In times past, Decem­ber vis­its to Munich have been warmed by new fallen snow and the glow­ing booths of the Christ­kindlmarkt. Munich this year had yet to see snow and the tem­per­at­ures of 7/8C and rain seemed some­how less fest­ive. People were still out in huge num­bers social­ising at the vari­ous mar­kets about town, but the lack of snow was a lit­eral damp­eron the occas­sion. So when I decided that the day was nigh to head off south to make my very first visit to the Konigschloss’s in the Schwangau, I was hope­ful. I expec­ted sim­ilar weather, but also enchant­ing archi­tec­ture and scenery.
As the slow regional train depar­ted Munich first thing in the morn­ing, Munich was a little grey, dry, but grey and over­cast.
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Was out to the kino to catch some­thing that I could claim as some degree of expos­ure to the Ger­man media scene. The red­light dis­trict prob­ably could have provided some spe­cial, ;-) exper­i­ences, but went the other way. What are the kids watch­ing — some­thing Ger­man only. I found ‘Lissi und der wilde kaiser. It advert­ises itself as a par­odie of the clas­sic ‘Sissi’. I can only say that it takes ser­i­ous license. As it turns out, it’s aimed at a little more mature audi­ence than the nor­mal anim­ated show goer. I booked early. Cir­cum­stances. And with Ger­man effi­ciency had an assigned aisle and seat. Showed up close to time as I recalled that there is a suf­fi­cient period in advance with com­mer­cials, not trail­ers. Inside there’s three people in a 150 per­son theatre. My seat if right beside them. Another couple girls 13–15 come in and sit on the oth­er­side of my 13–15 year old male friends.
Two adults come in. They are the seats in front of my col­leagues. I can see that there is a sys­tem in the seat assign­ment process…but it sucks. Its starts from best seat and starts assign­ing in all dir­ec­tions. so you get 15 people all sit­ting right adja­cent to one another des­pite 100 extra seats. And my Ger­man cimen­a­go­ers just went with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here I sit at the Flughaf­fen Frank­furt. Its about 8am, and we got in a little ahead of sched­ule at 6:45am. No sleep, but then I decided that that would be best in the end and forewent the sch­laf­fendrage (sic). Feel a wee bit fatigued, but not too bad yet. The 777 is a pretty sweet ride. The enter­tain­ment sys­tem has all the choices you could want for any length of flight. Seat pitch about the same, but it was one bumpy ride most of the way. Its just light­en­ing up in FRA and I have a rather lengthy lay­over. Tried to move to an earlier flight as there are Lufthansa flights for München every hour, but they tell me that with my fare, I would have to pay a hefty sur­charge. Not quite sure where the air­line eco­nomy is in that, but alas. We’ll just kick back for a bit and wait it out.
Frank­furt always seems (and is abso­lutely) removed from nation­al­ity. Every­one is on their way some­where or in between places. Its has that tran­si­ent feel­ing about it.
Saw the final Pir­ates of the Carib­bean, which was amus­ing then watched a string of sit­coms, includ­ing a Brit­ish one about pale­on­to­lo­gists deal­ing with dino­saurs in mod­ern day Eng­land and a US one called 10 items of Less which seemed quite good as well. A couple Office epis­odes, a Eureka and ‘Til death. All good.
Eng­lish is spoken in the air­port here more than Ger­man it seems, but then that seems to be the memory for here. About an hours walk to get where I am in the ter­minal. We shall see what we find in München.
No wire­less in the ter­minal that I can find.