Back in Germany

Well, you know you’re back in Germany when:
- you go for dinner with ladies from the ladies’ club, and 3 of them light up at the table. (It was shocking after 10 weeks back in the states!)
- you see lots of extremely tall people
- you see very handsome, hetero men wearing pink shirts
- you see men shopping for clothing with their women – willingly, even happily. They do that here. How nice.

I have been back since Sept 18th. Spent a week in a jet-lag and emotionally wretched haze. I didn’t want to leave Andrea, Greg & Gavin after spending the summer with them. And the parents are not doing well at all. So, while I was there, I decided that I need to move back to Rochester for a while. So I’m buying a house, doing that remotely. I will look for work there, again remotely (love this Internet thing!) closer to when I move. I’m planning on moving back mid-January, I should be able to occupy the house by then, the current owners are having a house built. Their builder has guaranteed it will be done by Jan 18th. … Having had my own experience with builders, I am skeptical. But they believe he’ll get it done by then, so more power to ‘em.

The house is cute! And, to all my sorely missed friends in CA – if you need a change of scene, I’ve got spare bedrooms.

That’s kind of hard, moving back to my hometown. (I will NOT think of the Pink Floyd lyrics, I will not …) But I’m intending the best for my stay. I’ll give myself 2 years to regroup, reconnect with family, and friends (Maggie will be close! Yay! And Mary and Beth!), get divorced, and do all the traveling in that part of the world that I never did while I lived there. I had been to NYC once when I still lived there, with a friend from high school. But then all my trips there came after I was working in California, and I went for business. I’ve never been to Maine. Or Vermont. Or wine tasting in the Finger Lakes. (I am really really hoping that the industry there has progressed as much as the travel articles claim. I have BAD memories of local wines. I may be getting that mixed up with Lambrusco and Boone’s Farm in my memory. I’ll report back on this in a few months.) So, I plan to travel and work on the little house and live and grow and hopefully occur an income.

I got connected with someone who works at Robert Half while I was back this summer (big placement agency, started out focusing on accountants, then branched out.) I talked with the manager of their technology practice. Blew his doors off. He mostly places coders and other IT types. He didn’t even know who he’d talk with, about me. That made me proud. And then chagrined. I’ll have to build up the network when I get there. There have been some interesting looking jobs online, I’ll start working those closer to the time I will move.

Meanwhile, it’s been beautiful here in Munich and environs. I am trying to see as much as I can in the time remaining, this time in Europe. (I fully intend to be back. Am envisioning a global job that has me traveling mostly to Northern Europe.)

And, being the travel pig that I am, I am off to the south of France tonight with some of the amazing/wonderful/fun ladies from the Ladies International Association. We’ve had this trip planned for months. So I’ve gotta run, in the meanwhile here are some of the places I’ve been recently:

Wendelstein, one of the nearby alps. This was a Sunday day trip. Took the cable car up & walked the Panaroma Weg, around the top.

View of the mountain from the parking lot


Coo beasties, below the cable car.


Church on a crag, near the beer garden.





Me, perched on a saddle at the top – very steep down in all directions from here.



There was a long weekend in Germany, Reunification Day was Oct 3rd. A group went from here to Lago di Garda, on the Italian side of the alps. It was just beautiful. Very German – they get a lot of Germans and Austrians, it was only a 5 hour drive from Munich. So the food wasn’t as good as it was in southern Italy, but the scenery was great. It’s a mountain bike and wind surfing mecca, lots of steady wind on the lake, usually. We saw sailboats too. I am still in kayak mode, but there wasn’t any place to rent one of those. Darn!

Castle along the way, shot from the car


We stayed in Malcesine, the castle is a museum now. They know it pre-dates 590, as it was recorded as having been partially destroyed then. Inside the museum is one very cool room that documents an even from 1439, when the Venitian navy moved their fleet into Lago di Garda, to protect themselves from the ravaging Milanese neighbors. This involved a mere portage over some of the alps (!!!) took 3 months. But they were successful, and able to hold the lake until 1509. Then they sunk the fleet rather than have it fall into enemy hands. In the 1950s divers pulled up some of the boat fragments, which are on display.


View from the top of the tower, into the town below


Me on top of the tower


Lots more pictures to post, but I'll have to do it next week after I get back from France. Love you all.