Hiking Baumgartenschneid and visiting Lake Tegernsee

The rest of last week (Sept 19-23) was largely uninteresting. Not much to share besides: we put the deposit down on our apartment, got 3 of the exact same phone call about picking up the keys (Joe's lab mates said they think the guy must have short term memory loss...), celebrated Joe's birthday by watching soccer on a laptop in our room, and that's really about it. Sarah got a stomach bug sort of thing and Joe was spending 10+ hours in lab so it wasn't too much of an exciting time.

Lake Tegernsee, from the boardwalk-like area where you can rent boats!

We decided to make up for it by going for a ridiculously gorgeous and scenic hike on Sunday! Joe planned the whole thing out, surprisingly, and led the way. We took the U-Bahn (subway) to the Bavarian regional train, called the BOB, and took that train south to the town of Tegernsee. It's a beautiful little town on a large lake (Lake Tegernsee), with a ton of hiking, as the lake is in the middle of mountains known as the Bavarian Pre-Alps. We picked a "shorter" hike, the Baumgartenschcneid trail, and hiked about 5 miles to the top and back. Between all the walking down to get to trains, around town, and to get to the start of the trail, we ended up walking around 11 miles total on Sunday! Sarah shared several photos on Facebook, and here are some of them, but for the full album (because Sarah can't just take "a few" pictures), here is a link to a shared photo album with all of the pictures. Enjoy!

View from the top of the Baumgartenschneid peak

"The hills are aliiiiiiive.....with the sound of muuuuuuusic"

Of course there was a biergarten/restaurant  in the middle of the trail!

A good half of the hike was this steep. It was not a leisurely climb!

We're trying to get better at taking selfies...we're not particularly great at it. 

Egyptian Weekend in Munich

The start of Okotberfest was this past weekend, and to celebrate, we went to IKEA on Saturday, and then we went to the Egyptian museum on Sunday. I know that sounds exactly like what Oktoberfest is about. Walking around inside along a predetermined path with very hushed voices looking at sculptures from thousands of years ago. Sarcasm aside, the Egyptian museum has a deal on Sundays that entry is only 1€, and since we had not received the PIN numbers for our debit cards yet, we were a little limited in what we could partake in around the city. Plus, the weather was pretty crappy (rainy, cold, windy) and walking around outside seemed like a poor idea. The picture on the left is the Marienplatz, kind of like the center of the city, and it's most iconic and historic building, all decorated with regional flags for Oktoberfest. It's the first thing you see coming out of the subway station in the city center, and quite a sight to behold, even on cold, rainy, and gross weather days.















But we did manage to make our wish list and budget for furnishing our apartment and the museum was actually pretty cool. Of course, we also spent a good deal of Saturday watching soccer games. We may not have been particularly adventurous last weekend, but we weren't bored either! Here are some pictures from the museum, mostly courtesy of Joe.

Same carvings, but with Sarah for scale

Large wall carvings

Neat lion brick mosaic

The fabric exhibit had this unique display. The drawers pulled out about a foot and a half,
to display different tapestries flat and protected from air exposure, but if you look behind
Sarah you can see that they only stuck out a few inches from the wall. The drawers were
mostly inside the wall, so they didn't take up display space in the room, but you could fully
pull them out and check out what was inside them. 

There was also a pretty interesting display about the process of displaying statues. Start with your rectangular block and then progress through these steps: 

Step 2 - Block out the shapes

Step 1 - Outline

Step 4- Further trim the shapes

Step 3- Trim down the shapes

Step 5- Add detail and finish! 

Cross your fingers...

In what can only be defined as a ridiculously short amount of time, we've hopefully found an apartment! We've signed a lease, but haven't made our deposit or gotten the keys so we're still crossing our fingers (you just never know). We'll pick up the keys in 2 weeks, so the countdown is on. So there's a quick update on that, hopefully a proper update will follow, with pictures of the place and documentation of our impending Ikea trip (YESSS!) to furnish the place, but for now, we are just waiting.

We've also (maybe) solved the bank crisis, although we're still waiting on the finalization of funds to transfer. Waiting on that too! Also waiting on my phone to unlock. I can hear so many relatives' voices right now all saying "Well, patience is a virtue" in unison...

In the meantime, Joe's putting in full days at the lab, getting training done and lab set up started. His office is currently undergoing renovation, which apparently is true of pretty much everything here. Kind of like at William and Mary, where there was ALWAYS construction happening that impacted your day, or in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, where there was constantly road improvement projects to ruin your "quick drive" to wherever. On the plus side, we are used to it! During the day I hear construction equipment and noise from around 8 to 4. Yesterday I had the pleasure of having a loader truck (but smaller, like a Bobcat) pull up right next to our window and just hang out there (running loudly, of course) for about an hour. It was fun (sarcasm). Needless to say we will be glad to move to our apartment once that's all finalized.

