Since Berlin I've been mostly in Munich, catching up with people for food. Examples: Schnitzels with Harry & Dieter down the road from me; brunch at Michaela's with Montserrat and her kids; crêpes at Béné's made by her goddaughter Tiffany from Nice; a birthday dinner for Fritz at a marvellously lively Greek place where they threw serviettes instead of plates, which was a good thing seeing how many they threw; a belated birthday dinner for me at L'Osteria with my old EPO friends - HUUUUGE pizzas!; and dinner with Lorna & Tomasz.

The exception to this recent Munich rule was a weekend in Austria with Michaela & the boys, catching up with family for food (Tante Martha baked heavenly Guglhupf for us once again) and sunning ourselves on the banks of a nearby lake: yes, there was finally a bit more summer! The drive down and back was blissfully uneventful and stress-free - oh, apart from nearly dying when someone pulled out of the slow lane right into the side of us. The A8 motorway from Munich to Salzburg is usually full of roadworks, but this time it was absolutely clear both ways.

And now it's time for a general observation: This year's weather is just no good. It's not consistently cold & wet, but it's just not what you'd call summer either. We're having to get our sun whenever we can, which in my case includes stopping off on the banks of the Isar for an hour or so on my cycle ride home from work.

Luckily for me, food quality is not affected by ambien temperatures - or at least my consumption of it isn't! I've had some knockout food recently. The first super duper meal of recent weeks was a complete surprise: Christian & I headed out to Feringasee for a spot of dinner at the local Bavarian restaurant there and I really wasn't expecting much, but my grilled fish platter turned out to be divine!

The zander was not too hard, the trout was exquisite and the char was just out of this world! Dessert was a treat too: we drove to Ostbahnhof and found a gelateria with very exciting flavours, then ate our ice creams whilst wandering through a village-style fête that had appeared in front of the station. It was bizarre to see such non-cityfied people in the heart of Munich.

My second meal of note was at the Kloster. Oh my, am I glad we go there most Mondays! The wine list is fab, the company wonderful, and the food is always great and often awesome. On this occasion though, they really outdid themselves: fior di zucca - lightly battered courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta and parmesan. Oh My Gooooooooood they were amazing!!!!!!!!

Just to prove I can write about stuff other than food, here's a mad coincidence that happened to me recently: after about two years of peace on the Underground, they came round checking tickets the other evening on my way home from badminton. And then again, the following morning, on the way to work! Twice in 24 hours! Good job I had a ticket...

And another coincidence: I was just on my way to an Internations party, where I was meeting Bénédicte, and I ended up missing a tram connection and walking through the centre of town, when who should I run into (almost literally) but Karin, on her way home from buying Lebanese groceries in the Landwehrstraße! And it was a double coincidence, since she had just bought me some houmous and was going to give it to me next Stammtisch on Monday. Instead she gave it to me there and then. Which meant I had houmous in my pockets for the party, but what the heck.

Just at the moment it's raining non-stop. The Isar is bursting its banks along the bit where I cycle to work (I managed to avoid an absolute downpour this morning; yesterday I took the U-Bahn cos there was no way I was getting on my bike in THAT weather) and I felt a visceral excitement at the spectacle of the raw power of the floodwaters as they rushed past. At one point I even braved a bridge underpass that was still very much underwater.

It took me back to the time I foolhardily set out to cross a Thames in full spate on my bike back in Oxford in '95. Since I could see the lampposts that edged the cycle path across the flood plain, I thought I might be able to make it. But about 20 metres in I realised that the path was sinking lower and lower into the floodwaters, and I would soon be swept from my bike, so I did the sensible thing and turned around. Sodden in the shoe department but otherwise unharmed.

Anyway, that'll do for now. I'll write again soon, I promise!

Madness! Utter madness! Weeks of silence, and then two great big fat blog entries, one hot on the heels of the other!

Berlin. Ah! What a city! I could totally spend a chunk of time here. A long weekend just wasn't enough - but it was better than nothing. It's ages since I've been up to Berlin. I must do it more often.So, Christian & I drove up with Béné. I'm beginning to recognise whole stretches of the A9 motorway, what with spending so many hours on it the previous weekend to Dresden and now again to Berlin.

The traffic was kinder to us this time though, and we were in Berlin in about five hours from Munich. We headed straight to Aleks' flat, where we were also staying, and dumped our stuff. Béné spent a few hours with Aleks catching up (they know each other from Béné's time in Amsterdam) while Christian & I went for a walk into town, strolling along the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin's main shopping district (Gucci, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, you name it, it's there) until it started absolutely CHUCKING it down, at which point we dived into a very nice coffee shop.

That evening was Aleks' birthday party. She had managed to borrow a villa - no, really! - in a very posh outskirty bit of town, and the party was WILD! Christian ended up managing the barbecue, whilst I assisted in many different activities (getting the kitchen sorted, barbecue, making sure people had drinks, that sort of thing). The cellar room was converted for the evening into a bar area, a dance floor and a chillout room, whilst upstairs was lounge, kitchen, and terrace (with barbie). There were lots & lots & LOTS of people, and I stayed till four thirty bopping my little socks off with a variety of French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, and Americans.

The next day, Sunday, a bunch of us went to a small lake near the zoo for brunch. The food was great, but the service was dire - Béné ordered a hot chocolate & a croissant; they managed to forget both for almost an hour. In mid-afternoon, we went along to a huge street festival celebrating cultural diversity. It was PACKED! Way too many people for comfort. Christian & I slunk off to a less crowded bit, leaving the others stuck in a huge human traffic jam looking for cocktails. There was a cloudburst but it seemed to skirt around us so we managed to avoid the worst of it. We ended up watching part of the street parade (we got to see lots of Korean nuns bashing gongs) then having a coffee and heading back to Aleks' place.

That evening we went for sushi. It was pretty good! The conversation inevitably turned to the happenings of the night before at the party, and in particular the unfortunate incident that saw Jessica from Amsterdam spitting out her drink all over a guy at the shots bar in the cellar! Her exploits earned her the nickname SprayMalay (she's Chinese-Malaysian actually, but let's not squabble).

We just had time for a spot of breakfast at Aleks' place on Monday morning looking at everyone's photos from the weekend, and then a relaxed coffee in town (at the same coffee shop that Christian & I had found on Saturday) before we headed off back to Munich. Once again, traffic was okay, and we got back to Bénédicte's before sundown. A quick bottle of prosecco & some cheese, then we drove home.

And that, folks, was Berlin!

Ooh blimey! Once again, I fail to update my blog very quickly. Well, it's a sign I'm enjoying myself at least. So, where were we?

Ah yes, Dresden. It was a hard start: the Wednesday night saw me drinking too much beer in the beergarden, surrounded by friends who came to celebrate my birthday with me. So I didn't feel too fresh when I had to get up early on the Thursday and pack for a long weekend away. At least Bénédicte was kind enough to come and pick me up from home in her car. We drove together to the EPO's main offices and there joined a merry band of international types on two coaches, bound for Dresden.

The journey took much longer than expected, partly because we had to wait for ages for a replacement bus (the other bus - thankfully not the one I was in - had a fault with the door locks, such that it kept beeping even though it was shut, which understandably wore down the nerves of the passengers). Lunch was dire - the longest I've EVER had to queue for fast food - but we finally arrived in our luxury hotel in Radebeul, just outside Dresden, in blazing sunshine.

We were met by preparations for a monster welcome barbecue evening. Rarely have I seen so much food in one place. And it was accompanied by limitless drinks from the bar. It's fair to say that Béné, Franck, Marie-Laure, Pierre-Jean & I (I was an honorary Frenchman for the weekend) drank our own bodyweight in red wine that evening - and our tongues were dyed a pleasant shade of deep blue for the following 24 hours to prove it!

The hotel had a lovely wellness area, which Béné and I tried to use each day. The pool was reasonably long and reasonably empty, the sauna hot enough and the quiet room quiet. All good!

We went on lots of excursions over the next few days, including a city centre walking tour (for which the rain held off; it started to piss down just as we broke for lunch) and a "catamaran cruise" along the Elbe (which turned out to be a dodgy inflatable raft with rickety chairs, but what the hell). The leitmotiv of the weekend was, however, food.

Oh, My, Gohhhhhd!! And I thought I was bad!! Clearly the organisers of the EPO get-to-know-people-from-the-other-sites event had decided that the only way to get to know people is over truckloads of delicous food & drink. No that I'm arguing with that theory, oh no! But the sheer scale of the buffets was overwhelming! Even the picnic lunch in the vineyard that we had as part of our "cruise" was obscenely well-stocked. And so much wine everywhere! If I hadn't felt so uncomfortably full all the time, I would have said I was in heaven.

I suppose I should say a few words about Dresden, the visiting of which was my primary motivation in going on this trip with Béné; believe it or not, I didn't know about the whole food angle until I got there!

Dresden was built pretty much all at once a few hundred years ago, then it was pretty much destroyed all at once in 1945, and now it's been restored pretty much all at once. The pearl of Dresden was - and now is again - the Church of Our Lady. This too was destroyed in the firestorm of '45 that followed the Allied carpet bombing, and the Communists decided to leave its ruins (basically one bit of wall, one arch & a pile of rubble) untouched, as a warning against Capitalism. Now it's been rebuilt, using as many original stones from the rubble pile as possible.

These old stones (and the surviving arch) are easy to spot because they are black, whilst all the new stone (the vast majority of the church) is white. We were informed by our guide that Dresden's local limestone naturally turns black because of its high iron content, so it's not a question of industrial-era pollution as in so many other cities. All around the city you can see shiny white details on walls, or statues, or bits & pieces, in otherwise black buildings.

It feels ever so slightly Disney to walk around all these brand new chocolate-box pastel buildings. I think in ten years' time, when the new stuff is a bit weathered, it will all look much more authentic.

One cool building is an old cigarette factory just on the edge of the old town, on the river. It's shaped like a mosque, complete with a huge glass dome and two slender minarets. These were a ruse to get around the ban on chimneys in town at the time of construction (in the 1920s). The factory has closed down, but it's been turned into an arts venue. And on the roof there's a beer garden with spectacular views across the Old Town. We had dinner there one evening (just the French gang plus myself and Astrid as honorary frogs).

After dinner at the factory, we headed over the river to the New Town - which, of course, is not that new at all. It was spared the worst of the wartime destruction and so has a completely different flair. There are lots of grungy bars and student hangouts. We were up for a bit of a boogie, and just followed our ears to what we thought was a happening bar - but it turned out that the music was coming from the car parked outside the entrance!! We nearly stopped to dance around the car, but then decided that would be a little too silly, even for us.

As was bound to happen, the weather on our day of departure was spectacularly hot. Béné and I headed for the farewell brunch buffet and ate our fill, then walked into the centre of Dresden to get a few photos of the beautifully restored Baroque old town buildings in sunshine rather than rain. Then we caught the tram back to the brunch, ate some more, and finally hauled ourselves into our coach. The journey back to Munich was even longer than the journey up. It was cruel to see such lovely hot sunny weather through glass. But you can't have it all...

I'm having that feeling where everything is going a bit too fast - and I haven't even had a coffee!

It's a mixture of excitement at a long weekend in Berlin starting tomorrow morning (driving up with Christian & Bénédicte), exhaustion after the first five-day working week in what seems like ages, and residual sensory overload from last weekend's four-day stint in Dresden (with Bénédicte and a host of EPO people). Oh, and still being a bit ill from the cold from my last post, I suppose. That makes sense. That and being A WHOLE YEAR OLDER than I was ten days ago.

I feel energised but tired, almost a bit too energised, like it's all going to collapse in a minute. Part of me wants to just switch off and do nothing, but most of me wants to get out there and live. Argh! Perhaps those sugared almonds were a bad move for dessert this evening.

Anyway, I'll try to stop rambling now, and give you an update on things since the last blog. Well, actually I've already mentioned everything except going to see the new Star Trek film - which is fanTAStic by the way!

So yes, I'm 36 now. That's, like, WAY old, isn't it? I made an evening of it by inviting people to come & drink a beer with me that day in my local Beer Garden, the Nockherberg, a handy five-minute crawl round the corner from my flat. The weather that day was the best all week, and it was a lovely mild evening & night. The last to leave were Bezi & Mouhammad, true to form! They'd also been in a party mood the previous weekend for Bénédicte's birthday bash.

I'm going to leave this blog there. Basically because I've already been to Berlin now, which feels like it ought to be a fresh blog all on its own - action-packed weekend!

Which makes this one of my shortest blogs EVER! Notable by its rarity, I'm sure. Stop waffling now Rich, you're spoiling the moment. Byeeee!!

Is it a good time to write a blog entry when you're feeling ill & sorry for yourself? Let's find out. Because, dear readers, I've got a nasty cough & a sore throat - so much so that I was off work yesterday and today. I knew I shouldn't have let those pigs stay in my living room the other night!

Yesterday was mostly about sleep, but today I've managed to be alert enough to do some paperworky stuff in the flat and now I'm taking the opportunity to write a few words here, having decided that I'd be best off not going to my choir rehearsal tonight.

So, what have I done recently that's noteworthy? Well, the first thing that springs to mind is a wonderful evening spent at my Peruvian friend Elmer's house last weekend. Elmer invited me & Christian to dinner, promising to cook some Peruvian delights. He served up a pastel de choclo (a sort of savoury rice pudding with ground sweetcorn instead of rice) with some delicious shredded chicken, and there was plenty of food for all! In fact, we all ate enough for three people EACH!

I hadn't seen Elmer for a long time, and it was great to have a chance to catch up. We spent the whole evening sitting out on his terrace, enjoying the distant rumbles of thunder as we chatted. Amusingly, his company and my company used to be part of the same division of Siemens. And even more amusingly, he lives just around the corner from where I now work, and I live just around the corner from where he now works! If only we could office-swap...

The other highlight since my last blog was a delicious dinner at Bénédicte's house to pre-celebrate her birthday (her proper party is next weekend). Now, those of you who know me (and I doubt many people who don't would bother to read this - but email me if I'm wrong) will agree that I am a bit of a bon viveur, but it's fair to say that Bénédicte outclasses me in bonvivicité - and if that's not a word, it should be. Let me set the scene for you:

No sooner had I walked in her door than she started slicing the limes for a round of caipirinhas, with finger food to go with them. Next came a round of blinis with sour cream and smoked salmon, washed down with a bottle of champagne. We opted to skip the main course (which would have been cassoulet) because we'd both pigged out on the salmon, but we didn't skip the red wine that would have gone with the main course - OH no!

Then came the cheese course - obligatory in any good French household, I should say. Well, the red wine was just a touch too wet all on its own. And to round the evening off we had banana splits to go with our digestifs. Small wonder, then, that I managed to break my saddle in half on the way home!

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I've just remembered something that HAS to go in this blog!! We've rediscovered Mama, my all-time favourite Vietnamese restaurant that used to be round the corner from my flat! After a hiatus of almost a year, Anna the proprietor has found new premises and reopened. And the best thing is, it's not even that far from me either! Just a short tram ride away.

Christian, Edith & I saw the signage as we happened to cycle past a few weekends ago, on our way into town to meet up with their old Uni friends from way back when, Birgit & Wolfgang, who were in town for the weekend from Vienna. We couldn't stop there & then, but we decided to go back the following night.

While I'm on the subject, I should say that the Saturday we spent with Birgit & Wolfgang was lovely! The weather was hot & sunny, and we spent all afternoon sitting at an outdoor café just near the synagogue, drinking refreshing drinks & chatting. This was followed by a huge Indian meal in Haidhausen, where we were joined by Bine, Anja, and Chris.

But anyway, back to Mama: Christian & I turned up on the Sunday evening (at a time Anna herself suggested) to discover that her new place is less than salubrious. It suffers mainly from having been a dodgy dive of a locals-only bar in its previous incarnation. Anna's only had it a couple of months, and she's in the process of remodelling the kitchen area so that she can offer the full range of food that she used to in the place near me. For the moment, the menu is a little limited, and the quality wasn't what it was in my mind either. But I'm sure it will pick up.

Anna herself seemed a bit preoccupied and not the chirpy, mad thing she used to be. But she seemed to cheer up as the evening progressed, not letting the drunken banter of her regulars-for-now get her down. It really was a shock to the system though! A whole group of people who I generally don't have anything to do with. My, don't I sound pretentious! Well, maybe I am a bit. I just don't have anything AT ALL in common with those people, other than that we were in the same restaurant that evening.

