In the Eye of Irene: A Survivor's Story

First, a disclaimer: Communities all along the East Coast suffered serious damage from Irene, and I don't intend to diminish what they are suffering by making light of my experiences. But the whole thing was such an anti-climax it is hard not to see the humor in it. Without further ado:

After very reluctantly canceling my trip to DC, I set about preparing for the hurricane. Between what I read and tips from concerned friends (who kept calling and texting and making me even more nervous), I knew that I needed to close all my windows and bring everything in from my fire escape. I wonder how many people have had to move a garden... This was more for the benefit of people walking below, as my plants are pretty much done for the season. I also moved my laptop away from my window, thinking that if anything broke through, I didn't want it to get water-logged. I was glad I had sprung for renter's insurance several months before.

I had decided to spend the weekend at Ed's apartment, which is an infinitely nicer place to hang out than mine, though it is lower (both in terms of the floor it's on and it's geographical altitude) and therefore perhaps a regrettable choice. In fact, technically he lives in a zone that was marked on a map as at risk for flooding if the storm was enormous. We were betting that it wouldn't be. I packed candles and matches, non-perishable food, board games, and rain boots, and headed over Friday night. On Saturday morning, we eventually located a restaurant that was actually open for breakfast, though they were closing at 11:00 that that morning.

Nasty Pig, supplier of edgy clothing for gay men, was also closed, as were most restaurants, bars, and stores in the neighborhood.

After eating, we walked to Whole Foods to pick up supplies. No such luck. It was closed until Monday. The only places open were neighborhood bodegas. As you can see below, we weren't the only ones who waited until the last minute to shop. There was quite a lot of selection, though - none of those empty shelves I keep seeing pictures of - so we chose hummus, cheese, and other things that wouldn't need to be cooked and headed back to his apartment to wait it out.

 Just as we left the bodega, it started to pour rain. Here we go, I thought.

Pumps outside Ed's building, in anticipation of flooding (minor flooding based on their size).

 Just as quickly, however, it stopped. Odd. I had expected a steady escalation. Still, we prepared for the worst, by filling Ed's Brita with water, digging out headlamps, etc. Todd, Ed's cat, supervised my filling the bathtub with water, useful for flushing toilets and the like if water supplies suddenly shut off.

 We watched a movie, then peered outside. Nothing seemed to be happening yet (it was around 3:00), so we decided to take a walk.

Pre-Irene, there's less traffic on the road and on the sidewalks.

It was interesting to see the ways some people had prepared for the storm. In my neighborhood, people were buying sandbags, which seemed ridiculous since we're somewhere between 50 and 100 feet above lower Manhattan. My street is actually sloped. It seemed to me that the water wasn't going to be doing much pooling up. We walked through Ed's neighborhood to the Hudson River, where there was more legitimate cause for concern.

Some precautions, like this waterfront building, looked reasonably effective. They'd secured plastic sheeting with a solid, and attractively painted, board and propped that up with sandbags to prevent water from seeping in through a vent.

Some was less effective. I'm not an expert, but shouldn't the caulk follow the bottom of the door, like, all the way along?

We saw a lot of taped windows, even some in a parked car! These guys did a good job, but the tape on a restaurant right around the corner from Ed was already coming off the windows hours before it even started sprinkling.

It was raining on and off, so we decided to head back, play Scrabble, watch a movie, and eat dinner. By the time we went to bed, it was sort of windy and still not raining much. 

The next morning...it was already over. Right after waking up, I noted that the air conditioning was still running and all the clocks were still set: We hadn't even lost power. Things outside looked a little worse for wear, but hardly. This fence was in better shape before the storm, which apparently came through around 4:00 A.M. I noticed that a bucket on someone's fire escape was knocked over. 

 We turned on the news, and watched newscasters desperately trying to make the situation in the New York area seem more dire than it was. They warned us to stay inside. So after breakfast, we went for a walk. Below is a picture of post-Irene Chelsea. Look familiar?

Although we were underwhelmed at first, we did notice damage that was at least worthy of a double take as we went on.

Leaves! Blown all over the sidewalk!

Pumping out a flooded basement. We saw this in a few places.

It was VERY windy, but only in gusts that lasted less than a minute. 

This impressive barrier wasn't needed, but it looks like they'd have been ok even if the nearby Hudson had decided to overflow.

Overwhelmed by the extent of the flooding.

Most trees seemed to have held up pretty well. This was the biggest branch we saw down.

