Another blog, another continent...

So after the Big Apple I returned to the Big Beer, and finally the weather was getting summery! Lots of bike riding (including getting lost in the Perlacher Forst with Michaela), coffee drinking - outdoors yay! - and lunches with EPO friends. I am really rather enjoying not working. It reminds me of my time travelling the world.

It was Sabine's birthday party, and she held it in the small upstairs front room of a small grunge-chic bar near the main railway station called Café Kosmos. It's very narrow and small, but the drinks are ridiculously cheap and it's probably the closest Munich comes to the raw feel of many Berlin bars.

Amusingly, having just got back from seeing Rich in New York, he was in business in Italy and came and spent a weekend in Munich! It was nice to be able to relive my NY experiences so soon after coming back. And I caught up with a bunch of people who I haven't really seen since Rich left a few years ago, including DJ James & Ralph.

On the Saturday, Christian's friend Christian from Salzburg visited, and we went for dinner in town as Christian, Christian, Richard, and Richard!! Rich had sent me a review of a vegan restaurant close to Marienplatz, and I was keen to try it out. Boy oh boy was it good!! SAF im Zerwirk is reasonably priced, pleasantly decorated in a modern minimalist style, and the food is out of this world!

I had a "garden lasagne" which the waitress warned me was raw; everyone at the table was then cracking jokes about how I was going to be served a clod of earth out of someone's back lawn. When the lasagne came I was at first disappointed: it was about the size of an after-dinner mint! Beautifully presented, it nevertheless looked like it might have just been tipped out of a tin can. But that was just because I'm guessing they used a cookie cutter to make such a clean circle. It was layer upon layer of raw goodness, including sundried tomatoes, pesto, olive pieces, and a "cheese" made from macadamia nuts. The flavours were intense! And I really couldn't have eaten much more of it, so the portion turned out to have been judged exactly right.

I think I'll stop this blog entry there. It's a short one compared to how I usually drone on, but I'd like the next one to be thematically focused on my recent visit to Barcelona, that wonderful city. So I'll just finish by saying that the weather on my birthday was terrible, but this didn't stop me from having a wonderful day.

Christian's surprise gift to me was to take the day off work and spend it with me. We had a lovely leisurely breakfast, which rolled into lunch with my EPO friends at Seven Fish on Gärtnerplatz, then Christian & I went to the Deutsches Museum and wandered through the mining exhibits, after which we had coffee & cake at Vits, followed by dinner on the mezzanine level at Nero, the stone-oven pizza place. And now I'm 35!