Anna wants to tart the place up, so that she when she invites all her old regulars back she can be confident that they will come again. And she's hoping that her local patrons will "learn how to behave in a proper restaurant" (her words) if they start rubbing shoulders with people who are there for the food, rather than because it's the nearest watering hole to their flat. I'm going to take a leap of faith and go back there from time to time, to support her worthy aim of turning the place around. But I have to admit, I think it's going to be a long haul for her.

Right, let's stop there shall we? I'm feeling a bit tired after all this typing. I think I'll have a little lie down now. Got to look after that throat of mine! Else I won't be able to go to work tomorrow. Tootle-pip!

Oh my goodness me, it's been way too long since my last update! I've done lots and lots and lots - as usual - and will have to keep it brief.

So, Gareth was over for a long weekend from the UK. It was lovely to see him again, almost exactly a year on since we visited him in India. He came and had lunch with me at the Siemens canteen (where he himself used to have lunch when he was a trainee at Siemens some 14 years ago!) on Friday, and we had dinner at Michaela's house on the Friday night: Christian cooked a monster lasagne that was simply divine and we ate portion after portion even though we were totally full.

Saturday was spent in Munich, doing a spot of shopping, a spot of eating and a spot of sightseeing. That evening Christian, Gareth & I popped in on Bénédicte for apéritifs, and we were joined by Lorna & Tomasz (who had just got back from a weekend in the South Tyrol, bringing me a crazy strong piece of pecorino with truffles that we had with the champagne at Béné's). We then all headed to Neuhausen, to Lorna's favourite Turkish restaurant Pardi. Michaela joined us there too, and we had lots to eat & drink before heading home with the last U-Bahn.

On the Sunday Christian, Gareth & I took the BOB train to Schliersee (it's less than an hour from Munich) and we walked right round the lake, treating ourselves to coffee & cake at one end and a more substantial snack of beer, sausages & rice pudding at the other end, before taking the train back to Munich. It was a lovely spring day, but there were still patches of snow in shady bits of woodland and chunks of ice on the lake.

On the Monday evening Michaela & Gareth joined me & Christian for our usual Stammtisch drinks with our Monday friends at the Kloster. Red wine and fun were had by all.

Gareth had to fly home on Tuesday, but this was good in one way (and one way only; in every other way it was sad!) because it gave me a chance to do my laundry and clean my flat before the next set of visitors, Rasmus & Lene, arrived from Denmark on the Wednesday night! No sooner had they arrived than we walked across to the Nockherberg for a spot of Bavarian dinner.

On Thursday Rasmus & Lene had a day round Munich town centre while I worked my last day of work before Easter - did I mention I'm cycling to work now? Thankfully there's a shower there so I can recover from the über sweat attack that cycling up the steep hill at Thalkirchen causes me to suffer, and not stink like a pig in the office. In the evening, the three of us walked across to Christian's flat where he had prepared another Bavarian dinner for us: Leberkäs and potato salad - yum!

On Friday the four of us drove out to Chiemsee for the day. It was a scorcher! The drive out through country roads was lovely, although much much longer than going on the motorway (which we did on the way home). Once at the lake, we parked up and took the ferry across to the Herreninsel, where we did a tour of King Ludwig's (unfinished) castle with its opulent state & private rooms, before pigging out on yet more Bavarian food and then taking in the art museum in the old monastery. There was an exhibition of Julius Exter, a 19th century artist, which was really amazing. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of him before!

Back in Munich that evening we headed across to Schwabing for a meal in my favourite Ethiopian place, Blue Nile. It was delicious, as ever, with the lentils once again exciting me the most.

On Saturday I took Rasmus & Lene on the BOB train, this time to Tegernsee. We got out and found that the weather was even warmer than the day before. Perfect for a bit of a hike up one of the hills surrounding the lake, Neureuth. With a 500m difference in height from lake to summit, my Danish visitors informed me that we were going to be climbing up higher than two-and-a-half Denmarks! But compared to all the other Alps around us and stretching to the horizon, Neureuth was a mere pimple. And a hot one at that!

The blazing sun followed us up the hill and meant we had to sit indoors at the summit (bloody pale-skinned Danes!). But on the way back down we had to trudge through a massive snow field. I was TOTALLY wearing the wrong shoes for such an endeavour! Back down in the town, we sought out the Bräustüberl of the famous Tegernsee brewery, and had beer after refreshing beer watching the evening sun turn the lake and snow-capped mountains golden, then pink. Back in Munich the three of us popped across to one of the small locals-only Mediterranean bars round the corner from my house (complete with Turkish or possibly Greek old men playing cards inside), then called it a night.

Easter Sunday morning saw us having a relatively early breakfast at Christian's, joined by Michaela for a bit of a chinwag, before Rasmus & Lene had to start their long drive back to Aarhus. Christian & I made the most of the still fabulous weather by going on a long cycle ride.

First we headed across town and out to the Botanical Gardens behind the Nymphenburg Palace, then we went across and up to the Olympic Park (taking in Christian's old university halls of residence, which were themselves the Olympic Village for the 1972 Games and are being renovated right now), then back across to the east side of the river and through to our favourite hostelry, the Kloster, for an afternoon snack. We had dinner back at Christian's place, a satisfyingly huge pile of pasta with a delicious ragú of all the vegetables either of us had left over in the fridge. Yum!

On Easter Monday we drove out to the Allgäu to visit Christian's parents, and had a lovely lazy day in their garden, soaking up yet more sun and generally chilling out, which I have to admit I needed by then, after so much visitor activity.

Back at work, things were hectic of an evening, what with having to pop out to Béné's every few evenings to feed her cat while she was on holiday, as well as doing my own thang:

- we went to the theatre to see Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida in a jazzed-up modern version, with a most entertaining shouty guy;

- Veronika came over to mine and I cooked her dinner before finally going through my India photos with her - we've been meaning to get together to do that for twelve months! - and having a good old natter;

- I went to the cinema with Christian to see an excellent Austrian film called "Der Knochenmann", a kind of twisted very black humorous take on the detective genre;

- I went for a Greek meal with Dieter from Stuttgart, who was in Munich to meet Harry after his three weeks in Vietnam;

- I cooked a monster fry-up at Christian's with the Cumberland sausages Gareth had kindly brought over from the UK;

- Christian & I went with Michaela & the boys to the Gasthaus zur Post near Michaela's house to sit in the beergarden there and soak up more rays.

Right, that'll do for this blog update, methinks. More soon - honest!

So, there I was, back in the UK just five days after having left...

Justin did a far better job of bestmanly organising for Steve than I did for Foggy. And I managed to join them early enough on the Friday evening to really take part. I joined them just as they arrived at a Japanese izakaya-style restaurant and we proceeded to eat various bizarre wobbly animal bits and drink Sapporo and hot sake. Delicious!

Next stop was a private karaoke booth in Islington. This was far less dodgy than it sounds. Nine of us (Steve, his brother Robert, Justin, myself, H, Nick, Rupert, Tom and another friend of Steve's whose name escapes me) had what was basically a padded cell with a flatscreen TV to ourselves.

Our throats were readied for singing courtesy of the "thirsty button", which you pressed to make a waitress appear with beers. The rest of the time we could sing to our hearts' content, with no pesky strangers to be embarrassed about, just a seemingly inexhaustible list of tunes on the computer to choose from, two mics, and a few kitsch props to give us that popstar feeling (the rainbow shiny wig was a personal favourite).

Steve, Justin & I got to our hotel near King's Cross at about three in the morning, and some six hours later made our way, bleary-eyed, to the breakfast buffet to line our stomachs for Saturday's mammoth pub crawl. Foggy met us on the other side of town an hour later, and we proceeded to pub number one for a darts match and our first drink of the day at ten thirty.

To paraphrase a current popular ditty, I Drank A Shandy And I Liked It! The Taste Of That Beery Liquid. I Drank A Shandy Just To Try It, I Hope My Boyfriends Don't Mind It. It Felt So Wrong, It Felt So Right, It Don't Mean I'm A Lightweight Tonight. I Drank A Shandy And I Liked It, I Liked It!!

Justin & I did feel like a couple of twats ordering shandy, it has to be said, but with woozy heads and strong sunshine the idea was So Wrong - but it really was So Right! Hard-core Steve went straight onto the hard stuff, and of course Foggy was not the worse for wear from the previous night so he got stuck in straight away too. I have to say, though, the many, many other beers of the day slipped down so much more easily after the rehydrating and reinvigorating effects of that small quantity of lemonade.

We walked from pub to pub, Steve carrying out Justin's many pub-name-related challenges at each stop along the way. And as we progressed, we picked up more & more co-drinkers: Jezza joined us in Hammersmith, Nick in Chelsea, erm, um, my memory is a bit hazy now about who else joined where, but suffice to say that we were a very merry band of men by the end of the evening in a pub opposite the Palace of Westminster.

It was left to four of us (Steve, Justin, Foggy & me) to take it to the limit by going out clubbing in Clapham, but we rose to the occasion. Okay Tom was there too but he left early so that's a thousand jesse points to him. The four of us finally made it back to the hotel at about three o'clock once again.

Sunday morning was like Saturday morning only more so. We broke the fast and then jumped on a train to Justin's house in Sunningdale (losing Foggy along the way to go back to Kath's in Kent). There Sam, Grace & Maisie brought happiness into our addled brains with pizza and laughter, before we drove off to Wycombe to watch the Wasps play the London Irish.

We'd arranged to meet up with Nick Tostivin at the Park & Ride car park, but the traffic coming off the M40 was mad, and the car park was overflowing by the time we got there. We managed to meet up with Nick, and then played "find the parking space" all round the edge of Wycombe, before finally deciding to park ever-so-slightly illegally in the Park & Ride after all. We made it to the game only a few minutes late, (missing the first try) and saw pretty much all the action.

Justin was kind enough to drive me to Heathrow after the match, and this time - for the first time for me - Terminal 5 was efficient, pleasant and stress-free. I sat in Wagamama savouring my udon noodles and reading the Economist, then made my way to the gate with a minimum of fuss.

How time flies when you’re earning money!

To use the set phrase unadulterated in the context of recent weeks would be to give a false impression of the level of enjoyment I derive from my current job. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really quite nice, and the people are great, and the canteen has big tasty portions, but any job is going to be less fun than doing whatever you feel like, all day, all week, like I have been for the past several months.

Well, what’s been doing since last I blogged apart from earning an honest crust for a change? Let’s see now, I’ve been back & forth to the UK a couple of times for stag dos, I’ve been ill, I’ve got better, I’ve eaten dinner with a variety of people, I’ve been to the theatre a few times, I’ve been to the gym not enough times, I’ve been to feed Béné’s cat while she was on holiday, I’ve sung in my choir, I’ve played badminton, I’ve drunk beer & wine & champagne & spirits & coffee & tea.

I could leave it there actually! I mean, it’s a complete list. A bit sparse on the detail front, but does that really matter? Okay, perhaps I should offer a little bit more about the most exciting parts of the last month, namely my two stag dos back in Blighty:

The first one was in a sense “my” stag do: I have the honour of being Best Man at Andrew & Kath’s upcoming nuptials, and so in theory I should have put loads & loads of effort into arranging a memorable day for the bridegroom-to-be. This proved a little tricky however, given that I live in Germany and the stag do was to be held in Liverpool. The result was a minimalist tour-de-force, a do that was pared down to the essentials: a bunch of blokes, a bunch of beers, a couple of pubs, some rugby on the telly, a curry and a bit of female flesh.

I had a great time! Andrew picked me up from Manchester airport and we had some time in the car to have a proper catch-up (it’s been a while since I saw him for any length of time). Then, after dumping my bag at his, we headed into town to get my train ticket for the morrow and then on up to the Philharmonic Pub, our first port of call. There the two of us slowly became seven: Andrew, myself, Chris, James, Jamie, Jezza & H. Our original lunch plan got ditched in favour of lots of crisps.

About six pints later we moved on to our second venue, the Fly In The Loaf, some 100 yards away from the Phil. There we drank more, ate some (well I did – a tasty slab of pork pie and pickled onions), and watched the rugby, joined (in a refreshingly modern way) by Jamie’s girlfriend. The extra beers (including exotica such as Australian microbrewery specials that I haven’t seen in years) and a cheeky round of sambuccas gave everyone an appetite, so we headed to a nearby curry house.

It really wasn’t a very good curry, but no-one was in a state to complain, after by this time about ten pints apiece. Instead, we wolfed the food down, drank our Cobras up, and moved on to pub number three, the name of which for some reason now escapes me. From there, we moved on – at the strong insistence of the youngest member of our troupe – to a nearby lapdancing club. Fun was had by all – especially by the owners, who are raking in the money with the prices they charge!

The next day getting up was hard. I had to leave quite early, because I had left myself a huge safety margin for the train journey down to London. The last thing I wanted to do was miss my flight! But in the end the train was only half an hour late into Euston, so I rang Dan and had lunch with him at one of those delicious all-you-can-eat veggie curry places behind the station. We stuffed our faces, as only the True Pie-Eaters can. Then, after a coffee, I left Dan & headed for the nearest Tube station, only to discover it was shut!

So suddenly my trip to Heathrow became critically cutting-it-fine stressful. I made sure to check in online in an internet café, but I made the mistake of not printing out my boarding pass. This, two hours later, cost me my flight and my peace of mind. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the bastards at Terminal 5 didn't let me go through security owing to the fact that I was 30 seconds - really, thirty seconds! - late joining the queue.

This being because I had had to queue for ages to get a boarding pass printed out, and the lady who did that not telling me to get over to security double-quick, so instead I went for a pee (I was gasping after that long Tube ride and the lunch & coffee with Dan), and thence to security, and thence via a succession of BA staff to the desk to be waitlisted for the next flight. Which of course ended up being delayed an hour. But at least I got on that one (had to be shoe-horned on, mind; it was über full!) and so didn't have to crash at Chris & Kate's that night!

And then, five days, two feedings of Béne's cat and one Greek dinner with my mate Hias later, I had lots of stag do fun all over again, this time in London...

Ooh-arrrr, me hearties! Ahoy there from the good ship Blogger, making steady headway in the choppy waters of the Sea of Employment! As I mentioned in my last Captain's (B)log, I got a job. No, really! It's been three weeks now; suddenly my days are a whole lot fuller than they have been in recent months.

I'm working in the Human Resources department of a company based here in Munich, and when the weather gets a little milder I'll be able to cycle to work in under half an hour, which will be nice. If I'm still there in the spring: I'm temping, and currently I'm only on board until the end of February. But we'll see...

But, in other news, I've been making the most of living within spitting distance of the Alps by actually going skiing a few times. I've already been more times this year than I did all of last year, and it's only February! Mind you, my March weekends are pretty much all booked up in the UK, so I'm not sure how much more skiing I'll be getting in this season.

Let's see, what else shall I mention here? Well, the whole inviting-people-to-mine-and-cooking thing is coming along nicely. I've had Bénédicte over; I've had Christian over again; I've had Tom over; and I made a to-die-for tiramisù which I took round to Michaela's for dinner one Sunday.

I've also done some "away" eating, notably at Bezi's house (where Bénédicte & I got to enjoy an authentic couscous cooked by her Moroccan husband Mustafa) and at Harry's house (where he & Dieter cooked up a storm in the form of chicken & chips with oooooodles of cream to make a very naughty but nice sauce), as well as at a fab Afghan restaurant called Lemar, which had a divine beetroot starter that I can't really describe; I'll just to go and eat it again a few times...

The weather here has been properly wintry (although not as extreme as in London and other parts of the British Isles!), with day after day of fat, heavy snowflakes falling through the air and collecting on every available surface. On occasion it's been blowing a gale too, but then on other occasions it's been gloriously sunny - and warm enough for a bike ride along the Isar to the zoo!

It was Ryan's birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I got to enjoy the raucous birthday party in a (hopefully soundproofed) basement bowling alley underneath an Italian restaurant near Michaela's house. It all went very well, considering there were a dozen pre-pubescent lads running around and getting progressively more boisterous.

I dressed up for my first Fasching (=carnival) party of the season on Friday night. It was a fancy-dress party organised by the EPO's social affairs people, where you had to dress as a star. I went as Clint Eastwood, not because I think I look anything like him, but because I've got a poncho (and it's real alpaca wool, don't you know, which I bought in Chile). Bénédicte went as Penélope Cruz. There were lots of people in crazy costumes. And TOO MUCH food!! I was stuffeder than I've been in a veeeery long time.