All public transit was canceled until Monday morning, when it came back up in time, alas, for people's commutes. It may be just my imagination, but I swear the tracks look cleaner than they did before the storm.

We went out for dinner that night with Maggie and Leonard, and the restaurant didn't have several of the things normally on its menu because it hadn't been able to get any deliveries on Saturday. Similarly, the fruit stand I often visit on the way to work had only some elderly bananas and very sad looking apples this morning. Everything feels pretty normal by now, though. It did seem like a bit of a let down after all the hype, but at the end of the day I suppose I should be thankful that I wasn't blown away by Irene.

Hunkering Down for Irene

As if the earthquake weren't dramatic enough, New York is getting ready for another natural disaster. At least we have advance warning about this one. Hurricane Irene is predicted to start hitting our area on Saturday night, and most of Sunday is supposed to be pretty bad.

It looks kind of pretty from up here.

This will be my first hurricane, though I experienced a tropical storm or two in Tokyo. I'd planned to go to my dear friend Shannon's bridal shower in DC, but after reading predictions about 90 MPH gusts of wind, relentless rainfall, and near-certain flooding, I decided to call it off. I didn't want to be in a top-heavy bus in the middle of all this, nor did I want to use a vacation day because my bus was cancelled and I was stuck in DC. So I'll be staying here in New York for the weekend, equipped with a flashlight, extra batteries, a fully charged phone, and some books and games that do not require electricity. Several friends have contacted me to share tips or express concern, which has been thoughtful, but I'm not worried. 

While weather will be poor for sunbathing or kite-flying, I think as long as I stay inside and am prepared to lose power, I will be fine. It will be interesting to see what happens though. I wonder whether subways and buses will be running for people crazy enough to go outside. I think we will probably lose some trees, too, as all the rain we've had lately has made them a bit less likely to stay rooted in the ground. Part of me is hoping that power WILL go out and that I won't have to come to work on Monday! (Although if there is no electricity, I wonder how they will contact us to tell us to stay home...) Yesterday, I got an email informing me that the race I'd entered for this weekend - before I knew about Shannon's party - is not cancelled yet, but that it likely will be, and that we should keep checking the website and our email for updates. I also got an email from the tutoring company I used to work for encouraging tutors not to put themselves at risk to get to appointments and to reschedule Sunday appointments for other days whenever possible. There is a lot of speculation about how bad it will be and whether all the dire warnings are just media hype to get people to take it seriously. I guess we'll find out soon.

Either way, wish me luck! I promise to take lots of pictures and post about it as soon as I can.

Typical Work Week

Many of you have asked for details about my job, so I thought I'd give you a brief summary of a typical week for me. (I'll be writing about last week, which was a bit more indicative of  my usual routine than this one has been.) Quick introduction: I do an academic assessment, Paul does a neurodevelopmental assessment, and then we compare our results to come up with a learning profile for the student we're assessing that day. Once we agree on an explanation for the kids of results we saw, I share the kid's profile with them (so they go home feeling good about how well they did) and then write a learning plan for them containing strategies they should use to strengthen their weak areas. This is mailed to the family as part of a long, detailed, fascinating report about the student's brain function and how it affects his/her academics. I get to do some instruction occasionally, too, but not as often.Without further ado, here's last week:

Monday
I started off the week with a medical student. She failed her first year of med school (we have a partnership with a few med schools in the area and they send us students they think we can help) and her school would not let her re-enroll until we assessed her. Her problem, like most medical students we see, is that she didn't use any strategies for categorizing information. She was attempting to memorize everything, which obviously doesn't work in medical school; there's way too much information. The upshot is that they don't remember anything, so my learning plans for them end up looking pretty similar: strategies suggesting that they take notes, make practice tests, spend time thinking about what things are details and what things are over-arching themes, etc.

Tuesday 
I spent the first part of the day writing a learning plan for the medical student, as well as finishing the learning plan for the student I assessed the previous Friday. Each one takes me between 90 minutes to three hours to compile. I also do a few other sections of the final report, so I finished that up for both students. Then I spent a few minutes editing an admissions essay for a friend of mine (I have enough down time to do things like this, which is great). After lunch, which I usually eat at my desk, I prepared for the student I was going to see on Wednesday, a six-year-old, by reading his file, looking over his test scores, and collecting the materials I would use to work with him. Finally, I did an instructional session with a 15-year-old I'd seen the week before. While Paul met with his dad, I taught him active reading strategies - like highlighting, making margin notes, and filling out graphic organizers - to help him improve his reading comprehension.

