More photospheres

Rather than link to them all individually, I'm going to be lazy and link to my Google+ profile, which seems to be the only way I can share these properly (without submitting them to Google Maps, which some of them won't suit).

https://plus.google.com/118418360285960780865/posts

Of course my blog posts are automatically linked there too, linking back to here... A bit like disappearing up my own arse.  In the future this link won't be as useful.  Maybe I'll fix it one day.

Nürnberg

Naturally everything will be an anticlimax after Bamberg, but I cycled to Nürnberg in the weekend.  A German bloke I'd chatted to told me if I hurried I would make it for the end of a semi-annual market for "old things".  I suggested "antiques?" which he latched on to.  It turns out that it was a giant flea market throughout the city, I didn't see anything particularly old.  Even though the cycling was easy going, I got there tired and it started to rain.  The bits of the market I got to see as people packed up looked no different to others I've seen, but I don't get excited by flea markets.  Buying anything just means carrying it on the bicycle later.

Found some interesting beer and wood smoked sausages, which was pretty exciting, though.

I just missed this barge going through a lock (is that the right word?).  You can't really see inside the lock though, so that's about all there is to see.

Part of what puts the berg in Nürnberg.

The museum at the castle in Nürnberg is pretty cool if you're into armour, swords, and early firearms (even just a little bit).

They even have the holy hand grenade.

For David's son.  Two trains for the price of one!  The white one is an ICE and the one in the background looks like an RE.  The ICE goes pretty fast.  It didn't have the space to wind up to the same speeds as some of the Japanese shinkansen trains I caught (which have way cooler farings), but fast all the same.

Bamberg

I am now in the hypocenter of beer.

The circles represent breweries (and not all of them).  With possibly 100 or more breweries within cycling distance I am left with no option but to admit defeat.  Let's make some crude assumptions:

• Each brewery makes 4 different styles of beer.
• Each 0.5 liter beer contains 2 standard drinks.
• My body can healthy metabolize 4 standard drinks per day, but I can only do this six days a week (in maybe 12 hours the sound of somebody in Australia correcting me that it's actually less will reach me).
• I have absolutely nothing else to do.

I figure I would need the better part of  year to try them all, even with complete devotion.  It's also false economy to try to fit more breweries into a day, as it just takes you out of the game the next day (of course this would be a rookie mistake that I did not commit earlier in the week).

Nonetheless, I have done what I can.  I set myself a rule that I am not allowed to drink the same beer twice.  I found myself breaking this tonight when I ran out of breweries (that I know of) within the city itself.  I spent most of today cycling through villages, and past breweries I would have liked to stop at.  The idea was to be able to cycle back, so I only had one beer while cycling.  A smarter person might have bought bottles at those breweries and then drunk them back at the hostel, but I only thought of that now.  It's possible I liked the rauchbier from down the road so much that I wanted an excuse to get more.

Still, I have found myself in the predicament that I might have more photos of beer than I do Sakura.  It would probably get quite repetitive to post them (and the notes of them), except possibly for beer fanatics.  To the beer fanatics, just go to Bamberg.  It lives up to the hype in this regard.

You're still going to get some beer photos...

Possibly because I followed a recommendation, the first two beers so far have been my favorites.  Rauchbier has a smokey flavour.

The Märzen was particularly nice.  If you're in Bamberg, go to the Christian Marz brewery.

These kind fellows explained to me that you order a beer at Mahr's brewery by saying "ä ü".  This will get you an Ungespundent.

One thing I've noticed is people take their dogs to the pub, or the restaurant, pretty much anywhere.  I like it.

Every time you look up in Germany you see vapour trails (oh noes, chemtrails man!)

Bloody motorists spoiling my exposure.  Or was is a cyclist.  Bah!

Some of the cycling drudgery I've had to endure.  Bamberg is in the distance, not sure how well it shows up.

I really want one of these.  It's a bottle capper with a foot operated lever.  I can't believe this never occurred to me before.

There is at least one brewery in Bamberg that gives you sane sample sizes (well, sane if you want to get through every brewery).

Meal translations

I'm trying to post this between ordering and receiving the food.  Will update on the results.

Kalbsnierenbraten mit Spargelmüse und Kloß

Google translate calls this "calf kidney-fry vegetables with asparagus and lump"

I'm hoping "lump" means "dumpling".  I chose this purely because it had "spargel", and even though white asparagus is in season here I've not seen it on a menu yet.  I'm sure my vegetarian friends already think I have no shame or conscience.

München (cont'd)

Something I find fascinating is what gets offered as impulse purchase items.  In some places it's just cigarettes, bit here we have liquor as well ("Mum, can I have a packet of Camels?").  Disregarding the display laws at home, if you put them in the open like this in Australia they'd be heavily targeted by shoplifters.

I tried to surrepticiously take some photos of the old subway trains using my phone.  Should have used my camera, you don't really get the feel.  I did see the year 1970 printed one one of these, so I guess people were using these trains during the Olympics.

In the Lenbachhaus gallery.

The Deutches Museum.  This is a WW1 era U-boat with the side removed.  Great museum.  I'd been warned there's too much to cover in one day, and it's true.

I dearly wish this was one of the interactive exhibits.

The Foucault's pendulum they have.  I was boring enough to wait around and see one of the metal spikes topple.

These holes were caused by micrometeorites.  Well I think it's cool.

Some parts of an A4 (better known as a V2) rocket.

Testing out a photosphere

Okay, click this link and see if you get an interactive image (kind of like Google street views).  If this works I'll put them all up.

