Weekend

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Since ltur offered ICE tickets to Munich for 19€ Fried visited me for the weekend, so we spent the time having fun in Munich 🙂

On Friday evening we did some cooking, enjoyed the brownies and watched “Into the wild” together with two other friends of mine from IBM. I really like the film – it is based on a real story instead of a random hollywood plot and one of those movies you need some time to think about afterwards. As all of us are also adventure seeking to some extend we found the film quite inspiring, but at least I also identified strongly with the criticism about consumerism and its implications on society and personal happyness (which can and will never live up to what is suggested in advertisements in my opinion).

On Saturday we got up a little later than we had wanted, so we couldn’t go swimming in the Danthe-Bad as planned, but as we had some technical difficulties with a certain product we spent an hour or two at the Apple Store instead. Afterwards we met Lud, invited some other friends over for lunch and then tried to find a geocache. We tried using our phones only if absolutely unavoidable, because it was so cold. Unfortunately this lead to a 10 km walk from the train station to where we would’ve had to climb a fence and gave up – the way back was just 3 kilometers, but at least we did a pretty nice walk…

Directly afterwards we were invited to a little homeparty where we ate some nice vegan food and then played kinect for the rest of the night, I even had to survive a bootcamp 🙂

For Sunday we had planned to eat organic Weißwurst at the Milchhäusl and afterwards take the train to the Bodensee, but again the time plan was too tough, so we went to Schliersee, which was beautiful, the lake was frozen so we went to the little island and looked for another cache. We couldn’t find it – most probably it was hidden under snow and returned to the civilization to get warm feet again. When we arrived back in Munich we then caught up to visiting the Milchhäusl and had some great food there. What a nice weekend!

Brownies

Food, Uncategorized

I got a truly wonderful recepe for American Brownies from a collegue. It is quite easy, genuinely American, and really tasty. I tried it twice already, it’s really nice if you get some visitors because a baking tray worth of brownies can sustain 4 people for a whole day 🙂

Here’s the recepe (yes, it’s that simple):

1,5 cups = 180gr cocoa
1,25cups = 150gr wheat
0,5 spoons of salt
3cups = 675gr sugar
6 eggs
2 TL vanilla flavour
12 oz = 335gr melded butter

Mix all the ingredients thoroughly and pour it onto a baking tray. Bake at 180°C for 15 minutes. Afterwards it will be very soft, just wait until it’s cold and enjoy perfect brownies!

Sightseeing

Food, Travel, Uncategorized

After another busy but very intersting week in Munich I found some time again to share some experiences. My parents took the long train ride to visit me, so we spent most of the weekend trying to see and discover as much of Munich as possible, but with a focus of indoor activities because of the bitterly cold weather.

A very nice place was the Schloss Nymphenburg which is impressive in winter but must be really awesome in summer – it’s beautiful and just huge. Even the fresh snow didn’t seem to pose any problem to the masses of runners we saw, in warmer times I can only imagine as a paradise to go running. Maybe I’ll get the chance to spend another internship here in summer, I’m sure I would take it. Right next is the Museum of Men and Nature, which was very interesting and features a lot of interactivity, so you don’t get bored.

We also saw the Transportation Exhibiton of the Deutsches Museum where we spent more time than planned on the history of transportation, old S-Bahn trains, cars, bicycles and much more, I would really recommend it for a cold winter day, especially because it has so many old things you can inspect instead of just reading about them.

Naturally we also stopped by the Marienplatz, Karlsplatz, Maxmonument and several other sights, but another highlight of the “tour” was trying quite a good variety of food including the original Hofbräuhaus, Bretzelina (which has the best Bretzen in Munich so far and I tried a lot) and Vapiano. The real highlights to me were Milchhäusl (very small place offering affordable, organic but traditionally bavarian food) right in the English Garten, Basic Buffet and Hänsel und Gretel at the Marienplatz. All those three restaurants have a quite unique philisophy which I always prefer to generic places like Starbucks – which are nice but not really a reason to visit another city for. Sadly 99% of the people don’t seem to care much about those individual places, but I hope they’ll still be able to survive.