Wednesday
The student I saw Wednesday was the youngest I've worked with here. In addition to being immature because of his age, he had some pretty serious attentional/hyperactivity issues. He was very sweet, but we were all absolutely exhausted by the time he left at the end of the day. After the assessment and demystification (that's what we call the end of the day, when we share the kid's strengths/"challenges" with them), I had about an hour left before 5:00. I love it when this happens because I get to start the client's learning plan instead of having to wait until the next day. I got most of it planned out, if not actually written and formatted, before going home, which was great because all of the information was still fresh in my mind.

Thursday
I started the day with two back-to-back report consultations. I'd seen both kids about a month before, and the both families had gotten the chance to review the reports and start working on some of the strategies. One kid's parents came in to talk to me about the contents of the report and ask additional questions, and the other kid's mom called me. Both families are lovely, and I enjoyed checking in with both of them. We also talked about ways they wanted us to be involved with their kids' schools with the start of the school year. Each conference lasted about half an hour. When I'd wrapped that up, I spent a lot of time working on the report for the 6-year-old. His took me a bit longer than usual because he had a lot of different things going on - attentional issues, reading/writing deficiencies, etc. - and I wanted to be sure to address all of them. Then I spent a while editing an article I wrote for our quarterly newsletter. Finally, I prepared for a rising third grader who I'd be seeing the next day, and also for the 16-year-old I'd be seeing on Monday.

Friday
This was a strange day, because this kid's parents had divorced quite recently, and it sounded pretty messy. The poor kid definitely had learning issues - lots of trouble with recognizing and producing information in sequence, primarily - but he had lots of anxiety from being in the middle of this awful custody battle, too. We saw a lot of attentional problems, although anxiety can manifest as inattention, so we spent a long time after working with him trying to figure out what was really going on with him. Happily, his parents behaved themselves much better than expected. We were all relieved when it was over, however, and I spent the end of my day making notes about the third grader's learning plan and looking back over final information about the 16-year-old.

There you have it! As you can see, my day's are filled with variety, which I love. We see a huge range of students with a huge range of needs, and I get to see some of them multiple times; they may come in for instruction, reassessment, or both (or neither). They come from all over the place, too - today I'm working with a sixth grader from California, and I've seen a kid from Florida and one from Toronto!

Again, those interested in educational matters should check out the center's blog, available here. I write a lot of articles for it, though I'm not the only contributor, and I think it's rather interesting and informative. (I am also enormously biased.)

Shake, Rattle and Roll

A little after 2:00 this afternoon, I was prepping for my case tomorrow when the building started to shake slightly. There was a slight pause, then it shook a little harder. When it didn't stop for about 10 seconds and the leaves on my plant were trembling, I decided that it was not just me and headed out into the hallway to see if anyone else had felt it. They had, and our office manager Jeremy shooed us out of the building lickety-split. Of course, we are on the 12th floor, so the evacuation took a pretty long time.

To our surprise, there weren't that many people out on the streets by the time we finally got out of the stairwell. Someone passed around the message that a friend in DC had just called someone else, and he said they'd had a big one there. No one's phones were working, and we just sort of stood around waiting for someone to make a decision. My coworkers were all more freaked out than I was - I think it was the first earthquake any of them had ever felt. I pointed out that they don't tend to last all that long, and so by the time we'd gotten out of the building it would already have been over. No one else had heard that you're supposed to get under a table or desk; I guess I just took it for granted that you learn that in California.

Jeremy told us that we didn't have to stay if we didn't want to, and many of us, myself included, decided to take him up on it. I was fairly certain that nothing else was going to happen, and that if the epicenter had been somewhere around Virginia, even an aftershock wouldn't do much damage in New York, but it was a beautiful day and I liked the prospect of having an afternoon off. I relaxed for a bit, then went for a run. If this is a New York earthquake, I think I could handle a few more of them.

Deutschland, Part 4 (Weimar and Auf Wiedersehen)

The traffic on the way from Munich to Weimar, our final stop before heading back to Berlin, was the worst yet. There really didn't seem to be a single part of Germany that was not being reconstructed. David and his high school exchange student, Lucas, had made plans to meet up in Weimar, and David had to call him several times to push back our arrival time. When we finally pulled into our hotel two hours late, Lucas joked that the Autobahn has no speed limits, but you can never really go very fast, so it doesn't matter. Oh well, the long drive gave me the chance to finish my second book and take lots of drive-by pictures of hops growing in the fields that lined the road.

