OK, so I’m a bit late on posting happy thanksgiving, so I added “weekend”. What have I been busy with? Well, not much as I’ve been home sick, umm…Civilization IV has kept me busy, with this new computer it is just FLYING. I’m loving the new computer. Anyways, other than that I’ve been writing travel tips for a website…and umm…drinking mango juice. I love mango juice.
At least several dozen times in the last few years people wanted to have a lengthy discussion about the cars here in Munich. I intend to have a proper post on this, and by posting this first, hopefully I’ll remember to actually get the pics together to properly write on this topic…so look for that on Sunday.
In the meantime, try to stay away from shopping malls, they’re full.
My nose is running like you wouldn’t believe, but only out the one side.
Anyways, I think I’m sick again, I believe this is already the 2nd time since I started this blog that I’m sick…that’s not good. Well, it is more or less as far as tours are concerned that the tourist season is over. I’m on the once or twice a week I have a tour thing at the moment, so I’ve been wandering around Munich with ~150 posters a day instead. Oh well.
On a positive note, the tours that I have been getting have gone really well. My last tour, on Saturday, was to Neuschwanstein. I had people from 9 different countries on the tour…oh, wait, 10 countries. Two of the guys who claimed to be American turned out to be Mexican…it took several hours to get that out of them. However, that certainly explained why their English wasn’t perfect. They were cool, we talked talked politics and agreed on about everything. (one was from Tijuana one L.A. ….but neither were U.S. citizens, technically) (also I want to note I was asked to not include tour numbers anymore…so now you’re gonna have to guess based on the # of countries represented!)
I believe Petra and I will get our new computers either tomorrow or the next day, so that means a hell of a lot of work needs to be done to transfer data to the new HD, reformat my biggest current drive for Petra…and well…re-install every program. I made a list of things I need to install immediately, it’s over 30 progs…then there’s gonna be random other ones that I’ll need to install whenever I get around to it of course *cough*.
On Monday I had a Munich Highlights walk. For those who haven’t taken my tours, what this means is that I take (typically) between 5 and 15 people around Munich for just over 2 hours. My normal plan of attack is to general make a circle around the old town area of Munich (I won’t get into specifics because, well, that’s insider knowledge). So I basically try to cover ~850 years of Munich and Bavarian history in that 2 hours. So really, I do my best and depending on the group, it can be the best 2 hours of my day…as I really do enjoy talking about Munich’s history to anyone even slightly interested.
SO, Monday’s tour…well, only one woman showed up, which is typically a no tour, since our company policy states that we need at least two, because otherwise the company could lose a lot of €. So she was paying 9 euro for the tour, I won’t say how much a personal tour is, but it’s a long ways off of 9 euro. My boss happened to be in the office and offered her the personal tour for just 5 euros more, which she of course took because that’s how she had planned to start her day, and, well…who doesn’t like a personal tour? ….so um, €13 is still a LONG WAYS from a personal tour rate, so she got a great deal, meanwhile I got paid more by having the tour go rather than not, so everyone’s happy. (did that even make sense?)
I sent out the “monthly e-mail” to family and friends today, so I’m kinda in rambling mode, sorry.
Last week I went to Salzburg twice, both times I spent the 3 hours in the middle of the day in a large shopping mall at the edge of town. For those who haven’t been on the Salzburg tour, I take a group to Salzburg, we walk around for 1.5 hours, then they have 3 hours to go into all the places I talked about…meanwhile I usually read a book or whatever. Then we meet back up and head for Munich.
SO, just to do something a bit different, the last two trips I hopped back on a bus and went to Europark, which is quite nice. It has lots of restaurants, a couple bookstores, a large supermarket, a large electronics store, and free bathrooms *cough*. Now, on to pictures…first off, here’s one of a 80,000 EURO TV.
Here’s a pic of Untersberg from the mall entrance, on a crappy day:
…and here’s a recent pic from Neuschwanstein looking down at Hohenschwangau, this was last week, Nov. 5th 2007.
