New This Week, Part 21

I can't leave novelties alone, can I?

1. New Residence: Frankfurt
Photo courtesy of Travel Aficionado

On Saturday of last week I moved my stuff to Frankfurt into an apartment so beautiful that I cannot even begin telling you because you'd all want to come for a visit. And you're welcome to do that but you'll have to figure the beauty out for yourselves.

Actually, I haven't only found a great apartment to start living in, but my landlord and his girlfriend are two of the coolest, nicest, funniest and most warm-hearted people I have ever known. I could never have imagined this start-off in Frankfurt to be as great as it has been. Even the Thai place around the corner that we went to last night has incredible food.

2. New Restaurant: Thai Snack (Frankfurt)

I am happy to say that already in those two days that I spent in Frankfurt unpacking and carrying around stuff, I have stumbled upon a low-key Thai restaurant in the neighborhood that is extremely good and reasonably-priced! Frankfurt, I love you already!

New This Week, Parts 16 Through 20

Waiting longer before you write a new blog entry should make it easier because of all the things that have happened in between, shouldn't it? Well, the opposite is true; I haven't written anything in weeks, more than a month even, and with every passing week, the hurdle to do so becomes higher, not in spite of but rather because of all the things that have happened. And what makes it worse is the fact that I am very bad at remembering the order of things so enumerating the new things for each of the past weeks is like building a concrete house from scratch when you have nothing but bamboo and mud.

Introduction

In the past weeks, I've been busy with a lot of things. To start off with, I finally resigned from my old job in privacy management. I'll happily tell the story in a personal talk at some point but for now, what's important is that I had spent months there being unproductive because there was no work to do. What's more, my bosses had decided to hire a colleague although there was no work even for me alone. And you probably read about the things the wife of one of my former bosses pulled off. It was time to get off the s**king ship.

At this point, my now ex-boss knows that I'm starting a new job in Frankfurt, which is why telling you here on this blog is not a problem any more, even though my former colleague knows about this web address. I think I'm right considering my job perspectives none of my old employer's business but since it's out anyway, here we go. Weeks before I resigned I told my former colleague about this blog because I wanted her to have an example of how to approach writing in order to write complex structures more elegantly. Well, sometimes keeping business and leisure separated is a good idea. This might teach you a lesson. It does for me.

But back to my news report.

For almost-two weeks, a friend from Los Angeles visited me in Düsseldorf in May, which gives me at least a very bad excuse for not keeping you up to date. Being off work as I currently am, you'd expect me to have more time rather than less, but the latter is at least how things have appeared to me recently.

So let's finally get to the new things for each week. Here is where things become a little blurry. There were new things in each week but the order or specific week might be a little off in this list.

Week 16
1. Xco Shape class with 1.7kg Xcos
Photo taken from the Xco Trainer website

Those of you who have no idea what Xco Trainers are, check out this link. As the gym tended to run out of them for each class I decided to buy a pair on Ebay. What I ended up buying was the wrong size, and instead of the cute ones you see on the linked website, weighing half a kilogram each and being easy to grip, I got myself one of 1.7kgs that you usually hold with both hands.

When I showed this big one to Mel, our chief instructor at the gym, she told me jokingly I could have her second one and just work out with both of them. And actually, I decided to just give it a try, and accepted. It turned out to be much more demanding but not so bad ultimately, so I have used the big ones during class ever since. The instructors think I'm crazy but then again, they're not so wrong, are they?

2. Emptied waste toner pack of my Brother printer

Big deal, I know, but for the first time I actually noticed that my Brother laser printer has a waste toner pack that needs to be emptied at some point. My life will never be the same.



Week 17

1. New Bar: Pulse in Frankfurt
Logo courtesy of gastroconsult.net

Checking out my new apartment in Frankfurt and getting to know my new landlord, we met at a bar in Frankfurt called "Pulse", a very nice joint for family and their friends.





2. New Food: Horse sausage
Photo courtesy of jb.atwood

When I was in Munich that week to celebrate a friend's birthday, and taking my friend from Amsterdam there, we went to the Viktualienmarkt and also got ourselves some horse sausage that had been highly praised. It actually wasn't so bad.