And Lorna was here briefly this weekend too. She was skiing in Tegernsee, but popped in to have a drink, a meal & a chat. I miss her! I was in her old stomping ground the other day for Susanne's birthday, in The Big Easy, just up the road from where Lorna used to live, and I thought of her then too. She had lots of stories to tell from her three weeks in Mexico & Belize. How jealous was I?! But hey, perhaps 2009 is a year for knuckling down and doing a bit of work.

Which brings me back to my job, and to the fact that it's getting late, and I have to get up for work in the morning, so I think I'll stop there, my dear readers. Tootle-pip!

Tah tadadah tah dah DAH!! It's 2009! It's a blog! I've got a new job!

Yes, earthlings, my time of relaxed participation in the non-work aspects of daily life in Munich has all but come to an end. As of Monday, my nose will be back at the grindstone. More on that once I've had my First Day and then picked myself off the floor...

But January has been lots of fun until now too. I mean to give you a little taste of what I've been up to:

German media considered it newsworthy that, at New Year 2009, there was roughly a doubling in the number of SMSs sent by revellers to wish their friends & family health & prosperity. I did my bit, sending an inordinate number of texts and receiving quite a few in turn.

But the best text was sent by a German friend of mine who had spent Christmas visiting friends in the UK. I quote (translating): "This year I celebrated in your ex-homeland. We pulled apart exploding sweets and I received a crown. Lovely traditions!" It took me a second to realise she was talking about Christmas crackers. And then a wave of pleasure ran through me at the sheer deliciousness of something so familiar being described as a first-time experience!

I started the New Year as I mean to go on, by heading to my gym for a workout. No, dear readers, you haven't suddenly gone mad, I did write - and I do go to - "gym". Argh!!! It's only five minutes down the road, it's cheap as chips, and somehow the press of hot, sweaty bodies surrounding me when I'm there spurs me on to greater heights. It SO beats exercising alone, that's for sure!

The next few days I spent at Michaela's house, helping her to sort through stuff old & new. We really got a lot done, in part because the boys were at their father's so we weren't so distracted. We rewarded our hard work with a day's skiing with Claire & friends of hers from Ireland. It was my first ski day of the season - and, it being January, a much better start than last year, where I didn't hit the slopes until April.

We were at Söll, in Austria, where a surprising number of the guests - and an astonishing number of the staff - were English. I found it quite amusing, but it actually freaked Michaela out to have English-speakers where they're not supposed to be! (She's been living here too long...) The weather was pretty good, and the snow good too, so we had a nice easing back in to things.

The first memorable meal of the year was at Karin's house. Most of the Stammtisch crew were there (me, Christian, Edith, Chris, & Bine) and Karin cooked up a storm! Her parents both have Lebanese heritage, and she put on a spread of Mediterranean marvels for us. Her stuffed vine leaves were particularly subtly flavoured, the secret being to cook them resting on a joint of lamb. Fabulous! Later, Karin showed her love of whisky in an eloquent introduction for us to the joys of that tipple.

Christian & I met with Rudi & Sabine at the theatre later that week. Rudi's sister joined us too. Sadly, the play was well-intentioned but awful: some miserable Austrian piece droning on about World War II and its psychological aftermath in the German-speaking lands. I could see where the playwright was trying to go, but it was too undigested.

One Thursday evening I amazed Christian with my cooking skills. I decided to try out some of the recipes from the tapas cookbook that Michaela got me for Christmas, and they all turned out pretty well, especially the little spinach & anchovy empanadillas. One of my New Year's resolutions is to invite more people to dinner at my place & to cook for them; I reckon I'll get into the swing of it pretty quickly.

I've already been to a couple of parties this year with Bénédicte. First we had dinner with her friend Frank at SAF, the vegan place (the food was not quite as amazing as it had been last year with Christian, Richard & Christian) and then we went on to the French Party at Ampère, a small club just by the river near the Deutsches Museum. We drank a lot of prosecco but didn't do a lot of dancing, because the music was pretty dire.

The second party was just the other day. It was organised by http://www.internations.org/, a networking site for expats that has its origins here in Munich but has groups all over now. The venue was a new one to me, called Beach 38°. I wasn't sure whether this meant the whole place was superheated or what. Sadly, the number relates to the house number not the temperature, but in fact it's pleasantly warm and done out like a tropical beach bar, with sand & decking. Also, they have an attached beach sports hall, which was full of people playing beach volleyball when we were there. I might be tempted to go back there...

And another party I've been to was at the EPO's SkyBar, for the 50th birthday of a friend of Michaela's. The buffet was splendid, the drinks free and the atmosphere buzzing! I've been in SkyBar before, and it's always been a bit disappointing, but now I see that it can really get going in there once there are enough people. There must have been 200 of us in there, with good music getting people onto the dancefloor in droves. A good time was had by all!

Lorna has finally left Munich for good now, handing back the keys to her flat the other week. We had one last weekend of fun, first with Tomasz at the Augustiner in Arnulfstraße & at Ryan's Muddy Boot, the Irish bar in Neuhausen, and then the next night just the two of us, starting at Pardi & ending up back at Ryan's Muddy Boot for midnight crisps. I shall miss her, and our spontaneous beers! But, like Lorna says, we'll still have the planned beers to look forward to.

I spent a fabulous three hours at Therme Erding, Europe's largest spa & sauna centre, the other day with Matthias from Augsburg! There are SO MANY different saunas, spas, jacuzzis, whirlpools, and just plain old swimming pools to choose from! And it really is special to be swimming along (naked, of course!) in hot water, steam billowing up in clouds that obscure the buildings behind you, and snowflakes landing on your head as you lazily make your way around the outdoor section of the main pool, before heading back indoors and perching on a seat at the in-pool bar for another beer.

Last weekend was most relaxing too. Christian & I drove down to his parents' place in the Allgäu because it was his mum's birthday. We didn't do much apart from eat & drink while we were there, but it was really cosy in their warm house on such cold days & nights as we've been having here recently.

The weather has been unrelentingly cold since the start of the year. It snowed on New Year's Day, then hasn't been above zero since, so there are still scraps of snow around & about. It's been sunny on a few occasions, but mostly overcast. I'm already kind of over the whole winter thing, and it's not even the end of January yet! Ah well, I'll be heading into the mountains again this weekend for a spot of skiing. Perhaps the weather will be cheerier there...

Folks, it's time for a final blog for 2008. Yes, I know it's already 2009 - and I haven't even wished you all a Happy New Year yet! - but there were some fun things that I got up to after I was back from Japan that I want to share with you. So here goes:

I got back to Munich on the Friday night, and on the Saturday afternoon we had a final choir rehearsal. The concert was on Sunday, and it was followed by a big dinner for the whole choir at our nearby Greek restaurant (amusingly in Türkenstraße). I was luggageless and consequently lensless for the whole time, but I managed to sing in glasses okay.

I went to visit my mate Uwe in the hospital at Neuperlach on the Monday. He had had some minor surgery, and I remember myself how bloody boring it is to be in hospital, so I was more than happy to go and see him for a couple of hours. On the Wednesday I had the beers with Holger (as mentioned in my last entry) where I got the whole luggage story off my chest.

Michaela, Ryan & Charlie seemed to spend the whole of the rest of 2008 bouncing various diseases amongst themselves, so at various times I was over looking after one or other or all of them. I thankfully didn't succumb myself; but I'd been ill enough a month previous to last a while! Despite illness we still found the time & energy to go to Sealife Centre Munich for Charlie's birthday. It was much better than I was expecting, but still not a patch on diving in the Red Sea.

Christian & I went to Bussone for great pizzas and cheesy karaoke one Saturday night with Lorna & Tomasz. But as soon as the regulars in that place started smoking - despite the smoking ban, and with the naughty acquiescence of the owner - we headed off for a coffee in a restaurant in the Glockenbachviertel. I can't remember what it was called, which is a pity as the menu was enticing; I'll have to wander around there until I find it again.

I had a lovely afternoon & evening of food, photos & conversation at Christoph's flat with Martin. These two are tenors with me in the St Markus Chor, and Christoph wanted to show us his new flat and photos from his summer walking in the Alps. All accompanied with piles of cake & cheeses - my kind of evening!

The following week I had dinner with Rocky, who I used to work with at E.ON when I was first in Munich. I haven't seen him for literally years! I think the last time we met up was early in 2007. So it was great to catch up with him - and to savour the delights of the Italian pizza place just near his office by Westfriedhof. I'll have to go back there; the wood-fired pizza oven worked wonders.

It being December, and Advent, of course the many Christmas markets of Munich sprung up on squares across the city. I visited a good few of them, meeting up with Tom, Fritz, Susi, Thomas, Lorna, Christian, Michaela, Lisa, Claire & Bénédicte at various times at Sendlinger Tor, Marienplatz, Stephansplatz & Tollwood, enjoying Glühwein, Feuerzangenbowle (Glühwein with even more alcohol in it), 1/2 metre sausages, exotic foods, schnaps & hot coconuts (hot coconut milk with rum -ooh yeah baby!). It's a cold time of year, so you need to warm up well...

The run-up to Christmas itself was actually quite quiet, the one big Christmas-themed exception being Moyra's Christmas party at the EPO, where once again Michaela, Christian & I stuffed ourselves silly with lashings of traditional English Christmas dinner & divine mince pies. Being unemployed, I of course had no office party of my own to go to. Instead, I got to spend a day being bored OUT OF MY MIND on an absolutely pointless training day during which I was supposed to learn how to write an application letter. Oh my God. That day, I earned the dole money I've been getting, I tell you!

I managed to eat stupendous amounts of non-Christmas-themed food during December as well: notably at Molos, that fab Greek in Maistraße, with Lorna & Tomasz; a couple of times at Bénédicte's house (her parents were over for a weekend and we ate a full raclette with several wines & champagnes from her dad's exceeeeeedingly extensive wine cellar); and one evening at Christian's, where the Kloster gang gathered to feast on pizzas & chocolate mousse. There was a large brunch at Christian's too, when Wolfgang & Christian came up from Salzburg to visit.

Christmas Eve we spent at Michaela's. I cooked a gulasch, while Christian did the bread dumplings to go with it. Michaela rustled up a fantastic trifle, and the meal was complete. Apart from all the wine & Baileys of course.

Christmas Day we were at Christian's parents in the Allgäu, along with Ralf, Bettina & the girls, who were down from Osnabrück for the holidays. It was quite a quiet one, with Bettina actually in bed almost the whole time with an evil flu. Christian brought his new projector down with him and we showed photos from Israel & India. It was strange to see all these hot places while it was cold & miserable outside.

Boxing Day had me heading down to Salzburg airport to pick up Kate, my Aussie friend who I met on Samoa back in 2004. She is currently living in London, and was at a loose end "between the years", so I said she should come over. Boy did we have a ball!! If the pre-Christmas week had seemed a little quiet, the post-Christmas week was anything but. We did many many fun things! Here are the highlights:

• A WHOLE LOT of shoe shopping in every shoe shop in the whole of Munich - but of course, in true girly style, Kate failed to buy a single pair! - as well as lots of shopping of the non-shoe variety;
  
• Coffee & cake, Asian snacks, Ethiopian dinner, an Australian pub, German food: Jungschweinbraten mit Kartoffelknödel (roast baby pig with potato dumplings); Kaiserschmarrn mit Zwetschgenröster (scrambled eggy pancake with plum compôte), big fat cocktails, coffee in an Italian bar called Box, Thai food, Italian food, bakery food...
  
• Quick desserts in Salzburg town centre (Salzburger Nockerl, a kind of meringue that looks like a wobbly tit on a plate, and Topfenknödel mit Marille, curd cheese dumplings with apricot compôte);
  
• Amusing comedy deafness moments: Kate heard me saying "that's where I had tram sex" when in fact I was saying "that's where our tram stop is"; I heard Kate saying "do you want it up the bum?" when in fact she was saying "do you want lip balm?"
  
• Upmarket shopping in Ludwig Beck, where we saw a puffer jacket that looked like a sundried tomato and felt like when you put your finger on an old balloon, and in many branches of Zara;
  
• Many a happy hour spent browsing the Viktualienmarkt, including a lunch of grilled ox & Weißwurst (traditional Munich veal sausages), as well as tucking in to the free pralines we got with our coffees just behind the market;
  
• Culture, in the form of Kate going to the Kandinsky exhibition while I did the next-door Glyptothek & Antikensammlung (many great statues!), not to forget the book of street art that Kate bought in the funky Kandinsky art shop, which we spent the 3/4 hour of queuing for tickets reading;
  
• More culture, in the form of the Salzburg modern art gallery, where we saw a Paul Klee exhibition as well as a bunch of photography, some of which was even good - and I suppose the Austrian lunch with Wolfgang & Kazumi was sort of cultural too, what with the traditional Austrian restaurant and the classic Austrian dishes (Fritattensuppe or pancake soup, Fleischfleckerl or pasta with pork);
  
• Yet more culture, in the form of the Nymphenburg Palace, but we didn't hang around there because it was BLOODY cold that day, so instead we headed into the Backspielhaus for more coffee & cake. And we gave up on the idea of ice skating at Stachus for the same temperature-based reason, settling for the Glühwein instead;
  
• A trip to the cinema to see Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was bloody good (let's agree to disagree about Scarlett Johansson, Kate - either she's wooden & boring & can't act, or she was very convincingly playing a wooden & boring American - but the other actors were all fantastic);
  
• Some interactive wildlife pleasure, in the form of the butterfly house in the Botanical Gardens, where we were attacked, Hitchcock's The Birds stylee, by enormous butterflies, before taking refuge in the other, plants-only parts of the palm house.

Kate's visit ended on 31st December, when we caught a train down to Salzburg and had lunch with Wolfgang & his friend Kazumi, who was over from Japan for a few days of mountain pleasure. Then Kate & I headed up to the gallery.

As the sun was setting, Just after the ridiculously loud musket fire from all the hills around Salzburg's city centre, and a cheeky hand-made Mozartkugel chocolate in town, I put Kate into a taxi to the airport and headed back to the railway station to catch my train back to Munich.

And then it was suddenly New Year's Eve, which Christian, Michaela, the boys & I spent at Jackie's house, along with a bevy of other British expats from the Patent Office. Oooooh the stilton!! Happy New Year everyone!!

Ladies and gentlemen! It gives me enormous pleasure to announce the final instalment of this, my epic memoirs of a few days in another country quite far away!!

The last day of any experience is tinged with sadness, but in this case I was reeling from all my new impressions and frankly I didn't have the mental capacity to get too worked up about having reached the end of my time in Japan.

I got up really early, having sensibly packed most of my stuff the night before, and did my morning ablutions. By the time I was about to leave, Steve was up & ready to go to work, so we walked together to Roppongi. There he bade me farewell and I went down into the Metro for one last time.

The route was familiar to me already, because once again I was going to Tokyo station, only this time I wasn't catching a Shinkansen but rather the airport express train. I just had time for a quick coffee & croissant (my god the croissant was unashamedly delicious - but also unashamedly expensive!) before going to the airport train platform and jumping on board.

An hour or so later I was at Narita, where the check-in procedure was smooth & orderly. The wait at the gate was uneventful, the flight uneventful, the views wintry & for the most part dusky (well, we were heading over the arctic in winter, so no surprises there). Arrival in London was uneventful, and even Terminal 5 was less chaotic than it had been on the way out. The onward flight to Munich was uneventful.

Things got eventfuller on arrival at Munich, when to my horror I discovered that my luggage hadn't made it back with me. My luggage, with all my liquid items in it of course, including my contact lenses. There followed a period - lasting DAYS - of absolute chaos, with phone calls to call centres in Italy, misinformation, cock-ups galore, and the most laughable text message I've ever been sent: "BA would like to inform you that your luggage will probably - note the word probably, people! - be arriving on day blah-blah on flight blah-blah" - which, naturally, it didn't.

And of course, because Munich was my final destination not my holiday destination, I didn't qualify for a penny of compensation. And of course, you can't actually ring BA customer services - oh no, we don't want to be speaking with Customers! And of course, I haven't had a reply to my "disgusted of Munich" email either. Bastards. British Airways can kiss my custom goodbye.

My mate Holger, who works for Lufthansa, had the misfortune to agree to meet me for a few drinks later that week, and I'm ashamed to say I vented all my airline frustration on him. But for fuck's sake, even once my bag had reached Munich, the arsewipes were still incapable of ringing me and arranging a delivery time, so that I might have a chance of being at home. No! Instead they just sent a driver, who turned up at my door with my bag, THEN rang me to say he would be taking my bag back to the airport because I wasn't home!

