Phew! I can't quite believe I've finished writing about India! And I've still got TWO other exciting trips to tell you all about as well.

But first, a few words on my inbetweeny times. Because as of April I've been officially unemployed, with dole money and everything! It's quite exciting. I've never been on the dole before. Luckily, I've had stacks to be getting on with at home - not least of which was just readjusting to normal life after the fortnight in India, which seems to have taken about a month.

I won't bore you all with yet more blow-by-blow accounts of what I did in April. Here's just a few highlights though:

I've joined a choir - at last! I've missed performing music, so now I get a weekly fix (well, sort of weekly; there's been quite a few weeks without rehearsals) in a church in Schwabing with an amusing conductor and friendly folk.

I went skiing - at last! Honestly, when we were leaving for India I thought "well, that's that for skiing this season then". I hadn't got around to it at all while it was cold, and now it was a very late Easter and I still hadn't been. But in fact the weather was so shite and freezing when we got back (and indeed while we'd been away ha ha) that there was tons of snow in the mountains.

So one day I drove with Bénédicte to Kaltenbach in the Zillertal in Tyrol and we had a day where the weather, from a bad start - we managed to actually get lost in a fog bank! - just got better and better. And four days later, at the weekend, I drove with Michaela & Charlie (Ryan was on a school trip) to meet up with her friend Kate & family, again in Kaltenbach. The weather was kinder, and the slopes were bizarrely empty for a weekend. But it was the last weekend of the season, and perhaps people couldn't quite believe the forecasts saying there was plenty of snow. Which there was. Up top at least; there was no way we could ski out to the valley floor.

I went to the theatre a few times with Christian. We saw a very amusing performance of songs about life, love and death by three great actresses; we saw a slightly harder-going play about Turkish identity, with the conflicts between securalism, Islam, tradition, and modernity; and we saw a dire, dreadful, unending nightmare of a play about German terrorism in the 1970s. A mixed bag then, but with live performances you have to take the lows as well as the highs I guess.

Lisa came over from Dublin for a long weekend (photos will be uploaded to my site soon). The weather had improved by then, thankfully, so we got to do some nice things outdoors, including the Frühlingsfest (Spring Festival), a kind of mini-Oktoberfest with some of the same rides and foods and beers. I also had the biggest hangover of my time in Munich on the Saturday morning, after a long evening and night of revelry at the Biergarten round the corner and bars in town.

I went to Europe's biggest thermal spa & baths at Erding, just east of Munich, with my friend Thomas the tram driver (who had the day off). It was HUGE! I've never seen so many different kinds of pool - and all under one roof! There were swimming pools, fake lakes, hot springs, plunge pools, Finnish saunas, Turkish saunas, a Hawaiian sauna, Roman spas, Celtic spas, a mid-pool bar, outdoor areas, indoor areas, a restaurant, and even a traditional German pub. And all of that just in the naked section! The clothed section sported another few swimming pools and a monster water slides area, complete with tyres for floating down some hair-raising tracks. I've never been down pitch-black water tubes, and there was one where it swirled you right round so you felt like you were literally going down the drain. Crazy!!

Throw into all these excitements a regular round of lunches with (now ex) colleagues, coffees with friends, and dinners with friends & family, and you've got a fairly rounded picture of my April. A picture which flatteringly misses out all the times where I was being a lazy arse, sitting around reading, surfing the web, playing computer games, lying in the sun, and otherwise generally preparing myself for the challenge of a new job.

And I'll finish with a little vignette of Munich city life. The river Isar, which flows through the heart of the city, used in olden days to be a very wild water indeed. It was notorious for killing people in sudden surges, which would often happen in spring when the meltwaters from the Alps would swell the river's volume. Back in the '60s the danger was reduced through a series of measures to control the river flow, but these left much of the course of the river looking more like a canal.

In recent times though, and particularly since the building upstream of a big dam & reservoir that has put paid to lurches in water volume, money has been spent on re-naturalising the riverbed. Most of the river up- and downstream of the city is now a beautiful area for sunbathing or swimming, with pebble beaches and plenty of cycle paths on either shore. Only the stretch in the very centre of the city is still an ugly concrete trench. But now, finally, this bit is being reworked too.

So for quite a while now, when I've been heading into town on my bike, it's been pleasant to stop on one of the bridges over the Isar to watch the work being done. After all, it's not every day that you see Caterpillar diggers up to their tracks in water, man-handling huge rocks into place to create dramatic new paths for the water, plumes of brown sediment swirling about their feet in the otherwise greenish river. I'll put up some photos of the works soon, for all to appreciate.