3. Easy Order at McDonald's
Photo courtesy of bradley_newman

McDonald's now -- at least in some stores -- has a new way of payment, called "Easy Order". It's basically a terminal where you choose your order items yourself and pay with a debit or cash card (Geldkarte). When you're done, you get a receipt that you walk up to a special counter with to get your items handed out. Not quite Earth-shattering but an interesting approach. I wonder when they make that a 24-hour service with automated food preparation.

4. New Restaurant: Hofbräuhaus
Photo courtesy of johnnymnemonic84

Yes, I did it. I actually went to the ever-so famous Hofbräuhaus in Munich. As it would turn out later (week 20), with all the tourists and the tackily dressed musicians and so forth, the ground floor isn't even the worst part of it. It's just incredibly noisy and uncomfortable to be in because the walls have a horrible echo.

Week 18

1. Spent a night at my friends' new place in Cologne
One of my friends in Cologne moved in with his partner recently, and with my friend from LA, I spent a night at their place when he and I were visiting the city and had gone out to the bars that night.

2. New Facebook application: Mafia Wars
I don't know how it started. I had ignored Mafia Wars invitations for weeks, maybe months, because I found it stupid to play things like that. On top, I didn't like the violence aspect. And then I somehow started playing. Actually, I still don't know really why I'm playing it, and I'm beaten up regularly anyway, but it's kinda fun, also to check out what games are currently played. It's good to be up to date with what's happening, I think.

Week 19

1. New Bar: At Mexx Outlet in Korschenbroich
Again not quite a burner but my friend from LA and I went to a bar/restaurant place in the Mexx outlet building in Korschenbroich and had lunch there. Nice place, okay-priced, okay food.

2. New Restaurant: Zum Schiffchen
Picture taken from the Zum Schiffchen website

To round off my friend's visit in Germany, he treated me to dinner at the Zum Schiffchen in the Düsseldorf Altstadt, probably the oldest restaurant in town where Goethe and Napoleon used to go to. If you're after typically German and Düsseldorf-type food, that's your place to go to. We had Düsseldorf-style roast beef with red cabbage and raisins, and what I'd like to call "Butcher's Delight", basically a plate with sausages, mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. A nice low-key evening that showed him some traditional foods, something I usually never have.

3. New Activity: Book Club
Photo courtesy of Editor B

This is a very special novelty. A good friend from Cologne had invited me to her book club already in February. She is part of a girls-only book club where they talk about books they all read, and this one time they had decided to accept guests as well. I would be hers, she had decided, and so she asked me to join the club meeting this week pretty much the same way I had been given homework at grammar school. I was hesitant to accept at first, especially because the book (Milan Kundera's "Die Unsterblichkeit", "The Immortality") didn't tell me anything, but I'm glad I did.

The group of people at the club was actually very nice and interesting, and I appreciated and liked both the discussions about the book and the book itself a lot more than I had anticipated. As my friend was still staying with me I couldn't stay for the whole evening but I am glad I attended the book club.

Week 20

1. New Gym Class: Bodystyling with Kathrin
Another not-so thrilling part at the gym: going to an earlier class which lead to a different instructor. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all if I hadn't been amazed at how different styles can vary with instructors. The classes she gives, I noticed, are very different from my two favorite girls' one.

2. Hofbräuhaus, Upper Level
I'm not listing it as a new bar because I had already been there. Last week, however, I went to the Hofbräuhaus again with some new colleagues, initially only to have a beer or two but then they decided they wanted to have dinner there as well. Great, I thought, sitting at a table downstairs where the acoustics are horrible already. But I had no idea what was coming up. We went upstairs to have dinner. If you think downstairs is already the biggest tourist trap on Earth, you need to go upstairs and check the freak show that goes on there apparently every single night. We sat a table in the middle of all of it. A traditional Bavarian brass band was playing on stage, and when we came in a group of four guys were schuhplattlering on stage, two of which were obviously tourist who had been dressed with too big Lederhosen. Two girls with Dirndls were hopping, one of which then started playing music with cow bells. At one point, two guys started pecking wood on stage. It was outrageous, and so was the volume. I could hardly hear my own thoughts.

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At this point, I can't recall any more whether I forgot something, even if it was something substantial. That's the downside of waiting so long until I write again. I'll try to be more punctual in the future.