The second time this happened, I had to plead with the driver to not go back to the airport but instead to deliver his other bags and then come back to mine an hour later. Grudgingly, he obliged. But really, it was no skin off his nose whether he went to my address twice or not, plus this way I was out of their hair. He was worryingly close to being a total jobsworth, but I should thank my lucky stars that he had a milligram of flexibility. Anyway, I could at last see properly again.

The bag episode coincided neatly with a choir rehearsal & concert, which I admit complicated things. But the concert went off well (we sang some Fauré and some Rossini, and we had a full orchestra accompanying us). But I'm drifting away from Japan at this point, so I think I'll just stop writing now and leave this blog there, with the agony of luggage and the ecstasy of travel.

So here we are, folks, Day Six of my week on the Pacific Rim.

My last full day in Japan nearly didn't get started at all: I was in such need of sleep that I managed to wake up after midday on this, the only day I had left to see the rest of Tokyo! I quickly changed my plans (okay, to be honest I'd already decided last night to bin the idea of getting up at 4am to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market, even though I know I would've loved it) and cut straight to the chase: lunch.

I found a small soba noodle place in a shopping mall near Roppongi, and had a bowl of what seemed to be beef gulasch, accompanied by a lovely mound of cold soba noodles. The two businessmen at the next table had enormous piles of soba noodles with a small dipping sauce - and a chunk of fresh wasabi root with a little grater - which I was coveting, I'll admit, but sadly I couldn't find it on the menu, and I didn't feel cheeky enough to point across the restaurant and say "me too". But mine was delicious too. And the best part was the tea they brought me when I'd finished my meal: it was the noodle water my soba noodles had been cooked in! Crazy but true.

After lunch I went to Roppongi Hills and paid the JPY 1500 to go to the Sky View observation deck on the very top of Mori Tower. This is a brand-new attraction that has stunning views over the whole of the centre of Tokyo. You can see out over the harbour, watch planes land at Haneda airport, glimpse the snow-covered peak of Fujiyama, spy the '70s boringness of the tower blocks of Yokohama, and peek into the secret gardens dotted about the middle of Tokyo.

I stayed up there for ages, just soaking up the view (and the rays; it was a chilly but very sunny day again). It was quite exciting to be standing at the edge of a helipad, over 200 metres above the city, and so peaceful too, despite the buffetting wind gusts.

My next destination was a total failure. In fact, this is - apart from the horrendously strong yen at the moment - the only negative thing about my whole week in Japan: I didn't once get to try an Onsen, or Japanese sauna. The one in Kyoto was closed for the exact duration of my stay, and the one in the centre of Tokyo has been closed down permanently! Damn it! I wanted to do the hot mud and hot springs and hot other stuff! Ah well, next time.

From outside the closed Onsen, I headed to Akihabara, Tokyo's Mecca for spotty geeky youths who like computers, grunge music and manga. I had a quick look into one of the many enormous electronics department stores, and tried out an electric foot massaging machine. It was okay, but just no comparison to a real person. Then I bought some Pokemon cards for my nephew's birthday, which I was missing because I was in Japan. And a teeshirt for myself that was covered in karate-chopping pigs. It's very me.

Then I had an unexpected Japan moment when I found a telly facing out from a tiny bar onto the street that was showing a sumo fight. But even in this most Japanese of sports, you can see the effects of creeping globalisation: the bout I watched was between a Belarussian and a Samoan. I have to admit, it was odd and even faintly unpleasant to see a Caucasian dude in one of those sumo nappy outfits; it just seemed so wrong, a slight on this centuries-old tradition. But I guess it's just a case of getting used to it.

There's another tradition that deserves a mention, although it's not as old as sumo: Japanese tourist information maps are handily placed at lots of intersections, and they're really useful, but it takes a while to get used to reading them. Unlike maps I've seen in other countries, which are uniformly oriented so that up equals north, Japanese maps are oriented to match the way you are facing when looking at the map. In other words, if you're walking down a road heading east, the map you look at will have east at the top. Which makes sense, I suppose.

I met Steve under the huge mother-spider sculpture at Mori Tower (it's the original; I've seen exact copies outside Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum and in London's Tate Gallery), and we headed to our dinner destination, a teppanyaki restaurant by the faintly amusing name of Bamboo Grassy. This was recommended to him by a work colleague, so I was prepared for a swish place. It took a while to find, but after we'd spotted a small sign and made our way down a dingy flight of steps, we stepped into a very well-appointed bijou eatery.

We got seats at the bar, right up against the hot plate, and opted for a standard menu of several courses, including vegetables, fish, seafood (I haven't had sea urchin since I was in Madagascar) & some beef. All washed down with refreshing beers. Well, I did glance at the wine menu, just out of interest, but decided I didn't want to pay upwards of sixty pounds for a bottle you can pick up in any supermarket back home for under a tenner. The meal was splendid: absolutely delicious ingredients cooked to perfection; friendly, attentive service; and lively conversation. These factors together made the EUR 100 per head price tag bearable. And that, my friends, is the most I've ever paid for a meal - with my own money ... ah, corporate plastic, how I miss you!

Welcome back to Day Five - THE BIG ONE! The last time we saw our hero, he was making his way through the throngs of tourists up the Philosophers' Path. Clearly, they named this before it became a popular tourist destination; philosophers can scarcely get a moment's peaceful thinking in here these days.

So, the northern end of the Path leads to the temple complex of Ginkaku-ji, which is most notable for its outsize conical pile of gravel just inside the main entrance. Really, this is a big big pile of gravel. And so perfect! Not a single stone out of place. We're talking not just physical shapes, but Platonic Ideals, fallen from the heavens and landed in a nice garden.

My camera had been working overtime for the last few days, and of course although I had a battery charger, for some reason the bloody international plug socket converter thingy I bought on the way here in Munich is a bit shite, and doesn't really like to let power through much. So I had to keep buying un-rechargeable AA batteries. But my camera chews through these at a rate of knots. Exasperated, I kept trying to take just the most spectacular pictures. But the problem was, it's ALL spectacular!!

I gave my camera a break after Ginkaku-ji, and instead of batteries I bought treats for me - yay! I had caramel-coated hot rice flour balls on a stick (they had a slightly charred taste from the barbecue, but they were okay) and then I had an incredible thing, so full of taste that the image in my mind was of the moment in Over The Hedge where the packet of tortilla chips gets ripped open, giving rise to a thermonuclear mushroom cloud of flavour over North America. Now I truly know the meaning of "rice cracker"! Not the poxy things you buy in Europe that look - and taste - like flattened toilet rolls, no no! These are just on another plane entirely. Wow.

As the sun set, I made my way back to the main railway station. It was getting very cold again, but I was lucky enough to go to the toilet in the station, where they not only had underfloor heating but also undercheek heating. You've just gotta love Japanese toilets! I love toasted buns in the morning...

The shinkansen bullet train back to Tokyo was chockerblock, but I managed to find a seat in one of the carriages for people without a reservation and I promptly fell asleep until Tokyo. There, I negotiated my way through the Metro system (I still had Steve's second Metro electronic pass card thing in my wallet; it's like London's Oyster card or similar things in Hong Kong & Singapore) and got back to Steve's place in Akasaka. He had only just got back in from work when I arrived, and we headed straight out to a nearby Korean restaurant for dinner.

The Korean place was much better than it looked from the outside, with delicious scrolls of wafer-thin wagyu beef that the waitress fried for us in the big wok-shaped grill pan in the middle of our table. There were also these crazy mushrooms that look like mini haystacks with delicate little heads on the end of bunches of tiny pale stalks. Delicious! We skipped dessert, instead heading back to Steve's for a few more of the beers we bought the other night.

Steve introduced me to Shaun the Sheep on DVD. He told me how he had become hooked on Shaun the Sheep when he was visiting his two-year-old niece in the summer. I have to say, it's one of the best kids' programmes I've seen in a long time. So amusing, on so many levels! It brought me back to normal after what had been a fantastic few days of otherworldliness in the temples & shrines of Kyoto.

On the fifth day of my Japan visit, I made the most of the time I had left in Kyoto, before jumping back on the bullet train to Tokyo and catching up with Steve again.

It was another beautiful autumn morning, with a chill in the air that was offset by the sun's rays warming that part of my skin that was exposed to the elements, ie my face. I walked towards the station again looking for a new breakfast option.

It struck me, as I was crossing a road, that it should come as no surprise that mobile phones are pre-loaded with naff ring tones: the pedestrian crossing, rather than simply bleeping at me, was whistling a merry little tune of electric crapness. Then , at a busy junction I found what I needed: a busy-ish plastic-ish chain restaurant with muzak and chairs that were fixed to the floor, but more importantly with "breakfastu settu" menu options that were intelligible to me - and cheap!

I opted for the filet of salmon set, which thankfully tasted much less weird than the previous day's effort. I was flummoxed by the mini nori seaweed sheets that came on the tray in a little plastic sachet like some sort of refreshing towelette, until I saw someone at the next table use them to pick up lumps of rice, and I have to say, after following suit, that it was a good taste combo.

I felt pleased to have partaken in what I am guessing - and hope - is bog-standard Japanese everydayness. And then, energised for the day's sightseeing, I found the bus I needed to take me to my first port of call in Namzenji, northeast of the centre of town and a short walk from the bus stop through a quiet residential area.

This is another delightful collection of temple structures, once again with a two-storey wooden entrance gateway, but this one you could go up. Following the now-standard temple visiting routine, I dutifully took off my shoes, put them in the plastic bag proferred to me, and climbed the low-ceilinged staircase to the viewing platform. The view over nearby hills and back into the city was lovely on this cloudless morning.

I walked up into the hills behind the temple but quickly realised I was going the wrong way. It was pleasant walk though, so I headed on through the majestic trees and up the deserted ridge until I was in danger of not being able to find the way back. Then I walked along the aqueduct that passes behind the main temple complex, at one point waiting for a whole hoard of giggling primary school kids to pass over a narrow crossing. So much for being in the middle of nowhere!

After visiting the main temple building, with its beautiful gravel gardens and antique wall screens, I headed back into the hills (on the right path this time!) and to the Oku-no-in forest shrine, where I found an elderly lady busy praying to the small Buddha icons placed inside the dark cave at the top of the ladder. From there I continued along the mountain stream and up over this ridge of hills, past a large cemetery and down to the Nyakouoji shrine.

To my great delight, a woman was selling bento boxes in front of the shrine entrance, so I bought one and got stuck in to my first true-blue Japanese lunch box experience - accompanied by a bottle of water from a nearby trusty drinks vending machine. It had the works: rice, pickles, soy beans, shiitake mushrooms, some smoked eel, and some slices of the special rougher tofu that they use here for desserts. Yum!!

Duly re-energised, I headed for the splendid temple complex of Eiken-do, with its marvellous revolving Buddha statue and hilltop pagoda with more breathtaking views over the city. From there I walked the Philosophers' Path northwards alongside a quiet canal, stopping at one point for gelatinous slices of what I assume was green tea coated in coarse flour. Looking back, I remember the texture to be like soft Turkish delight, but at the time I have to admit it felt like I was sticking my tongue in whale blubber. What's more disturbing is, that wasn't disturbing! The taste was most refreshing.

My next stop was Horen-in, which made a nice change from the other temples simply through being off the beaten track; its bucolic charms were unspoiled by the hoardes of tourists to be found at many of the other temple complexes in town. The most remarkable feature was the huge mounds of fine gravel that from afar looked as though they'd been formed in a sandcastle-like manner by turning 20-metre-long moulds upside-down.

Back on the Philosophers' Path, things were hotting up in the tourist hoardes stakes. I could tell we were approaching a big big sight, because the number of small tourist tat vendors was increasing. I stopped to sample the wares of a small manufacturer of pressed ginger snap biscuits that reminded me of those little pictures on starch that you used to get in cereal packets that you could colour in and then put in the oven and they would shrink down to be the size of a keyring. I think I had one once from that dodgy sci-fi film The Black Hole.

Wow! Day Five is turning out to be a whopper! I think I'll stop there, and leave you wanting more; either that or gasping in relief that the end is come...

Okay, so here comes Day Four, hot on the heels of the day I arrived in Kyoto:

After sleeping like the proverbial (which was nice after my initial jetlag issues in Tokyo), I headed towards the main station for breakfast. I wandered around the building, marvelling at the panoramic views from its 13th-storey rooftop garden, then headed back to ground level for a traditional Japanese breakfast, or "brekfastu settu", as it's known in these parts.

Well, I won't be doing THAT again! The foods on offer ranged from the fine (rice) through the unexpected (super salty shredded salmon) and the bizarre (pickled seaweed, I'm guessing) to the frankly unpleasant (congealed partially digested soy beans), all washed down with some seriously astringent "match" tea. But I'm glad I tried it at least once.

There is a bakery just at the main bus station area, and I treated myself to a remarkably crunchy sugar-crusted doughnut and a steamed ginger bun that was almost McVitie's Jamaica Ginger Cake in its yumminess, then joined the long, long queue for the bus to my first temple of the day. Just behind me was a group of young, annoying, punchable Germans. I felt the need to join a different bus queue, just to avoid them. But as luck would have it, they of course were heading to the same temple as me. And yes, I kept seeing them (and, what was worse, hearing them with their arrogant bullshit conversations) the whole bloody day!

But let's put aside my petty issues against annoying tourists and concentrate on the sights...

Kiyomizu-Dera temple complex was first built in 798, but the current buildings date from 1633. There are loads of big temples, a huge veranda and a darkened hall containing a fabulous statue of Kannon, the 1000-armed goddess of mercy, flanked by amazing guardian statues, one of which in particular had really remarkable grace & poise, seeming ready to jump into the air.

Just up the hill is a small shrine, Jishu-jinga, dedicated to a pre-Buddhist local deity who is believed to help lovers. All I can say is, if that god came towards me down the street, I'd be running the other way! His companion is a two-metre-tall white rabbit that looked like a cross between Donnie Darko's imaginary friend and one of Moloko's Killa Bunnies!

I then proceeded to do the Lonely Planet recommended walk for southern Higayishima (the area of town east of the river), which takes in Teapot Lane (where traditional chestnut-paste-stuffed pancake makers were obligingly handing out free samples); the roads of Sannen-Zaka & Hinen- Zaka, with their pleasant olde-worlde wooden houses and geishas strolling along; Kodai-ji, a temple with marvellous gardens & a monster seated Buddha in a small temple next door that serves as a war memorial; Maruyama-koen, a large public park popular with picnickers.

By this time, I was getting a bit peckish, but - alas! - Lonely Planet had no decent recommendations for food nearby. This is where I had a bit of an epiphany, and decided to just follow my own nose for a change. Sure enough, within about two-and-a-half minutes I had found a small street packed full of restaurants. I picked one with prices that weren't too outlandish, and treated myself to a lunch of hot tofu chunks in vegetable broth. It was better than it sounds!

My full embracing of the traveller experience was heralded by a sudden change in the weather from grey & overcast to strikingly sunny - if a little chilly. This sunny weather stayed with me for the rest of the day. My first stop after lunch was the incredible Chion-in, which is just enormous in every way. I decided to rename it Chion-Bling for all the glitzy gold & sparkling silver on display. But it was also the most templey temple I visited, with full-on monotóne chanting of monks, beating of drums & clashing of cymbals.

The entrance to Chion-in, at the foot of the hill just beyond Maruyama park, is marked by the two-storey wooden behemoth of an arch that is San-mon, Japan's biggest temple gate. And just to the south of the massive main hall stands a belltower with Japan's biggest bell, a whopper at 74 tonnes cast in 1633. They say it takes 17 monks just to make the bell ring; I can believe this, having seen the size of the tree that they knock against its side to get it ringing.

Chion-in has everything: a fantastic view over Kyoto, a contemplative cemetery up against a cliff, side temples galore, and the whole thing is built on a majestic scale that cannot fail to impress.

At the foot of the hill is a completely contrasting little garden complex that is the opposite of Chion-in: it's small, understated, intimate, delicate. It reminded me of the Japanese garden I saw in Ipswich in Queensland, but only in the sense that this "real" Japanese garden put that one to shame. Although, at the same time, I could appreciate what the Ipswich garden was trying to achieve all the better for having now seen the "real deal", as it were.