David was able to identify these strange vines as hops. Who knew?  (David, apparently.)

Weimar is a lovely place. It is very well preserved because both Goethe and Schiller lived here, and so it is viewed as a sort of cultural hub for the arts in Germany. It's a great place to stroll around.  

We spent our first evening wandering around Weimar looking for a restaurant, finally settling on one in a lovely garden. There was a covered area set up nearby, but no one was sitting in it because the evening was too nice. All that changed very quickly, however, and we ended up seizing our plates and glasses and dashing into the tent moments before a downpour started drenching the outdoor tables in earnest. The poor waiters had quite a time trying to figure out who had moved where and ferrying trays from the kitchen and the bar through the garden to the tent with one hand while holding up umbrellas with the other.

Pre-dinner/pre-downpour beers with Lucas

The next morning, however, was lovely, and I finally got shot of the solar panels we saw everywhere in Germany. Remote farms would have whole roofs covered with the things, which was pretty striking, because the few houses that have them in the States have only about a quarter as many. Apparently there was some kind of government grant a few years ago. I read on the balcony before breakfast, savoring one of the only nice days we had while in Germany.

Solar panels, taken from the balcony of my room

We spent our last morning in Weimar walking around the town, looking into shops and exploring the marketplace in the central square. I bought chocolates to bring back to the office and a necklace with a silver ginkgo leaf hanging from it; Goethe wrote a poem about ginkgo trees and now the town has latched onto the leaf as its symbol. Once we reconvened, we headed to a nearby park which led us to a view of Goethe's garden house where he used to write and, according to Lucas, entertain lots of comely local lasses. "I think," Lucas commented, "he was a bit of a bad boy."

The marketplace in the center of Weimar

Goethe's garden cottage

Finally, it was time to bid Lucas goodbye and load up the van one last time so that we could return it in Berlin by the time we'd promised. In keeping with tradition, we got pretty lost coming into the city, though Jane and Anthony made the experience instructional by pointing out neighborhoods to which they'd traveled to visit friends we'd never met or restaurants we'd never heard of. Our final meal together in Germany was at an Indian restaurant, our third Indian meal while there. (German food is pretty heavy, and we could only handle so much of it. Our favorite spots were a Pakistani restaurant in Berlin and a Greek place in Munich. Go figure.) David headed back to Oregon very early the next morning, I left a few hours later, and my parents hung around for another week to see more of Berlin and spend more time with Anthony and Jane.

It was a whirlwind trip, but we had some great bonding time (well, bonding time anyway) in the van, and I discovered that, from the East Coast, the trans-Atlantic trip to Germany is pretty manageable. I can go directly to Berlin from JFK. So in a few months, I plan to determine whether Anthony and Jane were just being nice when they told me that I should come back.

Yachts, Mansions, and All Things Newport

As I have yet to sift through Weimar pictures, I'll divert to last weekend, which I spent in Rhode Island - final segment of my Germany trip will be next!

Ed and I were excited about going rock climbing in upstate New York last weekend, but about two hours before we were scheduled to leave on Saturday morning, we had to refigure our plans. It was scheduled to pour rain, which makes camping and climbing a lot less enjoyable. Since we already had a car reserved for the remainder of the weekend, Ed suggested Newport, Rhode Island, so after some quick adjustments to my suitcase (Leatherman: out, strappy sandals: in), we were off. 

Traffic was horrible, which was unexpected for a Saturday - I'd have thought the roads would have been more congested on Fridays and Sundays. The worst of it was after we'd finally gotten to Newport and had to sit in long lines of barely moving traffic before finally parking at our hotel. The hotel was lovely and right on the water in the middle of the harbor area, so it was easy to start exploring just a few minutes after we finally arrived. The congestion, it turned out, was not limited to the roads; the sidewalks were packed as well. Ed has spent quite a lot of time in Newport over the years - his father loved sailing and used to have a boat there - and he said he'd never seen it so crowded. We walked around and Ed pointed out points of interest in the town. It's a beautiful spot, and the weather was perfect. My favorite part was watching sailboats and yachts cruising by, however. Ed taught me a lot about how they operate, pros and cons of different types, etc. We shared drinks and a platter of oysters at an outdoor restaurant before dinner. "Idyllic" has never been a more appropriate term. I could certainly get used to that sort of thing.

