work stretch for her, and a bit of a capstone for an extremely weird month for me (more on that later, maybe). I've had some frequent flier miles accumulating for some time, and due to this particular airline's general lack of German service and the fact that these reward miles were due to lapse sooner than later, I pulled the trigger and chose to get us some free intra-Europe travel. Or so I thought.

I really shouldn't complain that much, but the airline-- I'll be a gentleman and not name the offending party here-- I'd like to think that I'm above that after all-- ended up charging my credit card $212 for these free reward tickets. In essence I paid for the taxes on the tickets only, plus a ridiculous $50 "assistance fee" which was completely unavoidable for someone in my predicament-- one can not make or claim international reward reservations without operator assistance. While I can begrudgingly see the logic in this airline's procedures, I truly do not appreciate them. Lufthansa, to name but one example, doesn't charge taxes for their frequent flier award travel.

To add a layer of intrigue and insult to this experience, this airline doesn't have any partners that fly into Nuremberg, so we have to hightail it down to Munich to get our reward flight, which means either an additional 56 Euros in train fare or 90+ minutes of driving each way and a roughly equivalent amount in long-term parking fees. The only airline partner that flies from Munich to Barcelona is the notorious Iberia Airlines, renowned for their indifferent customer service. I actually asked about the possibility of flying a different partner, Finnair, which routed the same flight via Helsinki (which is sort of like going from New Orleans to Phoenix via Boston) but no dice.

All in all, I think it'll be an adventure and at the end of the day, what amounts to be 75 Euros per plane ticket is chump change compared to the full fare prices we were looking at. It was so good that we actually bumped up the hotel budget to treat ourselves to the swankiness we deserve. And years of traveling in cattle class has systematically lowered my expectations of the glamor of air travel-- it's Greyhound with wings, really. More on Barcelona as it happens!

Something to Go With Your Dickmann's

Literally one aisle over from the Super Dickmann sweets from a few days ago, we have this curiously salacious-sounding, er, dish. This word is a play on Puten which is turkey-- but this stuff is actually Geflügelwurst--mixed poultry sausage (think liverwurst), and then thin-sliced. Yuk.

Calling Any Computer Geeks...

When it comes to these sorts of things, I sometimes feel like a plugged-in Luddite. In my attempts to get acquainted with some of the more up-and-coming (OK, minor) social media tools out there, I came across Whispurr, a macro-messaging service that actually seems to have features better than the venerable Twitter. Problem is, I can't figure out how to post my "Whisps" (Tweets by a different name) onto this here blog. If there are any computer-type folks out there that can guide me on how to do this, you get my eternal gratitude and a public mention on The Accidental Expat, a fine (if somewhat unpredictably updated) blog read by dozens of folks worldwide. Oh, and if anybody wants to be my Whispurr buddy, I'm "The Accidental Expat" there too-- gotta keep the brand strong, y'know.

Hard To Believe This Is For Kids

Aha, Dickmann's. Basically, they are a soft graham cracker base with 2 inches of marshmallow goo on top and a thin layer of chocolate coating the whole thing-- sort of like a high-rise Moon Pie without the top wafer. The "Special" edition ones have colored sprinkles on top. They are, in a word, disgusting. Oh, and the name is funny too.