My next temple stop was Shoren-in, a slightly more subtle complex of buildings that is most remarkable for the pair of enormous (and enormously old, by the look of them) camphor trees that stand either side of the entrance from the road. I've never crushed a camphor leaf between my fingers before, and the smell is intense! Inside, the temples changed character as the sun fell behind the hills, and I left at dusk in a truly autumnal atmosphere.

It was getting pretty cold, so I headed into a posh-looking café nearby for a restorative caffè latte - and a sit-down, more to the point! - before walking up to the incredibly massive bright red lacquer posts of the Heian-jingu shrine and catching a bus back into town. Back at the hotel, I treated myself to another herbal bath, then fell sound asleep on my futon.

A few hours later, feeling rather groggy but knowing I would regret it if I slept any more that evening, I walked into the now icy cold winter's night (thank heavens I had warm clothes with!) and made my way to a ramen noodle bar I'd spotted from the bus. It was fantastic! Suburban, unpretentious, but nonetheless with an amusing play on Christ's Last Supper as its logo (twelve dudes around a long table, drinking their soup from huge bowls). And the ramen & gyoza were just WOW. I had come to Japan longing for a bowl of ramen, and now I'd finally had one. Yay!!!

Of course, I was wide awake now, and didn't want to head straight back to the hotel. Instead I carried on up the street and went into a nearby place. I got into a conversation with Kevin, a student from California who was over for a few months on a Buddhism course. He was nice enough, and met my need for conversation, but he was really on a Buddhism trip and didn't have much else to talk about, so after a while I left.

I headed back to my hotel to read for a while, but first I allowed myself to go into a big late-night supermarket, just to see what products were on offer. I really do enjoy foreign supermarkets! They shed light on a different side of life. Of course, I couldn't even work out what half the things were - but that's as it should be. Satisfied with my peek at Japanese domesticity, and armed with a strawberry-creme chocolate bar that reminded me of the kosher chocolate I had at my old schoolfriend Stuart's house twenty years ago, I trudged through the icy wind back to my hotel.

Wakey wakey! It's Day Three here in Japan! There's lots to read about!

So today the weather got suddenly much sunnier, but also a lot cooler. A gorgeous autumn day in fact. Perfect weather for sitting in the bullet train heading west and admiring the courteous train staff service (they turn & bow before leaving each carriage!), which was how I spent that morning. And a big bonus was the splendid views of the conical volcanic delight that is Mount Fuji - which of course I HAD to photograph with my Fuji camera! - just as we pulled away from Yokohama and headed out on the long (but only three-hour by shinkansen super-fast train) trip to Kyoto, Japan's historic & spiritual capital and home no less than thirteen UNESCO World Heritage sites. The city was thankfully not bombed during the Second World War, so its thousand-year history has survived largely intact.

Kyoto's main railway station is brand-new and mind-bogglingly big & complicated, but I managed to find the tourist information desk after a while - and after a Chinese bun from a bakery that was eerily identical to the one I used to get my Chinese buns from in Melbourne. There I managed to get a room in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese guest house, just to the east of the town centre, perhaps a quarter of an hour's walk from the station. The hotel wasn't all that, to be honest, but it's full-on tourist season here right now, so I could just be glad to find anything at all.

Bags dumped (in my tiny room where there was just enough space to unfurl the single-sized futon and position the cherry-stone-filled pillow at its head), I headed out to a nearby Lonely Planet recommendation for lunch. All the way there I tried to learn the phrases for "I would like ..." and "how much is ...", but in the event I just walked in and was immediately served with the day's special, a tonkatsu breaded pork chop with rice & pickles, that wasn't as good as the one I had with Steve in Tokyo but was a fifth of the price and still better than some Schnitzels I've had in Munich.

The restaurant itself was small, with a few tables and a long bar that faced onto the kitchen area, where people were busy tossing vegetables in woks and scrubbing pots in a big sink. It seemed a family-run place, with granny and grandad arguing about something whilst the kids looked on. At one point a hoard of suited business types emerged from a back room, pulled on their boots and filed out behind me. I think there was also some kind of guest house upstairs, but it certainly wasn't aimed at foreign tourists as there wasn't a word anywhere in English.

Sated, I went out and started what was to become a magical forty-eight hours of touristy trekking & rubbernecking from temple to temple, with regular stops for food & drink. First stop was Higashi Honjan-Ji temple, the biggest wooden building on earth (what with the royal palace in Antananarivo, Madagascar, having recently burned down to the ground). This is one of a few big temples that are in the centre of town. Most of the others are further out on the fringes of the city, at the foot of the hills that form almost a complete ring around Kyoto.

I took a short local train ride to Tofukuji, southeast of the centre, and there visited the complex of temples that between them have amazing plant gardens, gravel gardens, rock gardens, tree gardens, and pretty much every conceivable combination of elements in gardens. I was very much NOT alone in my appreciation of the place; the crowds of tourists were overwhelming! It felt like Heathrow Terminal 5 all over again, only with much, MUCH nicer views. The crowds are here for the blaze of autumn colours that rolls down over Japan each year. Second only to the "sakura" or spring cherry-blossom season in popularity, autumn is truly a wonderful time to visit Japanese gardens.

So, after Sokusyu-in, Ryogin-an, and the Hojo "Hasso" Garden, I walked back to the railway, headed back to the centre, caught a metro train north, and thence walked all through the main shopping area of Kyoto to Gion, just over the river. This is a historic part of town with lots of warehouses & art galleries, as well as what Lonely Planet deems "the most beautiful street in Asia". It was very pretty, but I'm not sure that it was THAT good: a small river, a cobbled street, a row of pretty houses, a line of majestic trees.

Still feeling a little unsure of myself in my new/old traveller mode and in a country where I can't even read the signs, let alone understand them, I opted for another nearby Lonely Planet recommendation for dinner, but then wished I hadn't almost as soon as I'd walked in the place. It was a tempura restaurant and it offered all sorts of things in light tempura batter, including lotus nuts, but I was pretty much the only customer, the service was cool, and it all tasted way oily and basically shite. I really should have just followed my nose to somewhere less tourist-trappy. Ah, hindsight, eh?

Gallingly, in my search for the Lonely Planet recommended expat bar I passed restaurant after tasty-looking restaurant. Of course, the bar, once I found it, was empty and shite, but this time at least I had the sense to turn around and walk right out again. I instead treated myself to a "cortado" coffee in an unexpected Spanish-themed café downstairs in the same building.

I thought I would treat my now-aching bones to a traditional Japanese "onsen" bath-house experience (saunas, hot pools, cold pools, the Japanese answer to Turkey's hammam) and found my way to the Lonely Planet recommendation out west of the town centre - which journey included a long wait for a delayed commuter train on a freezing cold windy platform, with me not really dressed for the sudden coolness that came with nightfall - only to discover that the place was closed for today and tomorrow, or in other words for the two days I was going to be in town!!

I was really rather miffed at this, yet another Lonely Planet recommendation gone wrong, and determined to try trusting my own instincts a bit more from now on. Then I treated myself to a taxi to bring me back to my hotel, where I was able as a consolation prize to soak in the traditional herb bath on offer. It might not have been at all picturesque - it was in a small windowless bathroom with décor more like a boiler room - but at least I was rested & soothed and unlike the previous night in Tokyo I had no difficulty whatsoever sleeping through.

And that was Day Three, folks!

Let's get back to the thrilling story of my week in Japan:

We left off last time just as I was crashing, jetlagtastically, into a couple of hours' deathlike sleep at Steve's place. Well, let me tell you it was GREAT! So great in fact that I had to really force myself ever to get up again. After several false starts (bless you, snooze function!) I dragged myself out of bed and through the shower - with a brief but most pleasant visit to the heated toilet seat! (These are standard in this country; in fact, Steve told me that his toilet is one of the least interesting he's been on, in terms of functionality; sadly I didn't get to experience any unexpected jets of water or air or electricity while I was in Japan...) Then I headed out, alone, into the Great Unknown that was Tokyo.

My first port of call was the nearby area of Akasaka, which has lots of restaurants & bars but also a big temple on a hill, the major attraction of which is the hundreds of crimson prayer flags that line the staircases to the top. I duly walked up & down stairs for a while, then found my appetite and wandered into the morass of eateries. It didn't take me too long to settle on a nice-looking sushi bar. And OH MY GOD it's true: the sushi in Japan is just incredible. Every grain of rice was heaven; the fish was exquisite; and the cold fresh beer did my head a world of good.

Steve met me in Akasaka and took me to the rooftop bar of one of the posh hotels nearby. We had an exorbitantly priced cocktail and enjoyed the view over the nocturnal cityscape, then brought ourselves back down to earth by heading to his nearest offie & buying a bunch of beers, then heading back to his place & having a proper chinwag. And so ended my first day in Japan.

Sunday didn't get going for quite a while. I slept like a zombie in Steve's super comfy guest bedroom, and there was no noise or disturbance from outside (it's quite a posh area). I finally emerged around midday and Steve revived me with a coffee. Then we headed out to do a spot of sightseeing. The weather was somewhat overcast but it didn't really rain, it just sort of fogged.

We went by Metro to Shinjuku and walked through some of the shopping streets before reaching the Tsuan tempura restaurant. There we were treated to the full-on tempura lunch, complete with sitting awkwardly on the floor beside a low table. The tempura was delicious, especially the huge pattie of shrimps but also the vegetable & fish ones. I accidentally took the dining room's sliding door off its hinges whilst putting my shoes back on after lunch, but we made a fast exit & I think we got away with it unnoticed...

A restorative Illy espresso & cinnamon bun later, we walked through Shinjuku to its big park and marvelled at the delicate beauty of the chrysanthemum displays (it's the time of year for them). The park itself was delightfully laid out too, with a more relaxed "English" section and a more thought-through "Japanese" part replete with rockeries, pools, bridges & a huge pagoda donated by the Japanese community in China.

From the back of the park, we walked to Meiji-Jingumae, Tokyo's main Shinto shrine, which stands in another large park. There we saw couple after couple in traditional dress lining up to be married. By this time it was getting a little darker overhead, but somehow the grey skies seemed to me expectant, exciting, full of promise. I love travelling!!

We walked through the rest of Meiji-Jingu park to Harajuku, where sadly the dodgy weather meant that there were far fewer freaks in Elvis Presley costumes than on a typical Sunday. Still, we saw a gaggle of people in '50s outfits & matching hairstyles dancing along to boom-box beats at the entrance. After a quick adzuki bean dumpling (yum!) we crossed the main road and found ourselves in the heart of the Tokyo Dance Music Festival! Gothtastic Harajuku girls aplenty, along with lots & lots of youngsters who looked like they'd been partying hard for about the last four days.

Our stroll took us past the Yoyogi National Stadium and on to Shibuya, a trendy shopping area with the world's busiest pedestrian crossing. Now THAT was quite something! Five roads intersect here, and all five of them have simultaneous red lights. Then a flood of people crosses in all conceivable directions for fully two or three minutes, before normal traffic flow is resumed. The other amusing attraction in Shibuya is Love Hotel Hill, which is home to a number of these archetypally Japanese service centres: what with Tokyo flats being so small and so expensive, young people often live with their parents, making intimacy at home difficult to achieve in privacy.

With all this walking, we were developing quite a beer thirst, Steve & I. So we took the Metro to Ginza (a very glitzy shopping area) and headed to the Lion Beer Hall, an art deco confection that is slightly reminiscent of Munich's beer hall culture. Well, the staff wear dirndls anyway. Oh yeah, and they serve "German" snacks like sushi & sauerkraut! The beer was tasty and the decor made a change from the modern steel-and-glass grandeur of the shopping precinct around us.

Our final port of call for the day was back in Akasaka, in a tiny - and I mean TINY! - restaurant that specialises in wagyu beef and wild boar dishes. Our table was recessed into the ground with a footwell around it, so at least I didn't have to lose the blood flow to my legs in another crouchtastic dining experience. We had a stew of wild boar and a few side dishes, all washed down with draft beers. And then we crept out through the hobbit-sized front door and headed back up the hill to Steve's.

Thus ended the second day of my sojourn in the land of the rising sun.

Woohoo!!!!! A new country!!!!!

A week in Japan is just what I needed to lift my spirits from the sudden arrival of miserable cold weather in Munich. So off I tootled, to visit Stephen in Tokyo. (After seeing him at Justin & Sam's wedding the other week, it would have been majorly rude NOT to go and visit him...)

The excitement started early on in the trip, just two hours after leaving Munich in fact. Because I had to negotiate the giant dog turd that is Heathrow Terminal 5. I had a four-hour wait for my onward flight to Tokyo, so I was a little surprised when the lady at Munich check-in stuck a "fast connection" label on my bag. Well, it wasn't long after arriving in London that I realised she was in fact right to do it. What chaos!

As I stood, lost in the huddled mass of transfer passengers being squeezed through makeshift corridors of pointless waiting and herded up the single - yes, SINGLE - escalator to the needlessly complicated (and queue-stricken) x-ray arrays to enter the terminal proper, I was personally ashamed on behalf of my country of the shambolic passenger management on display in this, supposedly Britain's flagship airport terminal building.

Once I was through the baggage screening, my shame turned to despair: where were the signs??? I couldn't even find my way to the toilet without walking all the way up and down the whole bloody building! This terminal is the bastard son of a shopping centre and a slaughterhouse. The one bright spark in an otherwise unremitting black hole of glitzy nothingness is a branch of Wagamama, where I promptly calmed my nerves with a serving of their chicken soba noodles.

Oh, and on my way under the runway to the sub-terminal from which my flight was leaving, I was amused to see emblazoned proudly on a glass wall that Terminal 5's luggage conveyors whizz bags at 30mph (that's 50 km/h). No wonder that BA managed to lose everyone's bags when the terminal opened, I thought to myself. That thought would come back to haunt me...

Anyway, the flight in the jumbo to Tokyo was pleasant enough. I had a seat free next to me, so there was plenty of stretch room. I think the 12-hour flight would have been much less bearable otherwise. And the views across Siberia and Russia's far east were spectacular in their vast wintriness: endless forests blanketed with snow; anonymous rivers cutting their way across the plains; saw-toothed mountain ranges without a sign of human intervention.

I watched two films during the flight: Mamma Mia, which was good but not that good; and Wall-E, which was simply mindblowingly amazingly fantastic! I wept buckets. It's a real tear-jerker (okay, some of you know that I blub at the slightest invitation - but Mamma Mia just didn't get me going at all) and I highly recommend it.

And then, suddenly, there I was in Japan! It having been a reasonably short-notice decision to come over, I hadn't had much time to form any ideas of what Japan was going to be like. I read the opening chapters of my newly-acquired Lonely Planet on the plane, but I still felt massively underprepared. Which is how I always travel, actually. Still, it meant that I was in that over-alert state of excited dread, adrenaline more present in my blood than on a normal day, with everything burning a little brighter in my mind's eye. Even seeing a Starbucks menu in weirdy Japanese characters was thrilling!

Stephen had kindly emailed me instructions on how to get to him in Tokyo, so I had no difficulty getting my bus ticket and hopping on board at the bus stop just outside the terminal building. I even managed to sleep a little on the bus, once the novelty of the traffic and pointy hills and oh-so-slightly different architecture had worn off. Then Steve met me at the hotel which was the first drop-off point for this particular bus, and we walked to his palacial flat on a quiet hill, set between a temple and the residential compound of the American embassy. A lovely spot. It was easy to close my eyes and forget I was pretty much in the centre of this throbbing megalopolis of 35 million souls.

After a quick coffee, we headed out for a bite to eat (locally it was now lunchtime on Saturday; in my body it was about half past unconscious). Steve took me to a smart-looking tonkatsu restaurant in Roppongi, just a ten-minute walk from his place. The food - a pork chop breaded in something resembling superfine cornflakes and served with shredded white cabbage & a variety of dipping sauces - was absolutely delicious, but possibly the most delightful part of the meal was the bowl of steamed rice that came with it.

The Japanese take their rice very seriously, I knew that before I flew, but I was unprepared for the delicate perfection of these pearls fallen from heaven into my bowl. Each grain seemed to encompass the breadth of rice experience! Sticky yet smooth, soft yet with an alluring resistance to the tooth, at once neutral and full of flavour, they clung to my chopsticks and unleashed a tsunami of pleasure in my mouth.

Steve had to meet some friends of his that afternoon, so he headed off and left me to fend for myself, alone in a strange country. I thought I was up to it, but in fact the sleep deprivation of the flight got the better of me, so I headed back to his place and sank into a welcome sleep.

