Dear people, safe and sound. i arrived Josef Strauss Airport in München on Freitag Morgen, and have been here in Munich ever since.
- heard Juan Tonamara (sp?) in polish, while walking across the street, and i think this had just made a tumultous 7 hour flight worthwhile…
- I am staying right now at a hostel near the Haupbahnhof (main station) on the west side of downtown Munich.
- my knowledge of the german language has undergone a threefold explosion since being here, from about 8 words to now about 24 words! — it is amazing how fast that can happen,, — i arrived, being able to say “i am pregnant” (Ich bin schwanger) – and now can say I would like to be pregnant, and also, where is the pregnant?, and excuse i am pregnant in my room.. etc..
,, so yeah,,,
- for those that know Munich, my first day i went down to Marienplatz and the Odeonplatz, English Garten, needless to say i had not seen it before… and it is quite amazing. I will post those pictures up when they come online here. — today i went further east, walking down to the Estbahnhof, (sp?) and spent time in the much less touristy – (or to me?) areas on the edge of downtown, (pariserplatz and orleanplatz), where the day in and day out activities of life are.
-Oktoberfest clothing are on sale right now.!
-My favourite things about Germany so far, definitely are:
1. German bookstores – they are filled, nearly each one i have seen – with volumes of classic texts and with travel guides. I think the english equivalent would be walking into a bookstore and seeing big sections of the penguin and dover catalogs in front of you.
In differentiating from first and third world places, I have this pet theory that for first world countries, men tend to work harder or as hard as women, and that in third world countries, it can be the opposite…. also that in third world countries, books and paper are prohibitively expensive. In my trip to SE asia, i remember a simple novel in thailand a book costing 300/400 baht (8/10$), and paper pads costing a lot! In contrast, in Singapore (an expensive place), they were cheap if not cheaper..
… well in Germany, books are very cheap, given the cost of other things ( i bought a book for the same price as 2 coffees today!) – and i think this is part of the key to their tremendously well educated public.
I went also today, to the Science Museum – and expecting to see many tourists, what did i find – mostly Germans at their own museum! Their tourist shop included things such as books on Minkowski Geometry, and Proofs of Relativity, etc biographies of greats in many fields including Music.Science.Philosophy – all in german! at the tourist shop!
I think that is one large secret to the high level of education here, and enjoy it tremendously.
2. die DeutschBundesBahn ( DB) – love it.. it is the postal system of a country like england,canada,uk made for humans.
- trying to stay away from the monolingual travelers..
- trying to save cash – will be taking the DB to Prague tomorrow morning.
until then’
bis bald, more later’
A
posted by alwinian at 2:35 PM
http://alwinian.blogspot.com/2006/08/grsse-von-mnchen.html
For those seriously willing to pursue, there is a mispricing of u.s./cdn marked assets such as books. This leads to a beautiful arbitrage play, for anyone serious enough to do it.
If I could source a buyer of canadian books, i would do it in a heartbeat..
For anyone who read my post on why wine was a good investment – June 5, 2009:
http://www.alwinian.net/2009/06/05/wine-better-than-bonds/
The Star has posted some pretty similar findings in their investments over the decade review.
Ughemm.Ughemm..
http://www.thestar.com/business/investing/article/743128–it-was-a-decade-of-volatility-for-investors
That i’ve been holding onto for a long time. It would be simple to implement, with two usb mice. The problem is in the software, as the O/S needs to be reconfigured to either accept 2 input streams or to have the mice logically mapped from a single stream. Many applications would seem to be more intuitive with such an interaction. Click on the image for a larger version. So here it is. yup.
-Just installed this on my iPhone. FourTrack. Makes it easy to multitrack record, while waiting for the subway (see post re: city hall). A very fun and handy app.
-I’m offering free webhosting to any non-profit/charity that requires it, so feel free to contact me.
-Some new strategic coming for “Upcoming in Interactive – Winter”
-Also, I have heard back from City hall, they wrote a reasoned and clear response, which can be found in the comments for that post. Further to that, I’m excited that Streetcars will be getting GPS, so you’ll be able to look up where each car is at any given time, which should reduce some of the resource allocation problems i mentioned.
As always, feel free to subscribe to my feed—> (rss is on top right)
ciao4now’
The beautiful design pattern cycle completes, when you connect to Wifi. 4T broadcasts a webpage on a secret port displayed on the phone. type the url into your laptop/desktop browser and download the wavs!
Added Scarlatti on a Quality Casio Keyboard. (insert irony here), to videos widget (right column)
A clever iPhone application.
Almost done moving… 3 moves in 3 months. This will be my new room in August.
My friend Peemo (at PeterMohideen.com) put these up from his new shiny Ipod3GS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hkP7-RlOR0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_AA44bMkYE
Enjoy 
Safebridge a client from a fear years ago, marketing back on Facebook…