Hey people! Before I do a quick roundup of June, I should just mention a lovely little detail for something that happened at the end of May:

The city council of Munich is running a campaign at the moment to promote the use of bicycles, called "München sucht den Radlstar", which is a play on the German title of the TV programme that's the local version of "Pop Idol". My friend Karin was in the top 20 of over 1000 people whose photo was taken on their bikes, and the top 20 were interviewed for radio live on stage at the Street Life Festival on the Leopoldstraße.

The radio presenter was really crap, with an annoying, grating voice and a decidedly dodgy taste in music. But then suddenly, just after the interviews had finished and we were waiting for Karin to join us, a normal song came over the huge sound system. It was Keane with "Everybody's Changing". And a whole group of lads walked past singing along! They like totally knew all the words! Cute.

Anyway, so on to June, the month that STILL didn't bring summer, even though it did bring World Cup fever, and everyone was betting on the weather being fantastic again for the World Cup like it was in 2006.

I escaped to Italy - well, it HAD been several weeks since I'd been there last! - with Bernhard to celebrate Lorna's birthday. Charlotte flew down from Düsseldorf to join us too, which was great because I hadn't seen her since Oktoberfest. It was a short visit, but we packed plenty of action in: Bernhard & I had a quick day-trip on the train to Genua on the Friday; the four of us took the train to Lake Como on Saturday; and we even squeezed in some sightseeing of Milan itself on the Sunday.

Needless to say, we ate & drank marvellously all weekend. On Thursday night Lorna introduced us to the concept of aperitivo, which is a bit like tapas in Spain, where you pay for the drink and get loads of snacky food thrown in. On Friday night we ate in a delicious restaurant with a delightful inner courtyard just to the south of the Duomo. Saturday's gourmet experience was a lovely shady garden on the banks of Lake Como, in a tiny little village with views across the lake.

I had the pleasure of an evening of stupendously good food the following week, when Benedicte took me to accompany her to a meal at one of Lake Starnberg's most prestigious hotels. The head chef actually demonstration-cooked the meal as we looked on, and then when he'd finished each course out came the food for the rest of us on silver platters. It was DIVINE!! Molecular cooking, 3-star cooking, wow cooking. And the wines were a bit of all right too!

Gareth visited me that weekend, and we did a lot of walking around Munich, as well as a fair bit of beergarden visiting and eating (quelle surprise!) It was Franck's birthday party, and he did a delicious paella at his place for a big group of French friends of his (plus a few sundry French-speakers like me & Gareth).

We went to see Janie in an amateur-dramatics production of the French play "Je veux voir Mioussov", a farce on Soviet bureaucracy that was much much more hilariously funny than I was expecting (partly because I was worried that, this being the first time I'd have been to the theatre in French, I might not get all the jokes). Afterwards we (Bene, Franck, Marie-Laure and Janie) hung around in the salsa bar next door to the theatre and had a lovely evening of wine & dance.

I discovered a new place for fabulous coffee in town, just opposite the Pinakothek der Moderne. It's called TimBallo Food Lounge, and sadly it's only open during the day. But what sandwiches! What coffee! And WHAT cheesecakes!!

A highlight of the month was Michaela's birthday party, where at the stroke of midnight the waiters in the Greek restaurant brought out round after round of ouzo and quite suddenly everyone turned from merry to absolutely blotto!

Another hightlight was watching Ryan in his school production of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, where he played the granddad who accompanies Charlie round the factory. He was hilarious! And the other kids were great too - especially Emily who, quite against type, played the annoying whiny Verruca Salt with real gusto.

I'm going to leave June there. It was a good, if wet, month.