Kaiserthermen

München

I am constantly getting the coin-toss decision, between pronouncing "ch" as "sh" or that gutteral sound, wrong.  Somebody told me that if it follows an 's' then it's "sh", but on listening to what people actually say I'm thinking that's similar to a rule in English.  Anyway, I'm reliably told with München you can let rip with the gutteral sounds as if you were Welsh.  Don't blame me if you run into problems by misinterpreting that.

I haven't taken a lot of photos in Munich, mainly because I've just been sleeping there while visiting the outskirts during the day.  Then when I go to places I probably should photograph, I don't bother.  For instance, I went to the Hofbräuhaus today, and didn't even get my camera out.  I didn't even get a beer.  Maybe it's always this busy, or maybe it's a delayed May day celebration, but I couldn't find a seat.  It sure did make me hungry, though.  I get the feeling it's more enjoyable with a larger group than one, though.  Seems to be set up for crowds.

Earlier in the week I popped along to the Frülingsfest, which seems to be everywhere in Bavaria but in Munich is held on a small portion of the grounds that Oktoberfest is held on.  Given how much of this land is not used it must be a pale imitation, although once inside a beer tent, how would you even know?  It reminded me of the RNA Show, but focusing on beer tents.

One thing that had completely gone past me until this point is that you're supposed to tip somebody for going to the toilet.  I probably read that somewhere and forgot about it.  People say things to you in German that I assume are smart-arse when you don't.

Now forgive me for posting another photo of a church, but this is an establishing shot...

The cathedral in Munich.

Now I may be missing something here, and I apologise to the religious folk I'm about to offend, but surely these artists were taking the piss.

Jesus chilling out with a lamb in Munich.

Now I'm sure it could be argued that I'm not sorry at all for offending people, so I'll try to clarify my thoughts.  The sort of iconography I'm accustomed to from my upbringing in Australia tends to distil the themes and images into a fairly modern and digestible form, probably because colonial Australia hasn't been around for very long.  Going into these cathedrals in Germany you see different artwork around the place that can be centuries apart.  What's more, is that there's a lot of art that is quite topical to the time that it was produced, and is really intended to be understood by its contemporary audience, not scum from the future like me.  Because an artwork was produced for a specific location, it remains there.  In Australia, where not a lot of art has been custom made for a church (and if it has, it's not too old), any artwork displayed is chosen for fitting in with a more modern religious perspective.  In Europe the original art is still there, even if it's open to wild postmodern misinterpretation by people like me.

Some people suggest that the only thing studying philosophy does is to prepare you for rationalising anything.  Others may disagree that I successfully rationalised my stance at all.

On a lighter note, the Ubahn station at Marienplatz is super-cool.

Some of the subway trains you get look to be of a similar vintage, with vinyl wood grain veneer panelling everywhere in the interior.  I would have taken a photo of that, but I was embarrassed.  In Australia you can be interpreted as a terrorist for taking photos of public transport.  Who knows what happens in Germany.  You should see the uniforms the authorities have here.  I'm way too scared to point a camera at them.  Trainspotters beware...

Psychohistory

Often when I hear people talk about their concerns with certain information based companies, or even the government, knowing everything about them, I immediately think of Asimov's Foundation novels and the fictional science of psychohistory, which could predict broad social outcomes but not individual behavior.  You know, like how statistical methods often don't work on small sets of data (or so I'm told).

This is bullshit!  They have a goddamn GPS in my phone, not to mention all the other liberties they can take with my data, and they still can't get it right.

Maybe it's like the "stop" button in Tue space ships in Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.  The button doesn't do anything, it's just there to make people feel better by making them think they have a choice.  Or perhaps more like ancient Chinese authors who would put deliberate spelling errors into their work so the reader could feel smug about discovering them (for all I know that's also bullshit, I read it in a computer magazine of all places).  By getting my activity so grossly wrong, I'm supposed to be reassured that my information overlords don't really care one iota about the specifics of what I do, just so long as I click some of the advertisements.

And people tell me I think too much.  Harumph!

Weihenstephen Brewery

Now could I resist going to a brewery that claims to be the oldest in the world?  That's right, I couldn't.  The cascade of my bad timing with brewery tours continues (and will continue into next week), but I still got to try the beer at the source.

According to my bad translation (all errors are with the original text, and are not my own), as well as the broken English testimony of some locals, a long time ago Korbinian discovered a source of water here with a divining rod.

This saved the monks much pain hauling water from the river at the bottom of the hill.  The hill is not big enough to make you think it's technically too far to fetch water, but I bet it would get old pretty quick, so if I was one of those monks I'd have nominated him for sainthood too.

You can hear the gurgling of the water here.  According to the sign, the water has healing properties, and the locals tell me it's good for your eyes.  I'll never know because it's behind a locked steel gate.  Why aren't they making magic beer out of this?  This is what I want to know.

Eventually some monks got around to building a chapel on the site.  The locals tell me this was razed by evil secularists I'm the 1800s.

But the secularists didn't, for some strange reason, destroy the brewery.  I don't know if the chimney predates all these shenanigans, but I'm pretty sure that big stainless steel kettle does.

No brewery tour for me.  At the restaurant I was offered the choice of biergarten, a table with a window, or the cellar.

Normally in Germany you just go plonk yourself down somewhere, so they must be used to dealing with foreign tourists like me.

The waiter recommended the weizenbock.  I sure hope I don't get brain damage like the glass suggests.

The locals who'd given me the juice on the ruins told the beer to get was the Korbinian doppelbock.  They were right, it was very good.  This is not to suggest the waiter was wrong, though.  Both were fine beers.

If some random person searchng Google finds this while planning places to visit around Munich, do what I didn't do and find out about brewery tours well ahead of time, and book.  As far as I could tell, at the time of year I went there are only a few days a week that you can get one.  Getting a tour in English might even be harder.  Check early.  I enjoyed it even without the tour.