football, Hamberg vs. Munich

ok, here's the last of the munich pictures finally! just got done with a malting report so i decided to finish this up. munich that is. well........on our last day in munich simon talked us into going to see Hamberg and Munich play football. we didn't have tickets, so we had to wait at the gate and buy one from a fan. they don't have scalpers over here which in a way is kind of cool. i think it may be illegal to sell your tickets. why would you want to if you bought them. you are supposed to have round footballs in your blood if you are German. anyways, we got tickets. the four guys did. Erica opted for going back to the hoffbrauhaus by herself. she should have come with us, but then she probably would not have had as much bier. i didn't drink any bier at the game. they don't take cash at the concessions. you have to go to another booth and get a card with credits you pay for. they didnt get any of my money. the stadium looks really cool at night. Simon told us that it's not alway's orange. sometimes it's blue or something else. he's probably going to tell me that it was red, but who cares. and the second shot is real. it looks like we were pasted on there, but no, we really are standing there. none of us has any bier in them. sad. the last shot is one of the many U bahns leaving the stadium. no room to move at all. this was about a month ago. now i can start posting pictures that are more recent. this should do you for a few days though. prost!

more soccer pictures

the guy in the first picture is probably going to kill me for calling this soccer, but i had to just once to fuck with him. he's from Hamberg and the reason we went to this game. Simon, the german multi-language learning future brewmaster.

more munich for ya

well, here you go. more pictures of munich. first we have another church that i'm pretty sure i allready put a night photo of on an earlier post, now you get to see it in all it's day light glory. wasn't it worth the wait? the rest of this post is all pictures of the world famous Hoffbrauhaus. it was cool and i'm glad that i got to go there, but i was expecting something more. it's pretty big. supposed to hold thousands of people or something, but i though it would be bigger. there was a bier garden in the middle or the back that was opened because of the heat. didn't get any shots of that and i don't remember why. the bier was good though and so were the pretzels. not to mention a few of the barmaids.

bier garden in Munich

it's not really time for bier gardens, but i guess they just had to since it was so hot. it was pretty cool except for the fact that i didn't feel very good. i choked down half a liter and then i had to go pull over. use your imagination. or maybe you shouldn't. anyhow, they had this brass band playing in that oriental structure in the middle. we all wondered why it was there. it was Hoffbrauhaus bier and you only had to pay for the bier and a 1 euro deposit for the glass. would have been worth keeping one except i would have had to lug it around all day. the horse gives carriage rides maybe. we didn't see anyone getting in one, so just assuming here. then i had to throw in this shot of the 3 most photogenic dogs in Germany. they were nice, but they didn't really want me to pet them. they didn't know what to think about that. dogs are weird over here by the way. none of them give a shit about being petted. sort of makes me mad. i think all their owners must beat them. most of them walk within a few feet of their owners without a leash. tennessee dogs are better. you can't take them anywhere and think they will behave, but at least they like affection.

Munich by daylight

we got kicked out of our hostel at 10 am i think. but it made us get up and walk around. the first shot is pretty close to the hostel. then we went to this little cafe and ate breakfast outside. this was the warmest weather we had seen since being in Germany. it ended up being over 18 degrees celcius. hot. sort of. so we walked through this park and ate ice cream and looked at all the sun bathers. no one topless that i saw. the last shot is on the top of this little hill overlooking the park. some sort of pavilion up there. don't know what the buildings are in between, they just looked like they wanted me to take their picture.