Apparently, I just can't shake off this fascination with culture at the minute! Back from London on Tuesday, I found myself in a theatre on Wednesday night (with Christian, Sabine & Rudi) to see Kafka's The Trial. And what a show it was!!!! Absolutely mind-blowingly good. The Trial is probably the book I have the most vivid recollections of from my studies at uni. I remember really enjoying the tutorials I had with a world-famous Kafka professor. So I wasn't sure how it would be to see it performed as a play. But in fact it was amazing!

The stage design was fabulous: whilst there was a proscenium area in front of the main curtain that was standard enough, as soon as the curtain was raised you saw a world turned upside-down. They'd actually fixed tables, chairs & a bed onto a rotating platform that was raised up at a dizzying angle, and the actors were having to perform feats of acrobatics to cling on to these furnishings as they turned round & round like a spinning top.

The second splendid bit of innovation was to have Josef K played by several people - simultaneously! There were six or seven Ks running around at any one time, all dressed identically and often talking in unison or in turn, but - and here's the best bit - often talking at crossed purposes! It was a most effective device for bringing out the internal contradictions in K's character as portrayed in the book.

And the third bit of fabness was that ALL the characters were made up to look the same, male or female, with slicked-down short black hair and a dodgy moustache. The male characters all wore dinner jackets, as did some of the female characters. The wardrobe effects - when women WERE in dresses - were sublimely good at conveying Kafka's intentions from the book as well. All in all, a truly excellent piece of theatre!

Last weekend I flew up to Hanover to visit Maggi & Jens and their new dog, Bubble the American bulldog. Lorna & Phil caught the train across from Düsseldorf, so we had a right old Powergen reunion. It was great! Maggi & Jens picked me up from the airport, and we went into town to meet the others at the main station for a quick cocktail in a lovely place called Sol y Mar.

From there, we went to a nearby Belgian restaurant and feasted on delicious Belgian beers & food (I had the mussels), of which the highlight was definitely the chips (fritjes) which were divine: thick, golden, and double-fried, giving them a crisp outer shell and a soft, fluffy inside. How a chip really should be.

Back at Maggi & Jens' beautiful new house, we were greeted at the door by a slobbertastically affectionate Bubble. He might look like a fierce hound, but he's really all heart. Not like your average Scots terrier. Bubble clearly has no self-worth issues going on. Anyway, after giving Bubble some love, we sat down for drinks, snacks & a board game that involves you knowing the other players' way of thinking. Phil seems to know me better than I do myself, that's all I can say! But then again, he's known me for over ten years now. That's quite a while!

On Saturday, after we eventually all emerged from slumber, we had breakfast (Maggi put on a huge spread). As it happened, Maggi & Jens were having some wood delivered that morning. It all reminded me of being a kid in Austria one autumn, when my grandmother's wood arrived for her wood-burning stove and we had to stack it all in the lumber room in the cellar. I couldn't resist: I suggested to Maggi & Jens that we quickly stack their wood too.

There was fully two cubic metres of the stuff, which doesn't sound like much but when it's chopped into bits that are maybe the size of a pencil case, that's a lot of stacking. But between the five of us, we got it done in an hour. It would have taken Maggi & Jens a lot longer on their own, plus it might have got rained on. I think we did a good thing. And it looked so homely, all stacked up neatly along the side of the house!

Our next step was to go into Hannover and walk around its historic old city. I remember being here once in 1991 when I was InterRailing with Stuart Davies from school and we visited a penfriend of his here. She took us through the old town too, but the only bit I could still recall in detail was the model in the New Town Hall showing Hannover before & after World War II. Like so many German cities, Hannover was bombed flat by the Allies towards the end of the war. The explosions and resulting fires left almost 90% of the city in rubble. It's a bit of a miracle that there's any old town left at all! The reconstruction must have taken years.

We stopped in an Irish pub at Phil's suggestion: there was an England rugby game on (against the Pacific Island combined team) and so we had a few pints of Kilkenny/Guinness/black & tan and munched on some crisps whilst watching the sporting endeavours of our kinsmen (they won handsomely). Then we popped home to freshen up for dinner, which was to be tapas in a Spanish part of town, but they were full, so we ended up in a delightful little hip-trendy-urban chic-organic cuisine place called 11a in an up-&-coming part of town. The food was FANTASTIC!

Our evening continued in town, where we met up with an American friend of Maggi's in a superchic (actually a trifle too chic for our liking) cocktail bar where all of Hannover's beautiful people congregate. It was WAY hot in there, so we moved on to another cocktail joint and had a drink, but frankly we were all a bit knackered (getting old!) so we headed home at around 1am. Back home, we had a nightcap and turned in.

Sunday saw a change in the weather from overcast but still to sunny but with a brisk wind. Perfect dog walking weather! So we headed up Hannover's biggest hill (weighing in at some 400m above sea level, it's more of a pimple really from a Municher's perspective) and watched Bubble pull Maggi along this way & that up steep slopes covered in woodland. There were loads of leaves for us all to enjoy kicking up, and it all felt very English actually. I guess it's on the same latitude, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the light is similar.

Lunch in town was at a nice Greek place, and then it was almost time to go home. We dropped Phil & Lorna off at the station to catch their train back to Düsseldorf, then Maggi, Jens & I wandered around Hannover's brand-new shopping centre right next door. This being a Sunday in Germany, the shops were shut, but nonetheless there were hordes of people window-shopping. And okay, a few of the cafés were open. We had another walk through the old town, enjoying the way they've lit some of the sights by night, and then they took me to the airport.

It was time to say goodbye. The end of a most enjoyable weekend was upon us.

He's back!

After all that culture in the Long Night of the Museums, what better way to get back down to earth than by buying kitchen tap fixtures at the Auer Dult market the following day? I sure know how to live! Not for me the fancy pottery, the antiques, or even the delectable local specialities. Instead, it was a shower head that caught our eye as Christian & I wandered through the thronging masses of people in search of a typical Bavarian bargain.

And what better way to get over the stress of buying a shower head than to dive headlong into yet more culture? Lisa was hungry for art, and I was more than willing to share her indulgent day of Kandinsky viewing. A major retrospective of his art is being held in Munich, where he worked for a number of years almost a century ago. Pity the audioguide voices - at least the English ones - are so dire! I've never heard such bored commentary.

I found a new (well, new to me) fantastic Italian restaurant just down the hill from my flat! They're so Italian, they even have Italian pop music TV in the corner! None of your MTV there! And the pizza was wow too. Must go again.

The weekend was once again a busy one. Christian & I flew over to London on Thursday night. We grabbed a car from Heathrow and drove down to Guildford, to catch up with Chris, Kate & the girls. It was Sophie's birthday recently, and I was carrying a monster parcel of clothes that Michaela & I had bought for her. She duly tried them all on - and they were ALL great!! When Chris got home later Kate cooked chorizo & scallops, which worked really well. Oh and - fancy that! - we then proceeded to demolish a series of wines.

On Friday, Kate & the girls had no plans, so they joined us on a day-trip to Windsor Castle. It was a glorious sunny day, and the drive across the country to get there was delightfully English. I haven't been to Windsor since I was at primary school, so it was really rather exciting. In particular, I was interested to see how they'd done with the restoration work after the big fire a few years ago. The answer is, WOW! Stunning, sumptuous, simply overwhelming. Lucky lucky Queen!

Christian & I headed on to Maidenhead that evening, where we caught up with Justin, Stephen & Becky in the Holiday Inn. Because the next day was Justin's wedding!! And I had the pleasure of being one of the ushers (Stevo had the excitement of being best man), so we got stuck in to organising things that evening. Including the pumpkin heads that were to decorate the tables for the dinner. Justin brought armfuls of pumpkins cut to have all sorts of expressions: tipsiness; ennui; geekiness; suspicion (that one cunningly carved out of a watermelon).

Saturday was the big day. It started with an urgent phone call from Steve: could I possibly drive to Justin & Sam's house with an important package? Of course, Justin couldn't possibly see the bride before the service, and I had a car. It turns out that, to provide the "bride" pumpkin with a veil, Justin had grabbed one of Sam's bras. Only, he hadn't realised it was the ONLY one that went with her bridal gown!! As Sam said to me when I handed it over to her half an hour later, it's lucky she doesn't get riled easily...

I was getting unexpectedly nervous as the day wore on. I had a reading to do; perhaps it was that. But in the end it all went swimmingly - and I'm not referring to the lashings of rain & wind either! The bride was beautiful, the barn festive, the registrar witty, the dinner delicious, the speeches amusing, the music a little loud for my old-man ears, and the company at our table delightful. Christian & I were seated with Andrew & Kath (whose wedding I shall be intimately involved with early next year, seeing as I'm best man!) and Pat, who flew in especially from Sweden. Nick & Meena were also supposed to sit with us, but their new baby Oscar changed their plans somewhat, so they just stayed for the service.

After the end of the service those left standing headed back to the hotel for a few cheeky ones in the bar. It was great to catch up with Hugh, Jezza & Tanya, as well as have a little more time with Andrew & Kath and Stephen & Becky - and of course with Justin & Sam and their gorgeous daughters Grace & Maisie. There will be photos on my site soon to show what fun we had...

Sunday was a big dash round lots of people's houses. After a farewell breakfast at the hotel, Christian & I brought Jezza & Tanya home. After a cup of tea & a natter there, we drove into town to visit Nick & Meena. After more tea there, we drove right across town to Hackney to catch up with Julie (who was putting us up that night). Julie took us to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, and then we headed to her favourite local pub, where we sank a few pints. Back at hers, we drank inordinate amounts of red wine, and I finally made it into bed at five o'clock.

Which was a GREAT start to my last full day in London! I somehow managed to drive the hire car back to the Sixt office behind King's Cross station without incident. Then Christian & I lucked out with the nearest café, which served us the best coffee we got all weekend in London. Duly strengthened, we headed into town and followed the Thames footpath along the north bank to the Tower of London. There we were lucky again, this time by getting a very amusing Beefeater on our guided tour. He was full bons mots and had lots of banter with the audience, which was most refreshing after my recent Kandinsky experience.

The weather was perfect for the Tower: grey, dank, with mist shrouding the tops of nearby buildings (including the Gherkin). Sounds were muted and people walked as if in a dream. It all felt slightly unreal. Especially when we left the grounds of the castle and saw next to the proud architecture of Tower Bridge the brand new shininess of the GLA building & neighbouring office blocks on the south bank of the Thames.

After staring in wonder at the crown jewels and enjoying the architecture & history of this castle, we headed over to Baker Street to an Arab bookshop recommended by Hugh. (Thanks to the usual crapness of Londond Underground, we at one point had to jump in a black cab. Still, it meant we got a taxi ride as well as trains, tubes and cars.) Hugh met us there, as did Julie, and we had a quick drink nearby before heading to Westbourne Park to meet Jezza & Tanya at their local (and my absolute favourite) Eritrean restaurant. We ate like princes and, sated, headed back to Julie's, catching the last train from Liverpool Street.

Tuesday was supposed to be an easy journey day. Instead, it turned into an all-day slog. We reached City airport, having popped to a supermarket to buy some decent cheddar, only to discover that our flight had been cancelled owing to fog! So we had to head across town to Heathrow, which took an hour & a half in itself. Then lots of hanging around there, a slight delay to that flight too, and finally we reached Munich some six hours later than planned. Ah well, the slightly crap nature of the last day of our long weekend only served to highlight the fabness that had preceded it!

Life is indeed good, picking up from my last blog there. So good, in fact, that I've fallen back into bad habits and not been keeping this here blog up to date! Okay, one week of my inactivity I was actually lying in bed so ill I could barely wake up properly. So life wasn't that good just at that point. But I'm fully recovered now, and have the strength to write about what I've been up to recently. Which is plenty!

So, let's rewind to 18th October, when Christian & I flew to Paris for the weekend. The main reason for going then, rather than any other time, was that Johannes (my Austrian in Australia) and some friends of his were also there that weekend. When he mentioned this to us during his Munich visit, it seemed as good a reason as any to plan a few days in Gay Paree.

And oh! it was wonderful! The flight over with Air France was comfortable; the journey into town from Charles De Gaulle airport amusing (our RER train driver, upon stopping unexpectedly between stations, announced that he wasn't in fact allowing us to admire the delightful view - of hideous suburban decay & factory walls - but was held up by a slow-coach driving the train in front, and he much appreciated our excellent patience and beatific understanding for his predicament, or words to that effect); the squeak of the rubber wheels of the Métro exciting; and the urbane atmosphere of the nighttime Parisian streets was just phenomenal!

Our hotel was pretty central, close to the Place de la République in the Marais quarter, and - more importantly - surrounded by cafés, bakeries, and brasseries. We had a bite to eat in a fashionable eatery and then walked into town to meet up with Johannes & his friends in a jam-packed tiny bar behind the town hall. It was great to see him & his friends Alan & Dez again (I met Dez in Sydney back in '05), and to meet their friends Glenn, Chris, and Simon. We had a very amusing night standing on the street in front of the bar, chatting & watching the world go by.

On Sunday Christian & I had a splendid breakfast in a nearby café (having fetched our croissants & pains au chocolat from the divine bakery next door) and then did the whole tourist thang, with a trip to the Eiffel Tower followed by a hop-on hop-off tour bus that took us past loads of sights and to the Notre Dame cathedral (which I'm not sure I've ever been in before). After a croque monsieur and a café au lait in a nearby brasserie, we wandered along buying prints & enjoying the late autumn sunshine. The next church we looked in had fabulous stained glass windows that were aglow in the afternoon sun. And the next café we looked in had fabulous cakes & pastries!

For dinner, we met up with Johannes & his crew again, this time in a very posh (but somewhat faded & jaded) restaurant called Julien that happened to be very close to our hotel. The food was nice enough, but the price was a little steep and the service was appalling! Our waiter even complained to Glenn (who booked our table) that Alan was complaining to him about the service! Hello!! Since when do waiters get customers to tell other customers off? Rather than just doing what they clearly haven't done in the first place, or Alan wouldn't have had to complain? The mind boggles.

On Monday Christian & I completed the bus tour, seeing the bits we'd missed on Sunday including the area around the Opéra and the Place Vendôme with its monster Napoleon statue. We jumped off at the Louvre - where we had the chance to admire a fantastically amusing teeshirt with a picture of two cute seals wearing sunglasses on a dancefloor under a huge glitterball, with the inscription "Stop baby seal clubbing!" - but didn't actually have time to go in so we just grabbed a bite to eat and then headed off to the hotel and thence to the airport.

It was now that my cold kicked in. I think I caught it from Michaela just before leaving for France, and it incubated while I was there. Now it floored me - for a week! Unfortunately I had a few bits & pieces I had to do that week, otherwise I think I would have just stayed under the duvet and re-emerged only when I was feeling completely well again.

Among the nicer things I had to do whilst still under the weather (hark at me! "had to do" indeed! It was my choice, and that's a fact) was to do some kulcha in the form of Munich's Long Night of Museums. Christian, Lisa, Bénédicte & I met in the evening at the Neue Pinakothek, the art gallery devoted to 18th & 19th century paintings, and went right round, following this up with a big old wander through the Pinakothek der Moderne, which features 20th century art. We even had a glimpse inside the new extension to the modern art gallery, which was very funky in its sleek Scandinavian wood look and will I am sure be fantastic when it opens next year. It was two o'clock before we headed home, all cultured out but having enjoyed ourselves immensely.

So it's autumn now. Officially. Oktoberfest is over, the weather has turned a couple of notches colder, and the next big party in people's heads (I'm not counting Halloween, that semi-holiday of dubious American heritage) is Christmas - or more precisely the Glühwein at the Christmas markets in town squares hereabouts.

I've had a lovely start to autumn though! The last weekend of Oktoberfest was fun because Bénédicte's friend Nath from Amsterdam was down with her Dutch husband & his two best mates, and Béné's friend Aleks from Berlin was also in town. We all met up in the Augustiner beer cellar just off the Marienplatz for far too much beer on Saturday afternoon.

Lorna & Tomasz joined us (Lorna was also in town for the weekend) and then, after a few drinks, the Dutch contingent were hungry. We wandered past a few places but eventually found a table big enough (and an establishment willing to take veeeery drunk people) at Donisl. The food was, erm, a bit underwhelming, but beggars can't be choosers. Then Béné & her guests headed off home (they'd been drinking since 11am) whilst Lorna, Tomasz & I headed to Prinz Myshkin, the fab veggie restaurant, for dessert & a drink. It was a good deal less rowdy in there, I can tell you!