It turns out that a German BBQ means grilling literally everything except for couscous salad and potato salad. It also means that you don't just grill a few things, you have 5 different types of meat and every vegetable imaginable available for grilling. And that you take 4-5 trips back to get food. It's quite a social scene and we had a good time.

Up next? Well, Oktoberfest starts on Saturday so we are trying to decide when we will go and what events to attend. There are parades, carnival rides and games, concerts and performances, and of course the beer tents. We've learned that the 2nd week is "the Italian week" and that we will absolutely notice the influx of Italians. It will be an entertaining and unique experience for sure!  We'll also have to take our Ikea trip to buy some things that will hopefully be able to be delivered  the day we get to move in (so cross your fingers for that too!) and getting the requisite residence permits and registration completed in the next few weeks. We'll also be joining a group from the University nearby in a monthly event, starting in October, and hopefully finding some people to play soccer with, or at least hang out with. That's the plan for now, at least!

A Summary of Days 1-7

Wilkommen! 

Joe and I in front of the Nymphenburg Palace

We've been welcomed to Munich with some absolutely beautiful weather. People in Virginia/North Carolina know it as "perfect late fall football weather" where the high is around 75-80 and the low is around 55-60 and there's no humidity and a light breeze, and this lasts approximately 2 days between sweltering summer heat and oppressively cold winter weather (which also varies by day, but that's another story). 

We survived our little-sleep-getting, multiple-plane-changing, surprisingly-not-so-terrible flight over last week and then proceeded to nap for several hours. We woke up way later than planned, found groceries for dinner (and breakfast for the next day), came back to our temporary apartment, and then slept for like another 14 hours. We originally had planned to "beat the jet lag" by staying up all day when we arrived... yeah that didn't go as planned. So we spent the rest of the week attempting to continue to beat jet lag and we just never really got there. Hopefully this week with Joe starting to work, we can get into a better routine.

More of Nymphenburg Palace

Pretty building facade 

Last week consisted of surviving on €60 in cash while we waited for our bank appointment with the English speaking banker, trying to figure out which train tickets would be best value for us without knowing where we are actually going to end up living, realizing we can survive in a kitchen with approximately 15 total dishes (maybe a few more, but not many!), continuing to be asked by other people for directions (we must really look like we know what we're doing), and a really suboptimal apartment tour where our tour guide spoke like 3 words of English and we were trying to make small talk and it was just completely laughable if you were an outsider, probably. 

The good news is that we have an application in for that apartment! It is very nice looking, although I didn't get pictures. I was too busy trying to hand gesture "we need an apartment quickly because ours is a temporary placement really far away from everything except Joe's work because it is basically a hotel room in the lab building." I didn't do a great job, in case you were wondering. We also managed to get a bank account and German phone numbers figured out. Joe's is currently working, but mine will have to wait as Sprint finds it necessary to keep my phone locked for a totally not inconvenient period of "7-14 business days after termination of our contract." 

Our "temporary apartment" really is like a hotel room on a separate wing of the Max Planck building where Joe is working. It's convenient for work purposes, but otherwise, it's about 20 minutes walk or train ride to much of anything. In case you forgot/didn't know/wanted a reminder anyway, Joe is working at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (say that 20 times fast). It's located just north of Munich, in Garching, which is a very quiet place. There's some farming fields, a LOT of apartments, 2 grocery stores, 5 restaurants, and not much else. It's right across the street from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), which is at the end of a train line (the U-Bahn), so luckily we can make it to a train that takes us to Munich city center pretty easily. 

Morning walk into Garching

Evening walk into Garching

Joe's first day going into lab!

Total cost: 2 Euros. 

We're navigating our way around pretty well. We've done a TON of walking around, not always taking the easiest or shortest route to help ourselves get used to it here, at the expense of our calf muscles and feet. Thankfully, the beer here is pretty cheap so at the end of our 3 long days of walking ~25-30 miles total, we had a weekend of watching soccer (fußbol), having a beer with dinner, and making popcorn. And also finding gelato once or twice. Obviously. 

Tonight's adventures include being really cranky, via the internet, with SunTrust for telling us that it would be easy to transfer money online, which is false, as well as a "BBQ" put on by German scientists. I'm not sure if they mean the northern term (grilling out) or the southern term (pulled pork in sauce),  or the secret German meaning of BBQ, but we will find out soon enough. Adventure awaits!