This list is taken from showing various visitors around and personal experience with their reactions…as well as looking back at my own first-time experiences with these places.
(I’m NOT going to include Neuschwanstein or Salzburg, as those are the most common ones…and let’s face it, you’re gonna go there anyways)
1. Linderhof Palace, Ettal Monastery, and the Eibsee: All three of these are easy to do in a day, and makes for one of the highlights of anyone’s visit to the area. The down side is, you need a car.
Linderhof
Ettal Monastery (and awesome brewery)
the Eibsee
Hi everybody, I’ve been too lazy lately to write much…sorry. Last Sunday Petra and I went down to Grünwald, which is a southern suburb of Munich, to finally visit their castle. I was very impressed with it myself, having low expectations for any castles that close to Munich. However, I definately recommend it to anyone who really wants to see a real castle and is in the area at length. Here’s some pics we took at Grünwald’s castle.
So basically, if you live in Munich…go see it…if you’re visiting, and it’s under 2 weeks, don’t bother…there’s just so many other things to see that I’d recommend first.
The most comparable castle in the area in my opinion is Blutenburg. Some of our visitors we’ve dragged out to Blutenburg, the only castle in Munich itself. Grünwald’s castle is a bit more impressive in my opinion just because you can actually go up the towers and they’ve made a proper museum out of it, where as with Blutenburg, it’s a children’s library and a restuarant…located in a park. For those who haven’t been to Blutenburg, again…it’s not a major site, but if you have plenty of time…or happen to be in the area behind Nyphenburg palace…then go for it.
here’s a pic of Grünwald’s caste (and Petra):
…and here’s a much older picture of Blutenburg castle in Munich:
Ok, maybe not glorious. I’ve got a break for a few days…well, technically til the 31st. My last tour was Wednesday, to Neuschwanstein. It was a beautiful day, sorta. The leaves are still on the trees in numerous colors…and down there, we still have snow (though it was melting quite fast and constantly hitting people in clumps falling from the trees). So, we had snow and various colors on the trees…making it very pretty. OK, it wasn’t perfect because of the clouds…we only had a few moments of blue skies or sunshine, it was looking like it could rain fairly often…but never did.
Here’s a pic from that tour:
That reminds me, most of the tourists are being quite boring with their questions lately. Just a thought, maybe I’ll continue it later.
Well, last night we got a new TV. I know, wtf? Were we looking for a new TV? not really…but I’m always on the lookout for things involving the word FREE. In this case, we upgraded our livingroom TV from 19″ to 27″. Also, now we can use that 19″ as our bedroom TV. YAY. Did I mention the word free? Basically, I was doing my usual thing, checking the toytownmunich.com forum and I noticed someone posted that they were giving a 27″ Philips TV in good condition away for free…well, it turns out it’s a damn nice TV, and umm…yeah, we’re thrilled. Here’s some pics of old and new:
That reminds me of just last month when we picked up my new monitor, which you can also see in the picture. That was a free upgrade from a 17″ to a 19″…and it is damn nice. Did I mention the word free?
SO, tours have been all over the place lately, as far as how I feel at the end of them anyways. Yesterday was a good day, except for it being cold of course…but not too bad. Neuschwanstein has snow on it at the moment, which only happened a total of 3 days last year, so it’s quite impressive this early. We don’t have any snow here in Munich, the other day it snowed, but it melted on impact. Tomorrow I’m heading back to Neuschwanstein so I’ll see if it has snow again. For some reason I didn’t feel like taking any pics of NSS in the snow yesterday. (I only had my phone camera anyways)
As far as tour numbers are concerned lately it’s been pretty consistent for me, around 9-15 people every tour…which is pretty nice. DB, the german train company, is planning strikes again…this time thursday and friday. Well, I have a Salzburg tour on Thursday and it always makes me uneasy when my boss wants me to go ahead with the tour during the strikes…I just don’t like starting a tour when I don’t know for certain we can get there and back. With Salzburg, if the tour is thrown off an hour, it really hurts the tour as they don’t have time to go into the museums or up to the castle…and well, I just want to make sure everyone’s happy. …so we’ll see how it goes for Thursday.
