Shanghai Bob

With our lunch:

We read that 69,000 hectaliters of beer are served and consumed at the “Wiesn” during Oktoberfest. While we were still sober, I was able to calculate that that amount of beer would feed the Rheinfall for just under 15 seconds.

After four to five liters of beer it somehow seemed like a good idea to go on the amusement park rides, something that would not have occurred to me before drinking so much, and was definitely a bad idea after.

The hats are a German tribute to American marksmanship.

I took the train to Munich on Friday and met Ann, Christian, Joel, Elke, Manny, and Ava.

They start drinking young in Munich.

We spent most of Saturday in the English Garden, followed by dinner at one of the bräuhauses…

…followed in turn by more drinking and some dancing until early in the morning.  Many of the guys were wearing lederhosen, and many of the girls were wearing dirndls, which created the effect of dancing with lots of beer hall waitresses.

If you have some free time (which you clearly do if you are reading this blog), check out http://www.hanzismatter.com for examples of misused Chinese and Japanese characters in tattoos and advertisement.

Today I saw a car with its own tattoo:

Part of the reason I took a picture, though, is because the car brand is Megane, produce by Renault. Every time I see one, I have to laugh — Megane is the Japanese word for “glasses”, a silly name for a car.

These are a little puerile, but I’ve collected some other “brands” that don’t travel well: A German travel group, a small town in Germany near Nürnberg (all the inhabitants are blind), and the Freiburg Traffic Association.

The autumnal equinox is in five days, on September 22 this year, and the temperature has dropped a few degrees in anticipation. It’s sunny again in Freiburg, but everybody is wrapped up against the cold and the leaves are starting to turn. The first few weeks of September were beautiful here, but because I spent June, July, and August in London this year, I was robbed of a summer. I’m hoping Thailand in November will make up for it.

Something else typical of Freiburg: mosaics. Every shop has a stone mosaic on the sidewalk in front of their store, and the public buildings do as well. This is Freiburg’s Wappen, or coat of arms, with St. George’s cross, just like the English flag.

The sunshine and shadow of a bicycle are also typical of Freiburg.

I found out that you can live in a large, quiet, clean apartment near the center of the city for just €250/month, or for €150/month a little outside the city (in St. George, for example!). These numbers haven’t changed much since I was a student (though of course they were designated in Marks then). In practical terms, you can pay your rent for an entire year in Freiburg on what it costs for one month’s rent in London or Tokyo, or for less than two months’ rent in San Francisco.

We took a roundabout route home from Switzerland and stopped in the middle of the Black Forest to visit the improbably large St. Blaise Cathedral. It’s billed as the third largest cupola in Europe. Wikipedia lists it as the third “widest” and adds the caveat “at the time it was built.” We got there just as the choir was starting, and left just as it finished.

One of the people traveling with us asked, What’s the difference between a Cathedral and a Minster? — the third time this has come up.

Wednesday through Friday I visited Manpreet and Volker at their new digs in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf started out as a dorf (”village”) on the River Düssel, but by now it has grown into a full-blown city on the River Rhein.

I gathered another data point for my upcoming “Gelato Index”, a measure of purchasing power parity based on the cost of two scoops of gelato.  It’s 2 Euros in the Königsalle.

Strangely, one of the big attractions in Düsseldorf is Japanese food.  The city has just over 600,000 inhabitants, and around 1% of them are Japanese.  We had ramen.

We had to wait in line outside the place (just like at a real ramen-ya in Tokyo), and had an interesting exchange in which the Japanese hostess took our order in German while we conversed in English.  When we had finished ordering, we offered the menu to our Japanese neighbor in Japanese, and he, having heard our conversation, accepted in English.

My train home was delayed over an hour by a bomb scare.

Friday ended up being a busy day even though we hadn’t planned anything in advance.  I finished some paperwork in the morning, and so was able to play a couple of hours of ping-pong in the afternoon with a clear conscience.  After our warm-up, I lost four games in a row because, well, I hadn’t played for years, I decided to change my grip that day, the sun was in my eyes…

The two Meli’s joined us for dinner afterward (I cooked, but it was good), then we drove through woods that looked like something out of The Blair Witch Project up the side of a mountain to a Lindy Hop dance.  There were a fair number of people there, the music was good, and it was cool to see the lights of Freiburg twinkling in the valley to one side of the dance floor.

The London weather apparently tracked me down and we had a solid 24 hours of rain, which I spent as follows:

• sleeping
• visiting Freiburg’s museum of early- and pre-history in the Colombischlössle
• eating at Lorenz Straußi in Kirchhofen

A Straußi is a kind of restaurant that produces everything it serves itself or sources it from the neighborhood.  They get a tax break through not having to purchase the standard restaurant license.  The portions were huge, I could only eat half of what I ordered, and since pumpkins are in season there were a lot of pumpkin dishes on the specials board, including a delicious pumpkin soup.

On the way out we saw some little kids who had set up a stand to sell grapes, one kilo for 1.80 euros, but they only had one kilo.  I thought it would be a good idea to encourage these miniature entrepreneurs, so I handed over a two-euro coin.

The kids were clearly running a just-in-time operation.  As soon as the coin changed hands, four kids took off in different directions, one returning shortly with a new plastic bucket, and two returning with a new bunch of grapes (from where? the neighboring vineyard?).  The coin went into their piggy bank, which differs from a cash register in that it’s built not to give anything back until you smash it open.  I was shortchanged by an eight-year-old.