That’s it for now, feel free to comment, I’m open for feedback and would like to hear your opinion.

DriveNow – getting petrol can be fun :-)

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DriveNow currently offers to sign up for 19€ and get 90 minutes for free to celebrate their start in Düsseldorf,
so a collegue and me decided to give it a try. When we went to Sixt at Ostbahnhof the first time, the queue was too long, as
we wanted to eat pizza nearby, so we went for the pizza first, but when we came back the registration system was down.
So I tried again yesterday morning at a different Sixt station and it worked flawlessly.

In the evening I read through the FAQs and found an interesting fact. If you pick up a car which has less than 25% fuel and
refuel it, you get 20 minutes free. I quickly found a Mini Cooper Cabriolet at 23% just a few metro stops away, so I decided to do
him a favor 😉

I quickly found the Mini, but as it was quite dark. Opening the car took about 20 seconds (DriveNow reserves a certain amount
of money on the credit card an opens the car once it was successful). They have a modified smartphone (7′ screen) in each car, which
asked me how clean the interior was and asked whether I noticed any damages. The time starts counting after answering these
questions, so you can make yourself comfortable in the car and adjust it to your needs. I couldn’t find out how to fold out the side mirrors and since the
the rear mirror is not really useful in a Mini Cabriolet while the roof is closed I drove to the gas stop really carefully.
There I stopped the car and was asked whether I wanted to park, return or fill up the car, so I chose fill up and it displayed the
PIN of its Shell card. I had no problems paying with that card and the whole stop at the gas station took just about 5 minutes.
There I also managed to fold out the door mirrors and chose “Home” for navigation. Drive-Now has a quite innovative feature – you
can define several places online and they are accessible from every car, I find this pretty useful.

So I drove back via the Autobahn (Isarring) and chose the first parking spot I found. Giving the car back was easy and once you lock
it with your DriveNow ID the time stops counting. It took me exactly 21 minutes, but since I got a 20 minutes bonus for refueling
I just used 1 minute 🙂

Weekend

Travel, Uncategorized

Because weekends are so short you have make intense use of them 🙂

Our team of three collegues and me found 9 geocaches including the glorious Mystery-House on Saturday with a nice Pizza in between, we went to eat real bavarian food, tried to climb down a bridge (which didn’t work out unfortunately) and went swimming.

Today we’ll most probably check out Drive-Now, I’m really exited to see how it works and whether we’ll find a parking spot afterwards 🙂

Munich

Travel, Uncategorized

I’ve arrived in Munich last Thursday, but have been busier than I had thought, so I procrastinated my first post about Munich till today 🙂

I love the city, it feels considerably cleaner and more friendly and everything feels to be within walking range. I’m staying in a nice flat together with a fellow student near “Englischer Garten” which might be better than Central Park in NYC as it is more than five kilometers long (I tried jogging to the end yesterday but gave up after about 5 kilometers as I had to get back as well).

I also found some pretty nice caches, but they all seem to be camouflaged pretty poorly here in Munich – I wonder how muggels in Munich should be so different from muggels everywhere else…

Though I’m using Youtube pretty rarely it gave me a good video suggestion lately (the first good suggestion ever actually) which resulted in me subscribing to the whole channel. Most of it is too advanced, but it’s very motivating and I’m really curious how long I can motivate myself to do some regular workouts – I get bored pretty fast normally and fall back to jogging, biking and such things where I can always see places I haven’t been before.

That’s it for now, I will update you on my Munich experiences whenever some things worth sharing happend (probably pretty soon).

 

Journey to the End of the Year

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New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun yesterday as I participated in Journey to the End of the Year with three friends. We reached the 5 checkpoints and were chased through the city. Once we had to split up, lost one team member to the evil chasers and met again at the next checkpoint. Finally we were among the few of about 80 participants (my guess) to reach the final as runners and went on to greet the new year at Brandenburg Gate.

May the new year continue as active as the last one ended – happy new year everybody!