I’ve also had a couple very odd tours to Salzburg…both going well…but…well…odd. The last one had 2 from spain (nearly no english but for some ungodly reason their spanish was EXACTLY what I learned in school so that I could actually understand them…this nearly never happens with spanish-speaking people. They were from Madrid, for the record), then a couple guys from Chile (here on business), then a couple americans (cali), and then three chinese guys who understood about 3 words that day (friendly, though). So in total, I had 2 who could actually understand everything I said, 3 that understood NOT A GODDAMN WORD, and then of course the 4 that understood only every 5th word. That makes things interesting, especially since they’re still working on the tracks, so with the multiple train switches….I’m happy to report that everyone made it there and back and were happy at the end.
The Salzburg tour before that was DURING the DB strike last Thursday. Now, I really didn’t want to do it since DB wasn’t promising anything…but surprisingly, it went well. Our train left on the other side of Munich, so we took the scenic route across town on the subway, then a train to the border, then switched trains….then our normal train right on time got us back…well, to the Ostbahnhof again, then an U-bahn ride over to the Hauptbahnhof which is where we started. Anyways…I hung out with a really nice old man from Malta whom I hope to someday visit. Also, an American guy who was from Seattle…and reminded me of my favorite professor from college….Dr. Fred Lee. We had a good time, despite the DB strike looming…and crappy weather.
I think I’m gonna put a beer in the fridge. My friend Andi, he owns the small restaurant (imbiss) that I stop at on my Neuschwanstein tours, gave me a beer the other day that I didn’t drink…so I hauled it all the way back here…so I’ll report back on how it tastes…as I’ve never had that brand of beer. I really do try to taste EVERY beer I come across…I’m slowly making my way. I should make a list. Anyways, this one is called: Schussenrieder Schwarzbier
Well, it’s official, we’ve had our first snow of the year here in Munich. In fact, a recent trip to Salzburg involved snow just about all day (it cleared up for photos in the last 1/2 hour…)
Last week I had one tour with 43 people…well, 44 with Brendan, so that gave me an opportunity to finally snap a shot of him:
For those that don’t know, Brendan’s a fellow tour guide….he specializes in Dachau and the third Reich, which happen to be the two tours I do not do. He’s also currently the office manager…and my guide to European sports.
Here’s another pic from the tour with Brendan:
I’m thinking there’s going to be more train strikes on Tuesday…we’ll see.
So, Saturday I had a tour to Salzburg, as has become the usual lately. Radius Tours started the winter schedule a little earlier than previous years, on Oct. 1st…so that means from now til April, our Salzburg tours are only on Tues, Thurs, and Saturday. Personally I’m not a big fan of being in Salzburg on Saturdays, it’s just so horribly crowded…yes, even on cold rainy days. In fact, it seems that’s about all I’m getting lately on my Salzburg tours…fairly cold rainy days. I shouldn’t complain too much though, it hasn’t really affected the tours much as it’s just been a lil rain here and there. Also, Neuschwanstein during the off-season is only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays…so obviously I’ll have less tours, which is always expected. And City tours of Munich are Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
The good part is, I’ll always have Fridays and Sundays off, since none of the tours I do can be on those days. Well, I’ll still probably do posters on a lot of those Fridays.
My last Salzburg tour was quite interesting. Personally, I think it was a fairly bad tour…I had 23 people which is a pretty large group for Salzburg (it’s ususally around 8-15), and they weren’t the fastest…AND since it was a Saturday, it was horribly crowded in Salzburg as well. However, the thing that really affects the tour is the fact that they’re working on the tracks between Munich and Salzburg…so it involves switching trains and even taking two completely different routes getting there and back. That eats up about 15min on the way there, and 30min on the way back…so that kinda blows. The interesting thing about Saturday’s tour was where the tourists were from. I’d say I get an average of about 5 countries represented on any given tour….Saturday’s was 10. Here’s how it went:
2 canada, 4 USA, 2 Denmark, 2 South Africa, 1 Jordan, 2 Australia, 4 Puerto Rico, 2 Korea, 2 Ireland, 2 Zambia.