The weekend was crowned by another delightful cheese & wine evening at Lorna's on Sunday night. It was just the two of us, but even so it felt like a continuation of the cheese evenings we used to do when Phil was still living in Munich. We drank wine, ate snacks and talked all evening, moving on to Pardi for a last drink just as the rain that had threatened all day started to fall.

I've been taking advantage of my weekday lunch appointment availability quite extensively in recent times. I've had lunch with Michaela, with Bénédicte, with Gabi & with the whole EPO crowd on various days. The cycle ride over to the Westsite building (known affectionately as Westshite to those recently relocated there from my old offices in the centre of town) isn't as bad as all that, once you find a route that avoids the worst of the main roads.

More visitors than I was expecting graced my flat last week: my friend Rasmus from Denmark has been planning to come for some time, but my friend Reto from Switzerland dropped by on very short notice. Thankfully, my flat was big enough for them both to stay. And we had a great evening together, first drinking beer in the airport's onsite microbrewery, then moving on to the Kreuzberger inn in town (where we were met by Christian, Bénédicte and Bezi), having a couple of cocktails in Wassermann, and finally one for the road in a bar the name of which now escapes me just off Gärtnerplatz.

Breakfast on Saturday was delicous (Reto had popped out to the Hofpfisterei to buy bread to bring back with him to Zurich, and he picked up some amazing white rolls which you needed a sledgehammer to crack open they were so crusty & good!) but before long Reto had to drive home again. Rasmus & I walked into town later for coffees, ox sandwiches & other delights, before meeting Béné for a drink in the Hofgarten (where the waitresses were SERIOUSLY stressed owing to the sudden warm sunshine that brought unexpected masses of customers).

Béné invited us to her place for apéritifs and then we headed to Sushi Cent together, where we were met by Christian & Béné's two French friends Frank & Mathieu. Anne-Laure, the French girl who took my place at the EPO, joined us after we had demolished piles of sushi and went with us (minus the two French chaps) to the Unions Bräu, a brewery/restaurant in Haidhausen that I don't think I've ever been to, despite having lived practically next door back in '02. It was a little quiet in there, but to be fair we got there just before closing. I'll have to go back.

We spent Sunday in the glorious autumn sunshine on the shore of the Ammersee, a lake to the west of Munich. Béné kindly drove me, Christian & Rasmus there. In the other car Michaela took the boys. And we met up with Steffi & Tommy - who I haven't seen for AGES! - and their two kids just near the lake. What a lovely afternoon we had together! The kids were playing in the water, we were sitting in the beergarden, it felt like a proper Sunday. Later on that evening Christian, Rasmus & I had piles of paella in the El Espanol restaurant in Haidhausen.

Monday was an even more gloriously sunny day. Rasmus & I made the most of it by catching the S-Bahn to Herrsching and then walking up through the forest to the monastery at Andechs. We rewarded our efforts with beer from the famous monks' brewery and huge hunks of roast pork, before walking down again & catching the train back into town - as well as catching some Z's on board. I dashed over to Kate's house to do some German with her son and then headed back to my place to bring Rasmus to our Stammtisch at the Kloster. His German is much better than I thought!

Tuesday was Rasmus' last full day in Munich. The weather was turning - in fact there were some fat showers that morning just as I popped out to my cheesemongers to stock up - but we still made the most of the day, by eating a good breakfast, then meeting up with Michaela again for coffee & cake, and then spending a couple of hours in the Deutsches Museum, before having a beer on the terrace at the Müllersches Volksbad (catching the last rays of evening sun) and then heading to Christian's flat, where we met up with Matthias & all enjoyed Christian's Käsespätzle.

And then it was time to say goodbye again. But not before introducing Rasmus to two last Munich traditions: a Weißwurst & Weißbier breakfast (at Isarthor, just near Isartor) and a random encounter with a crazy woman (in this case the owner of a funky new coffee bar just behind Isartor). She is seriously loopy! But I'll have to go back, because her coffee was divine and her cooking smelt wonderful. So, after a final coffee near Rosenheimer Platz in the EssBar (another place I'll have to go back to) we headed out to the brewery, had one last beer in the brewery, and parted company.

My mind was taken off the farewells by going to the Kammerspiele that evening with Christian, Sabine & Rudi, first for dinner in the Blaues Haus restaurant and then for the play itself, a modern interpretation of the Greek tragedy Medea which was actually very very well done. Plus it was the first time I'd experienced nudity at the Kammerspiele; apparently every play had some nude dudes back in the '80s when that was groundbreaking, but they've moved on since.

And this evening I've just been out for dinner with my dear friend Veronika. We fancied a walk after dinner so we decided to grab a coffee in another restaurant, and we ended up in a new place just between Faun and Sushi Soul. The food looks tempting there too. So many new places to try!! Life is good.

Ein Prosit, ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit! Ah, the standard toasting song of the Oktoberfest is still ringing in my ears after a weekend of beery excess with friends over from the UK. Yes! Siobhán was here from the Isle of Man for a weekend (I haven't seen her in over four years!!) and Matt was here from Leamington with his German girlfriend Sandra (I haven't seen him in at least two years).

Siobhán's trip was just like the old days: far too much booze, lots of laughter, happy memories. I went to the airport on Friday lunchtime to meet her and we went straight to the Airbräu on-site microbrewery, where we proceeded to demolish half a monster duck & several organic beers. Then it was a quick dash to mine to get changed and we were straight out again to the Wiesn.

There we experienced not one but two true strokes of luck: Bénédicte told me that she was in the Ochsenbraterei tent with a few people from the EPO, but it was already nearly five o'clock & the Wiesn was heaving with people; after all, it was just after work on Italian weekend. We went to the front entrance but were told that this was shut. We tried our luck at one of the side entrances, where initially the security guard told me "only with reservations", but inexplicably he paused after my "but all my friends are already inside, & it's only us two out here" plea and then ushered us in!

The second bit of good fortune came when we eventually found Bénédicte & her friends, because just at that moment two people got up & left the adjacent table, allowing us to squeeze in & settle down for a long night's drinking. And oh boy did we drink! The people next to us were a friendly lot from Salzburg, and soon we were chatting & laughing with complete strangers, in that special Oktoberfest way.

Around eleven o'clock we emerged bleary-eyed from the tent & hunted for some food. I headed back to the corn-on-the-cob stall I'd discovered with Lorna, only this time I pushed the boat out & had the garlic butter option. Oh yeah! So did Siobhán. But this didn't stop this Mancunian policeman from stopping to chat with her whilst I snuck away to get some chocolate-coated fruit. His name was Simon, and we ended up spending the rest of the evening together.

After a bumper-car ride & some snacks (deary me, Nutella is sticky stuff!) we headed into town to meet up with Michaela, Lisa & friends at the Schrannenhalle. It was their after-Wiesn party, and we had to queue to get in, but we drank our money's worth of free prosecco at the entrance (well, we DID fill in the name & address cards, just not legibly...) and headed in for more beers.

At four thirty, after fifteen straight hours on the razzle, Michaela, Siobhán & I jumped into a taxi and headed home. It was as much as we could do to get Simon to get into a DIFFERENT taxi; he was all up for heading back to mine with Siobhán & me! Ah, the Oktoberfest brings out the best in people.

Siobhán had the energy on Saturday to head into town with me & Christian & Bénédicte and buy herself a Dirndl, but she was flagging by the evening so I went into town alone to meet Michaela, Lisa & Claire for a bite to eat & a few beers in Faun.

I think it was secretly good that we didn't go to the Wiesn on Saturday, because it meant we were all the more ready for some Oktoberfest action on Sunday. Plus, it was a gorgeous sunny day. So after a brunch at Christian's, Siobhán & I headed down to the Wiesn, which was absolutely heaving AGAIN. And there we met up with Matt, Simon's old housemate, who was over for a few days. It was great to catch up with him & to meet Sandra. He's still busy doing crazy design stuff. That man is going to go far.

After a couple of Maß and a good deal of sunshine to the forehead (and in Siobhán's case to the chest, courtesy of her naughty Dirndl neckline) it was time to head back to mine, to get Siobhán packed off to the airport. The weekend was too short!!!! I can't wait to see her again - at the latest next year for the Oktoberfest, so she can get out her Dirndl again!

It occurs to me that I have been so caught up in Oktoberfest stories that I have completely failed to mention another visitor I had last week. Let me rectify this grievous omission immediately!

Johannes from Sydney is over in Europe again at the moment, and he headed over to Munich for the day on Tuesday. I met with him in the afternoon for a coffee & some beers in a number of bars around the Glockenbach quarter. Then Christian met the two of us in my new favourite restaurant, Cooperativa, where we had some delicious food followed by their divine chocolate mousse. Cor blimey! One last drink and then Johannes had to jump in a train back to Austria. But hopefully we'll be seeing him again in a few weeks' time in Paris...

Well, the weather hasn't got any warmer since my last update, but at least it's stopped raining. For now. So here I am, a week on, and I almost feel like I haven't got anything to write up! But that of course is not true. Because the Oktoberfest has started!!! However, in spite of the fame of this huge event, I shall nonetheless write up the week's excitements in chronological order, because I'm that kind of guy.

So Tuesday was Christiane's boyfriend Pietro's birthday, and that evening he invited a whole bunch of people to his flat just near the Ostbahnhof. He cooked up a storm! Plate after plate of southern Italian specialities (my two favourites were the deliciously mild chili peppers, grilled over a gas ring on his hob in lieu of a barbecue, and the parma ham, hand-cut in thick chunks just like a proper jamón serrano) were accompanied by the red wine that is made in his village in Calabria. Oh boy! The woozy head the next morning was SO worth it!

On Wednesday I had the first choir rehearsal of the winter season. It will also be my last for a while, because there's a good chance I won't be around in Munich on Wednesdays for a while. But more about that in another blog... After the rehearsal (we're doing some Rossini and the Fauré Requiem - yay!) a whole big bunch of us went to the nearby Greek restaurant in the Türkenstraße for beers. The choir trip, just as was predicted, has cemented friendships across voice groups.

On Thursday I met up with Tom for a bite to eat in Kreuzberger, a traditional German eatery in the Glockenbach quarter of town, and then we went on for a drink at Edelheiß. But I couldn't stay there long because I had arranged to meet up with Bénédicte & Bezi at the InterNations party at Ksar, just up the road on Müllerstraße. The cocktails were great - the guy behind the bar was giving it the full Tom Cruise treatment with the bottles & glasses - but the company was a little dubious. I'm not sure I'll be rushing to join the networking website that hosted the party.

Friday night was a long one. Christian & Wolfgang were up from Salzburg again, only this time they brought with them an American friend called Jerry who was over for the Oktoberfest. We had some dinner and then went on to the Munich Bears in Silver Wiesn Warmup Party. I caught up with stacks of people I hadn't seen in ages, and we didn't head home until about 3.30am.

Saturday morning was necessarily a slow affair; we eventually emerged and had a late breakfast / early lunch / brunch / call it what you like. Christian, Wolfgang & Jerry headed down to Salzburg, and I headed back to my flat. There Lorna paid a visit and we drank a bottle of wine before heading down to the Oktoberfest, dutifully kitted out her in Dirndl & me in Lederhosen.

We managed to not drink any beer at all at the Fest - which has got to be a first for me - instead sticking with the wine at the Sektzelt and graduating onto shots at various stalls. After a delicious dinner of corn-on-the-cob with butter & salt, we had a ramazzotti (the woman selling us them claimed that we were the first people EVER to have requested double shots, but I find that VERY hard to believe) and then left the Wiesn. Only to stop again on the other side of the road, for more wine, at Lenz!!

We went to meet Harry, Dieter & their friend Wolfgang at Edelheiß (which was heaving like I've never seen it before ever), then dashed round the corner to Rubin for a bite to eat (incredibly good chips, and really tasty bruschetta) before having one last drink. I caught a night tram home and rolled in about four o'clock. Again!

Sunday morning was necessarily a slow affair (déjà lu?); I got changed back into my Lederhosen and headed to the Wiesn to meet up with Christian, Wolfgang & Jerry again. I have to admit that my stamina was flagging somewhat after the weekend's amusements, so I didn't stay in the Bräurosl tent for more than a few hours. But it was long enough to see some old friends and make some new ones, including a French chap, a Spanish chap, & an Aussie. Ah, the international appeal of the Oktoberfest is cool!

I headed home and had a little nap, before meeting up with Lorna again for some dinner at Pasta e Basta in Fraunhoferstraße and some after-dinner drinkies at Cooperativa in Jahnstraße - which, by the way, is such an amazing restaurant/bar that I am DEFINITELY going to be going back there, again & again & again!

And the weekend didn't end there: I managed to get a ticket on the EPO table in the Hackerzelt on Monday night! I met up with Bénédicte at her new office and headed with her to the fest. We managed to get some space on one of the EPO tables, and then Alisdair & Domitille joined us too. Much beer was had by all, and much fun too. Again, my reward this morning was a fuzzy head, but again, it was worth it.

I'm sitting at my PC, taking careful mouthfuls from my vegetable soup that's just off the hob, and thinking "what happened to summer?" It's officially bloody freezing in Munich right now. This is something of a change from last week, where I was still sunbathing on the Isar and taking a refreshing dip in its cool waters. I think I would die of hypothermia now with just one glance at the gravel bank I lay on last Wednesday!

So, in a vain attempt to warm up my fingers, I shall now recount some of what I've already been up to in September. Phew! It's turning out to be a busy little month, this one!

My dear old aunty Mary passed away at the end of August, and - not having anything cumbersome like a job weighing down on my time - I booked myself some last-minute flights to London so I could be at the funeral. After all, she was the last of my dad's siblings, and I don't think there will be another chance like that to see a good selection of my cousins in one room.

I made a long weekend of it and finally found time to catch up with friends of mine in the UK who I haven't seen in years & years. It was a fabulous weekend actually! Here it is in brief:

Reach Munich airport Saturday morning - chat with my mate Holger who works for Lufthansa - arrive at Heathrow - tea with Jeremy & Tanya - drinks with Memet - breakfast with Memet - lunch with Gareth from primary school - drink with Pratik from high school - dinner with J&T - breakfast with J&T - lunch with Sam & the girls - drinks with Kat, Rainnie's friend who I met in the Philippines - dinner with Simon, Hester & Poppy - breakfast on my own (!) - lunch with Chris & Kate & the girls - finger food at the funeral buffet - drinks with cousin Jim in town - dinner with J&T - breakfast with Sanjeev from high school - lunch with Justin - fly back to Munich on Wednesday afternoon.

My movements were somewhat splatter-gun-like across the London metropolitan area, but for some reason I really didn't mind all the training & tubing it everywhere. I think, because the whole trip came about suddenly without forward planning any of it, I just got stuck in and enjoyed myself. The weather was so-so - but who cares when you're indoors eating & drinking? I haven't dashed about like that in quite a while, so perhaps I just enjoyed falling back into my peripatetic rhythm of old.

Only one thing marred an otherwise delightful long weekend: I managed to lose my favourite baseball cap in the Underground. It must have worked its way out of the pocket of my jacket whilst that was slung through the shoulder strap of my leather manbag. This event was particularly annoying as I'd had one of those prescient moments about an hour before, where I became aware of my cap rubbing against my leg and thought "I should really put that in my bag" but then decided not to because it was still raining and I was about to be outdoors again. Dammit!

I got back from the airport just in time to head straight back out again, to the first choir rehearsal after our summer break. We left for our four-day trip to Thuringia (the region adjoining Bavaria to the north, and the holiday destination de choix in the former East Germany (because, let's face it, they weren't really allowed to go anywhere else). The trip was a little hard on the spine & legs, with a big ol' bus journey to get there & back, but otherwise it was a lot of fun.

Thuringia is much prettier than I was expecting. There's loads of forest everywhere, so the air is very fresh. And the towns there had the mixed blessing of being left absolutely untouched during the years of Communism, and therefore being capable of massive restoration in the years since, with the result that they have risen again to become sparkling jewels of mediaeval urban splendour. Erfurt in particular pleased me enough to want to go back there for a weekend at some point, but Weimar (more famous thanks to its connections with Goethe, German literature's Shakespeare) is also delightful.

And the food was fab too! Thuringian sausages are famed, and rightly so. They're spicy like Cumberlands and they taste three-dimensional. At least, that's how I tried to describe it to someone in the choir. You know how some foods just taste flat & tired, and leave your mouth wondering what just happened? Well, Thüringer Bratwurst are the opposite of that.