Munchen, sort of

ok, this is only the first post for Munich and the only one i'm doing tonight, because i need to leave to meet some people. we got to Munich maybe around 9:30 or so and didn't get out on the street until after 10. the first place we went was this small Paulaner brewhaus. as far as i can tell, they brew with the same ingredients as the big Paulaner brewery, but on a small scale. i ordered the weis bier and i think it was the best weis bier i have ever had, period. we also ate some weiswurst and i think pretzels. after that we went to find the Hoffbrauhaus, but when we got there, it was closing. 12 midnight. that's when almost everything closes in Munich. keep that in back mind if you ever go there. it took us forever to find another place that was open and 5 minutes after we ordered a bier they started trying to kick us out. then we went down the strasse to this Irish pub that stayed open enough for us to have 2 biers. we should have gotten into town earlier i guess. first 3 at Paulaner, a church in a platz, and the last, some drunk German riding a stationery fake lion. that was about all we could do that night. more of Munich later.

festival outside of Mainberg

here's what i'm leaving you with today. after we went on the hopsteiner tour our guide told us about an annual festival the have in this small village next to Mainberg. maybe 1000 people live there. probably not. i think almost all of them where at this festival. i had to put this first shot in because it's the biggest rack on a deer i've ever seen. this was outside the festival. i made Simmon pull over. the other pull over story you will just have to hear about. at the festival, i met this guy who's lived in this village for 18 years, but he's from Biluxi Mississippi. maybe biluxi is not spelled right. who knows. they had strong bock bier. very strong! then, hop fields at dusk. the next post i think we will finally be in Munich. time for chemistry right now though.

Hopsteiner

well... i've really got a ton of pictures of this place, but i won't bore you people that don't really give a shit about hop pellet manufacturing. the first one i believe is some sort of sorter or something. nice sentence. the next picture doesn't look like much to the average person, but this is where they form enriched pellet 45's. they first take away most of the stem and flower of the hop cones and pretty much leave just the lupulin glands. the good stuff. this is where they mix the lups with some of the flowers to make pellet 45's more expensive, but you don't have to use as much of them, therefore less storage space. then we have a hammer mill that hammers. and a die that forms the hop pellets. finally they have this huge cold storage room. couldn't get a real good shot of this because we were not allowed in the room. the one you see is only about half the height of the building. again, use your imagination. we also got to visit the building they make hop extract with ethanol, but our guide did not really know that much about that process, so no pictures for you on this subject. ask to see them the next time you see me. lots of pipes and valves.

hop farm in Mainberg

sorry it's taking so long to get through all these pictures. there are just too many of them and i only have some much time on my hands for this kind of thing. excuses excuses. after Nuremberg we traveled down the road to Mainberg where people pretty much live off of hops. it's too bad that no hops were growing when we came through. the first picture is one of the many empty hop fields we passed. i think they look much cooler when hops are growing on them. maybe later this spring i'll be able to take some better shots of them. we had a tour set up at this place called Hopsteiner where they make hop pellets and hop extract. pictures of that will actually be posted before you reach these. you just have to take it the way you can get it. the second shot is the front end of a hop plucking machine. you feed this machine hop vines and it plucks off all the hop cones. wish we could have seen this working. next is a room where they dry the cones and then guess what's in the bags? part of last year's harvest. all these shots looked better in person of course. just use your imagination people.

more of Nuremberg

the 1st is late night john lane about ready to fall asleep. the rest are from Saturday morning walking around by myself and getting some breakfast. they are creative here in Germany when it comes to chocolate bunnies as you can see. the last two are of a church on top of this hill that you can see the whole town from and a pub right next to it, actually touching the church. nothing wrong with that. America needs to learn a few things. i would of had shots from the top but my camera ran out of juice just as I got up there. it looked nice though, you just have to imagine it I guess.

shots from Nuremberg

we left Bamberg and went to a town called Nuremberg to meet the other John's girlfriend's Dad's friend who own a brewery in northern Italy. he was going to take us out for dinner and we never pass up a free meal. it turned out that he thougt we were meeting him the next weekend, so we had to buy our own food. he is coming to Berlin in a few weeks for a raincheck dinner and is taking us to the most expensive hotel in Berlin for drinks. this is the hotel that Michael Jackson held his baby out of the second floor window. Nuremberg turned out to be pretty cool though. sort of like Bamberg, but bigger and a little more touristy.