I dunno, I got 30 euros in tips, so I think it went alright. By the way the tips came from the americans, south africans, and the canadians. Here’s a pic from Saturday:
As far as the hangover on Monday, that’d be referring to my current condition. We had a guide’s meeting last night, which of course involves all kinds of random conversation and immense amounts of beer. I apparently even watched a South Africa vs. Argentina rugby match for some reason. South Africa won, I think it was an ass-whooping, but I’m not sure as I was more concerned with trying to keep up with the other guides extremely fast beer drinking abilities, I swear they were pouring it on the floor when I wasn’t looking.
The last couple of days I’ve been putting up posters, one I’m proud of is for the Far From Finished show on the 19th. Here’s a pic of one of the posters:
Anyways, I’d like to point out how fucking thrilled I am that finally we’ll have smoke-free restaurants and other public places here in Bavaria. It’ll be amazing….it goes into effect January 1st…and so maybe I should hit the HB haus on the 2nd, just to breathe in the fresh air…er…stale beer smell rather than the smoke.
The few days have been quite regular tours. Today’s city tour was canceled, not surprisingly really, since it was the last day of Oktoberfest today. Technically I had two people, but they have a voucher so they can go any day the next week. The two guys were on my tour yesterday…and so it was kinda a shame, I offered to still do the tour, but they figured, naw…so well…maybe I’ll see them on my Tuesday Munich Highlights tour. One of the two of them is a fellow “Toytowner”…for those who don’t know, “Toytown” is referring to http://www.toytownmunich.com/ which is an awesome website if you ever want to move to Germany. It started as a website for expats here in Munich and has expanded to all of Germany. Anyways, it’s where we help each other out and hang out online. My nickname on there is NOFXmike, which is pretty obvious I suppose. Anyways, “3 lions” from Toytown was on my Salzburg tour yesterday…which was interesting…I rarely recognize someone when I come out to greet the tourists.
Other than that, today Petra and I went over to the O’fest…had our oxen sandwich and garlic shrimp…and came back home, we love the food there.
With the Oktoberfest in the title, you’d hope I’d have something funny to say about a weird incident involving a tourist, alcohol, and some nasty smell…but no, not this time.
The last couple of days I’ve had city tours, Sunday I had 17 americans and today I had 3 americans and 2 kiwis (that’s a total of 5 for those of you who haven’t gotten to 2nd grade yet). ….anyways, that’s a completely different tour, yet…well…it went about the same. We also had about the same weather…which was damn nice. Tips are up, YAY. I like tips…even the kiwis tipped today.
Tomorrow we’re going to a sushi place for lunch…to see if it’s anywhere near as good as dinner there…it’s half the price…soo….hmm…I’ll report back.
Also tomorrow I’m meeting up with my friend and fellow tour guide Brendan to head over to the Wies’n and have some alcoholic beverages. He claims he hasn’t actually gone to the fest for like 3 years…that’s kinda sad….but it IS a hell of a hassle compared to other (very similar) fests in the area…so I can understand.
Speaking of Brendan, I just realized I don’t have a damn picture of him. I know people are camera shy (nearly everyone I know…which is just sad….come on…), but I should get one tomorrow. In fact, I should make a point of it to take pics of all the guides the next few times I see them, just in case black mail is in order.
I’ll be drinking tomorrow, so umm, wish me luck on the tour wednesday morning 🙂
So, today is a nice…fairly sunny Saturday afternoon. Odd. Anyways, last night I uploaded some pictures…and, more importantly, figured out how to resize them on here so that it doesn’t completely fuck up the whole design of the page (it doesn’t look pretty with big pictures….trust me).