The sausages were most memorably advertised in pictorial form just below a huge sign for an erotic superstore. Somehow the word "Erotik" underlined by a fat German sausage tickled me!

Our local guide, Egon, was a bit of a windbag but he had some entertaining stories and bons mots. One of the local slang terms he shared with us refers to the newly ubiquitous wind turbines as Miefquirlen - literally "pong mixers" - and another has masseurs rendered as Fettschieber - "flab sliders".

I could have done with a portable pong mixer when I was walking down a pleasant cobbled pedestrian street in Weimar with Martin, another tenor in the choir, only to be greeted by a local man pushing his bicycle along beside us. Because the greeting came in the form of one of the longest, juiciest farts I've heard in a long time! And then he had the gall to look at us with a scowl!!

And then, in a bizarre follow-on incident, I was walking to my place in the Church of the Heart of Jesus (where we gave our concert in Weimar) when a soprano in her middle years, shall we say, walked past me and tootled twice with her sphincter - which, let me tell you, echoed admirably in the delicate acoustic of the Catholic church in which we found ourselves!

Besides Weimar and Erfurt, we also visited Arnstadt & its Bach church there, we went to Eisenach & its Bach museum (which has been recently re-done and is now kitted out with iPods & headphones to explain various aspects of his music), and we had a tour of the nearby Wartburg, Germany's foremost castle/palace that has been continuously added to since the 12th century & has been a museum since the time of Goethe, some 200 years ago.

So all in all a busy weekend, not just activity-wise but also weather-wise: we left Munich on Thursday morning in bright sunshine and temperatures in the high 20s, and then suffered a lurch into single-digit territory on Friday night, returning to a cold windy rainy Munich on Sunday evening. Yuk. Ah well, perhaps the summer has drawn to a close. Bring on the snow!

In my last blog I heroically wrote up my story for the month of July. In this one, I'm going to attempt to condense all my fantastic life experiences from August into a digestible couple of paragraphs. It's not going to be easy! But let's have a go:

Michaela has moved to a different office building, out west past the main railway station, and I went to have lunch with her there. The area certainly has nothing like the charm of the little streets & squares around the Isar building (where she - & I - used to work), but at least there's decent coffee to be had within a 10-minute walk from her; not like the rest of Munich, which seems to be drowning in a wave of god-awful Alfredo coffee, which tastes like they removed all the nice aromas and just left the flat burned flavours no other coffee brand wanted, but which is appearing in far too many coffee houses for my liking. Okay, mini-rant over.

It was a month of hit-and-miss weather, with most of the hits (ie sun) during the week. Poor little unemployed me could take advantage of this and cycle off down the river to sunbathe midweek. This cumulative sunning, coupled with a relatively stress-free lifestyle in recent months, has resulted in a very healthy glow about me that people actually keep commenting on. Yay!

Food highlights in August were:

• Pardi, the Turkish restaurant right by Lorna's flat in Neuhausen (which sells the delightful Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc from New Zealand that I got to know & love out there a few years ago);
• Lucullus, my old standard Greek down the hill from me and not far from Tom's flat or Fritz's flat (so it made a great meeting place for the three of us one evening);
• Kastanienhof restaurant, a place very close to Michaela's house serving slightly upmarket German cuisine;
• Gast, the Italian cook-while-you-watch place in the Gasteig (Munich's answer to London's South Bank arts complex, built on the site of the beer hall where Hitler proclaimed the first Nazi republic back in the '20s);
• Chinesischer Turm, or rather the beer garden at the base of this huge pagoda in the English Garden (I was there a few times in August, first with Bénédicte & her Polish friend Aleks from Berlin, and then with Chris & Kate & the girls);
• Wassermann, a place in town near the EPO which basically does cocktails & pub food, but they're GOOD cocktails and it's YUMMY pub food;
• Harlachinger Einkehr, an out-of-town beer garden I cycled to with Tom one evening, where we rewarded ourselves for having cycled for an hour all the way to Grünwald & back with a Flintstones-sized mound of spare ribs;
• Café Glockenspiel, the restaurant that overlooks Marienplatz and the town hall (I had a most pleasing grilled goat's cheese salad there with Bénédicte & her two French friends Mélodie & Nathalie that live in Amsterdam, who I met there back in January);
• Pappasitos, a Mexican place that actually didn't have the greatest food (oh it was okay, but not earth-shattering) but gets a mention for its outstanding mojitos (of which I, Christina & Susi had far too many during the course of Tine's birthday celebrations);
  
• Coffee & cake in various locations, including but not limited to Christian's balcony when Matthias came to visit from Augsburg (cakes on this occasion courtesy of the wonderful Konditor up the road, and the Bodo cake shop & café by Sendlinger Tor (with Béné, Mélo & Nath)
  

Looking at that list, you wouldn't think I'm doing Weight Watchers at the moment would you! But, believe it or not, I have managed to lose some superfluous pounds; perhaps I would have lost more by now if it weren't for all the delicious restaurants I go to, but hey that's just wild speculation...

The most exciting thing about August was the visit to Munich by Chris, Kate & the girls. They were here for just over a week, and unemployed as I am I could spend the whole time with them which was great. It was delightful to see just how well my four nephews & nieces get on - and best of all they're getting to an age where they need almost no adult input, leaving us adults much more time for getting pissed & having a laugh!

The week was action packed, with visits to the air museum at Oberschleißheim (where we also had delicious lunch in the restaurant attached to the palace there), the mediaeval market at Schloss Amerang (down towards the Chiemsee lake), a swim in the Starnberger See (with unrivalled views into the snow-capped Alps), and a couple of days on a mountain (the Schliersberg, to be precise, which has Schliersee lake at its foot), as well as some Munich-based entertainments (I already mentioned the Chinesischer Turm stint, but we also ate at Gast & went to see Prince Caspian in English in the Museum Lichtspiel cinema next door).

I'm glancing at my diary to see if I've missed anything out. And dammit I have! Just when I was about to congratulate myself on summarising August really rather well. But it won't do to leave out another wonderful day: Michaela, Christian, Charlie & I went to see Ryan performing in a circus!!

He did a week's summer-camp-type training with a travelling circus just south of Munich, and he was part of a troupe of acrobats that got up to all sorts of mischief. He is really very agile & sporty, and he's got the sort of personality where he decides to learn how to do something and will just practise & practise & practise until he can do it. I admire that, not having anything like the patience required for such an approach.

Where there's yin there's yang: I feel honour-bound to mention the special time I had with Charlie in August too. I got the chance to look after him all day one day (Ryan was away at the circus & Michaela was at work), and we had a great time cycling to my place & back, having some lunch, playing lots of Lego, and then going for a swim to the Oberhachinger swimming pool, where Michaela & Ryan met us just as the sun was going down.

And that's where I'll stop. Before I remember anything else! Tootle pip, readers!

Right, so I'm just about up to the end of June, and what is it now? Ah, approaching the end of August! I'll try to have a bit of a catch-up session now. Let's see how we go...

Summer in Munich is lots of fun, especially if the weather plays along. What with being unemployed at the moment, I am of course able to take advantage of sunny weekdays & don't have to hope for nice weekends like normal people. And this is what I've done - yay! I'm so brown it's unbelievable. And all thanks to the river Isar and its accommodating banks. (And to the fact that Germans have no problem with nudie sunbathing in public places...)

There have been a few lovely hot sunny weekends too, though. And one of them was in early July, when Christian & I cycled up to the Olympic park to visit summer Tollwood, the arts & crafts fair with funky jewellers and tasty ethnic food stalls and all that malarky. I munched my way through crêpes, hemp wraps & the ubiquitous sugar-crusted almonds, and washed it all down with Czech schnaps, organic elderflower cordial & a pint of Guinness. Multiculturalism ROCKS!

I cooked a proper English roast dinner one Sunday, and Michaela, the boys & Christian were all very pleased with the result of my efforts. Which is nice, because it's ages since I did a roast, and I was a little nervous. Christian's muffin trays came in very handy for individual-sized Yorkshire puds.

There have been a couple of times where I've got on my bike at EXACTLY the wrong moment: once I went to meet Bénédicte for lunch and managed to get drenched just going down the hill into town. I was sodden! Like a drowned rat that's been doused in yet more water, and then thrown in a washing machine just for fun.

And then another time I went down the same hill to meet Christian at the Auer Dult one evening (this is a crockery/antiques/food market that happens three times a year just near my flat) and got totally drenched again. I really should have known that time though, because as I was getting on my bike someone in my courtyard was talking on the phone to his girlfriend and she was telling him how it was pissing down in town. But the weather in Munich is deceptively microclimatic: it can really dump a load of rain in one part of town and be sunny in another.

Christian & I headed out into the rain for Munich's Gay Pride (known as Christopher Street Day in Germany - and I've been to Christopher Street now - yay!) one Saturday too. We ran into a bunch of people unexpectedly, as one does at such occasions. We had a few drinks with Harry & Dieter and then ended up spending the whole afternoon & evening in town eating, drinking & making merry with Christian & Wolfgang from Salzburg.

I went out one (not rainy) evening with my mate Uwe and we did a whole load of bars that I've never been to: we dined at Zoozie's, desserted at Café Glück, and drank at Moos. I love the fact that I've been living in this town for over two years and there are still stacks of places for me to discover!

I had a weekend of concerts with my choir. First we sang a "home" concert in the St Markus church in Schwabing. It was a cappella and went pretty well considering how ropey some of the sopranos are. And then the following day we did an "away" concert in Weilheim, a town just west of the Starnberger See lake. This went down very well with the locals - the church was packed!

We were lucky with the weather for our visit to Christian's parents, which coincided with a visit there by Christian's brother Ralf & his wife Bettina & his kids. It was great to see them again. I felt I got to know them both much better this time than at Ralf's birthday party back in February. And his daughters are lovely too! They're the same age as Sophie & Livi. The two highlights of our visit were a walk up a sizeable hill near Alban & Renate's house (where we had ridiculously cheap & tasty drinks & cake in the hostelry at the top) and a visit to the nearby village of Schweinlang, for their Day of the Open Village (where we got to look at lots of tractors & agricultural equipment).

Okay, well that's July covered off! Except to say that I had a few job interviews, which was a nerve-racking experience. The one slight problem in my ongoing search for work is that I haven't the faintest idea what I'm looking for! In the words of Sheryl Crow, "all I wanna do is have some fun" - and get paid for it...

I'm in the moo-hoo-hood for blogging; weblogging... if I could remember the rest of that song I'd try to extend my sentence and keep the rhythm going. But I can't. So now I'll just shut up & blog.

Where were we? Ah yes, we were just about to set off for a week's diving in the Red Sea! Well, that's what we did. Christian, Tom, Bettina & I met at the airport on the morning of Monday 23rd June, checked in at the TUIfly desk, and headed straight to the Airbräu, the airport's own microbrewery and restaurant. The beer is SO good and SO cheap, I'm tempted to go to the airport just for that!

It was only the second time that Christian & I had met Bettina; Tom knows her from a previous diving trip a few years ago. She is a busy lady, working in customer services for the sport shop SportScheck by day and running a private mobile fingernail salon in the evenings and at weekends. I always enjoy getting to know someone from a completely different walk of life, and the next seven days certainly gave us all plenty of time to share stories.

The diving itself was fabulous! The water was even calmer than last year and the visibility was astoundingly good. There are going to be some choice photos on my site as soon as we've had our photo-swapping barbecue party (which is next week, so not much longer to wait, folks!). We didn't see dolphins like we did last year, but instead we had a close encounter with a turtle (which was busy munching soft corals and didn't take the blindest bit of notice of us) and saw some sharks off in the deep blue.

It was mad: we had the whole boat to ourselves. There had I think been some sort of cock-up, and the dates of our trip were never put up on the organisers' website, so we weren't joined by anyone. There was more crew on board than paying passengers! It made for a very relaxing, spacious stay. I haven't slept that long or that often in ages & ages, so I felt very rested at the end of the week, even though diving is a strenuous activity.

One evening a big wind blew up off the deserts to our northwest, and lasted all night long. It was a bizarre and, frankly, disturbing experience. The water was calm, but the hot dry wind was howling around the masts and blowing our sleeping bags away (we of course slept up on deck every night, to enjoy the stars and the cooler night air). That was one night where I didn't get much sleep. But I'm glad I experienced that wind. I just love a good force of nature!

There was one sad thing that happened on the trip: my nice underwater camera that Rainnie gave me last year in the Philippines gave up the ghost - and really early on too! So I couldn't take nearly as many pictures as I had hoped, and ended up bringing seven unused rolls of film home with me. Luckily, Christian's digital camera survived the trip this time, and he's got loads of photos from many of our dives.

Oh, actually, I just thought of another sad thing: we didn't do many night dives this time. Still, in hindsight that might have been a good thing, because it meant we had the energy to do all three daytime dives each day. I still remember a few occasions last year where I was just too knackered to go down with the others - and of course those were the dives where they saw sharks...

And then we were on our way back to Munich, happy in the knowledge that we'd just had a bewitching week of underwater wonderlands.

Hello again, my dear readers! Just a quick one to fill you in on what else happened in May, all those weeks ago...

So, fresh back from Barcelona, I had just a few days to have lunch & dinner with various folk before heading off to our village in Austria with Michaela. We had to sort out the handover of our house from the old tenant to our cousin Martha's daughter Verena and her bloke, who were moving in on 1st June.

Neither of us had enough time to make a weekend of it, so we drove down really early on Friday morning and came back on Saturday afternoon. Still, we were there long enough to get everything done paperwork-wise (you know, visit the bank, be exasperated at how shite the estate agent is, that sort of thing) and still have some food & drink style fun with rellies.

And on the Saturday evening I was singing with my choir - did I mention that I've joined a church choir in Schwabing, just to the north of the centre of town? - in Munich's Long Night of Music, which saw 200-odd venues with different live concerts from all genres. Bénédicte, Lorna, Michaela & Christian came to see me sing, and then we went on for some food & drinks afterwards. It was weird to be in concert dress again, for the first time in years & years! I sang like an angel - of course - and the rest of the choir were okay too.

It was a lovely hot day on the Sunday, so Christian & I cycled out to Feringasee, a man-made lake to the north of town, to indulge in that quintessentially German pastime of nudie sunbathing. And then we stopped at Bénédicte's for dinner on the way home. She had also invited her friend Nicole from the EPO, and we had a lovely time stuffing our faces with crêpes.

Oh, okay then, I'll write a bit about June too! Have I mentioned that I'm giving individual German lessons to the two sons of Kate, Michaela's friend from the EPO? Well, that's what I was doing on Mondays before school broke up for the summer, and then I was going on to badminton from her house, and then on to the Kloster for drinkies. Quite a lot of cycling, to be fair!

It was Bine's birthday party on the first Friday in June. She held it in Café Kosmos, which I had only once - briefly - been to. I really warmed to it on this occasion. It's got something of the shabby-chic of lots of cool places in Berlin. And the prices are extremely reasonable too. Bine had commandeered the front room upstairs, but there's only the one serving area so we were up & down the narrow iron spiral staircase all night. The place was thronged with cool dudes & dudettes! I felt really rather old.

Michaela & Lisa came over to Christian's the following night. He had decided to do a curry evening in honour of our India trip, and by golly he cooked up a storm! It was a lamb curry with stacks of red peppers and chilli, and he did a barnstorming dhal to go with it. Five star! Marvellous!!

The following week was Lorna's birthday, which we celebrated in Ysenegger over in Neuhausen, her (soon to be no longer, what with E.ON moving all their Europe-wide trading staff to Düsseldorf) neck of the woods. It had been a lovely day all day, but it decided to dump a load of rain that evening. Thankfully we were indoors, so our beer didn't get diluted.

And I had a wine tasting at Gerhard's flat on the Friday night. At last! I've felt bad every time Gerhard has rung me in the last two years, since first I went to a wine-tasting at his with Jürgen, ooh, it must be two years ago. Each time, either I've been away, or someone's been over to visit me. But finally I was able to attend. It was a very interesting night, because the winemaker was there himself to talk about his produce and the wine industry in general (he's some sort of bigwig in the German wine industry).

I'll round off with Michaela's birthday, which she celebrated at the Greek restaurant reasonably near her house. It was a lovely hot evening, and we had a long table in the beer garden area, at the back, so the football coverage (on monster flat screens) didn't disturb us too much. The boys were both part of a little dance routine that Lisa had organised with a bunch of the kids of Michaela's friends. Cute!