Due to the rain and the early hour, this square was deserted on Sunday morning - the day  before it was jammed with tourists.

The next morning was gray and drizzly. We had breakfast, then boarded a schooner (I think it was a schooner...) for a tour of Newport from the water. It was chilly and windy once we left the protection of the dock, but it was fascinating to watch the crew operate the sails while the captain steered from the stern. We cruised by houses that used to belong to Jackie O's family, the Eisenhowers, and various other noteworthy, wealthy families.

Our boat, pre-voyage

This is the only shot I got from the boat itself; I was too busy trying to keep my raincoat wrapped around me to get any pictures once we were underway.

Before we headed out of town, we drove through the mansion-lined streets for which Newport is famous. Most of these houses are open for tours now, but it was fascinating to try to imagine the way they must have looked when they were residences. Ed's favorite was the Breakers, which I was keen to see, since it was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The tour was fascinating, though we were a bit rushed because we had to get back on the road, and my only complaint was that my beloved university was not mentioned once (which, I suppose, made sense because it was completely irrelevant. Still.). The sheer opulence of this place was pretty staggering, as you can probably deduce for yourself by checking out the dining room below. It reminded me a bit of FiLoLi and Hearst Castle. We went through bedrooms, the kitchen, the library, etc., and it was difficult to imagine anybody actually living here. Much of it was so decadent that it was pretty impractical - Mr. Vanderbilt's bathtub was made of thick marble, which made the bathwater get cold so quickly that it often had to be refilled with hot water multiple times before he started to bathe just to keep it warm for more than a few minutes.

Our ride home was pretty eventful. The rain made visibility pretty bad, particularly considering I haven't spent a whole lot of time behind the wheel lately. A spur-of-the-moment impulse to follow a ramp meant that I drove us over the George Washington Bridge not once but twice. Well, the view is nice, so it wasn't a total wash... The traffic, rain, and my propensity for picking ill-advised routes made it nice to get back home. But I was, understandably, sorry to leave Newport, despite the weather. I look forward to going back sometime when we have more than one night to spend. I imagine the drive would be beautiful in the fall, when the changing leaves will make being stuck in traffic more pleasant. And I look forward to Ed - whose navigational skills are, like most of the adult population of the world, better than mine - finding his driver's license so that I can relax in the passenger's seat.

Deutschland, Part 3 (Mittenwald and Innsbruck)

Retrieving the van from the garage was much easier than depositing it into the garage, and so our trip out of Munich went smoothly. For about three minutes. Then we got onto a main road where there was some pretty serious construction going on. We sat in traffic for ages, glaciers whizzing by us on all sides. (Well, they could have, anyway.) At some point, the monotony got the best of me, and when I woke up a few hours later, we were just outside Garmisch-Partenkirche, where the scenery looked a lot like this:

A house next to our guesthouse

I had been to Garmisch before and decided it was my favorite part of Germany. Mittenwald, I decided, was even more charming.

We saw a lot of churches in this part of the country with the onion-shaped dome, though we never did figure out how   the trend got there - it was the sort of style I associated with far-away Russia.

Mittenwald's charming downtown area, at the foot of the mountains

Mittenwald is in a valley, with dramatic mountains rising up seemingly out of nowhere on all sides. I am accustomed to foothills, like the kind we have in California, that lead slowly to steep mountains, but that's not the way it works in this part of Germany. The downtown area was pleasant, but rather more dominated by boutiques than I would have liked. We discovered a pair of men's swim trunks designed to look like Lederhosen in amongst the fashionable scarves, bright shoulder bags, and chunky bracelets.

It seemed that every building in Mittenwald had flowerboxes under the windows, elaborate murals adorning its outer walls, or both.

Our first hour in Mittenwald was lovely. After settling into the guesthouse, which was run by a proprietress who was gruff but, we decided, appropriately German-ly so, we walked to the center of the town where the boys promptly bought beers at a local bar. And then it began to pour. We split up and tried to look into various shops for a while, but it wasn't turning out to be a very pleasant experience, so we regrouped in a small, cozy restaurant, had lunch, and retreated to our guesthouse where I wrote postcards and everyone else played a board game.

It was still raining as we sat down to breakfast, and the weather report did not look promising, so we elected to drive over the Austrian border to check out Innsbruck for the day. Things cleared up as we drove, and while it was initially cloudy when we arrived, by the end of our day in Innsbruck it was sunny and beautiful. Innsbruck is a famous skiing city, and I found myself wishing it was winter. We strolled around the old city and had lunch at a cafe.