Yesterday we went to a salt mine down in Berchtesgaden, which we’ve been meaning to do for quite some damn time…but we finally made it. It was a hellish day to drive…between the road construction and the pouring rain…it took us about an hour longer than it should have. I posted all the pics we took on my photobucket page. However, for any of you that are super-lazy, here’s a sample:
Also uploaded are pictures from the Wies’n this year, which we went to on Monday. We met up with some of Petra’s colleagues and got our drink on. We were out in the beer garden just outside of a tent, but it was a beautiful day. Most of this week it’s been quite miserable for weather…so that worked out well. We also went on one of the big rollercoasters at the O’fest….and I was fairly drunk, so it was nice that it worked out *cough*. Speaking of coughing, I’m still sick, been coughing to beat hell lately.
That being said, I’ve got a Berliner Kindl mit Schuss in die fridge…hmm…it may be calling my name.
That’s right everybody, I’ve got no tours for a week! Last week I was sick…and I still am, just not as bad I think. Sunday I had a Salzburg tour & I dragged Petra along to join in my misery…not that it was a bad day, it was absolutely beautiful weather…and I only had 6 people on the tour. (a couple from Houston, 3 guys from Atlanta, and one lady from NY…well, mostly Miami…well…currently lives in Atlanta, do I want her life story? no thanks…she’s way too ditzy to be interesting)….anyways….
So yeah, I nearly collapsed mid-day on Sunday, but the tour went well…even had pretty good tips. We had lunch at the Augustiner Salzburg, which is far superior imo to Munich’s Augustiner…which shouldn’t even be compared as they have no relation.
Last night we went to the Oktoberfest, which was well…good fun, but I need to eat more before we get stuck at a table…unfortunately we were in a group, so I didn’t have much choice.
I should be adding pictures and a bit more this week despite not having any tours….because we’re doing touristy things ourselves. For example, yesterday before the Oktoberfest outing we went over to Sealife….it was nice, for about an hour…luckily we had a buy one get one coupon, so we didn’t pay full price…
Coming up this week we plan on spending a day at the spa…and probably have a day in a salt mine too. We may stop over to the Oktoberfest again for some food…but I doubt we’ll go back to get drunk and go on rollercoasters again!
Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration. However, it certainly feels like it. In the last few days I have gotten a chance to catch Nick Lindman a few times to play an online game called Project Torque…which is free and kinda fun, I like racing games and this one is where you can play up to 8 people at a time from all over hell…so…well…I mentioned free, right?
I noticed the other day that I can’t put a larger picture in here without making this page look REALLY wrong…so I gotta figure out something with that, maybe I’ll have to re-size anything I want on here, which limits me quite a damn bit, because well…laziness does kick in at a certain point…that’s the point, typically.
I’ve been doing stats on my tours lately, actually typing them into excel that is and figuring out where all my tourists are from…I’m almost done with that, so I’ll have 6 months of data on there anyways.
The other day I had two canadians on my city tour, I was sicker than a dog…and I think they could tell, unfortunately. So, well…they still had a good tour I think, but may have been worried that I’d die on’em.
I’ve already called in about tomorrow…I thought last night that, ok, friday I’ll do another test on the system and go out there and see what I’m made out of….but today my chest hurts, I’m coughing like hell, and my nose started running again…it’s not as physically painful as it was a couple days ago, but…umm…getting people sick on their vacation probably isn’t a good thing either.
Oh well, we can’t always be running around with dozens of people from all over the world without getting something from one of them (yeah, I’m blaming the tourists, they’re an easy target).
I should have had a Neschwanstein tour on Saturday…then a Salzburg tour today…but with my throat hurting, eyes burning, and nose running non-stop…I think I’d scare away the tourists, besides being in pain. You know how it is when each and every joint in your body lets you know it’s there? Yeah….lovely.
Looking at the weather forecast, I’ve been thinking of what I’m gonna wear with my lederhosen for oktoberfest, as it’ll be a tad bit nipply. So the other day (ok, probably a week ago now) I was looking at a couple places that sold leather jackets that go with the lederhosen. They appear to be around €70-80 for what I want. I can use the jacket along with the lederhosen for tour guiding sometimes…so that’ll work. I should wear my lederhosen a couple more times before it gets too cold.