Downtown Innsbruck

By the time we got  back to Mittenwald, it was sunny and beautiful, and we decided to ride up a gondola to the top of a nearby mountain peak. At the last minute, Dad suggested that we hike down. The guy selling tickets was very against the idea, as it was already 5:00 and the hike down took, he said, 4 hours, which would leave us hiking in the dark. Dad was confident that we could do it faster than that, and eventually the man threw up his hands and sold us the one-way tickets anyway, against his better judgement. The views from the gondola were lovely. (Jane, again, chose to sit this one out.)

The hike down was nice, but it was hard to enjoy much of it because I was a bit worried. If one of us turned an ankle, we'd have been in big trouble. (I felt better when Anthony successfully called Jane from the mountain; at least rescue was an option in case of injury and no one would have to climb down for help, leaving part of the party on the chilly, rocky mountainside.) We hiked down a scree field for the first two hours. It was rough going. We'd slip and slide on the rocks whenever the slope was especially steep. David was the only one who had on shoes with appropriate ankle support, and we had no water and no flashlights. I kept thinking about wilderness accident stories, and many of them, it seemed, started out just like this.

It was also not very pretty. We hiked by a patch of snow and lots of large rocks. Then, at last, we came around the side of the mountain to see the valley below us in the evening light. It was beautiful, and quite a relief.

Our terrain. The bottoms of my feet were aching by the time we got to the bottom because my shoes had thin soles and it seemed I could feel every rock!

We were all pretty relieved to get to the more pleasant path. We had seen some sheep on a hillside about an hour before, and Anthony walked ahead, then hid behind a bush and baa-ed as we came around the curve, causing Mom to get very excited about seeing a mountain goat at such close range. He emerged, to her astonishment, and passed the next few minutes tossing small pebbles at me from behind. The brother-sister relationship doesn't change with age, it seems.

Almost there!

The next morning, before we piled back into the van to drive north to Weimar, I took a short walk by the river that ran along the edge of Mittenwald. The water was a pretty incredible powder blue color from some mineral in the light-colored rocks, and there were some lovely wildflowers. It was all very peaceful, and I was sorry to go, though new adventures in Weimar awaited!

Deutschland, Part 2 (Munich)

It must be admitted that our arrival in Munich was the low part of the trip. Traffic was terrible and was not easy to navigate from behind the wheel of a 9-seater van. The hotel was somewhat difficult to find and the streets were crowded and felt narrow. When we finally found the hotel, they had no record of our reservation. Jane got down to business, negotiating with the desk clerk in polite but somewhat terse German, and Dad, Mom, David, and I ferried all of our bags from the van to the hotel, which did not provide parking. Then Anthony and I took off on a frustrating voyage through the heart of the city, sampling several parking garages over the course of an hour before we found one that was high enough to accommodate the van, and scratching the roof and the left rear fender in the process. Oops. Tempers were running high by the time we got back to the hotel. Happily, things were all downhill from there.

After a beer on the pleasant patio of our hotel, we set off to walk through the old center of Munich, a walk we repeated the following day. 

The old Rathaus, or city hall. Every few hours, people gather in the square to watch the Glockenspiel, or mechanized  performance of figurines set to music, which was handcrafted hundreds of years ago. It plays out in the upper part of the square tower on the right edge of this picture.

Munich is very aware of what tourists want to see. I've never seen so many people dressed in traditional German costume, all of them employees of touristy restaurants and shops. This band, completed with pint-sized dancers, appeared out of nowhere to play polka music in the square.

We wandered into this lovely church.

Jane and Anthony enjoyed it less than I did.

Jane did, however, enjoy the massive pretzels available at the Biergarten under the Chiniesiche Turm, or Chinese Tower, in the city's largest park. We saw some locals threading a forearm through the pretzel in order to free up hands to carry mugs of beer back to their tables.

Mom enjoyed the beer.

David enjoyed being incognito.

After refreshments, we walked by this artificial river in the park, where surfers take advantage of the waves created by fast-moving water through an uneven channel. They lined up on either side, and when it was their turn hopped out into the waves and rode back and forth until they fell and were carried out of the wave.

Jane, who does not like heights, did not join us for the trip into the tower of a large church. She missed a lovely, 360-degree view of Munich from above, as well as a very narrow, winding staircase.

Munich has a great outdoor market where one can buy exotic fruits, truffles, baked goods, sausages of every description, honey, and really almost anything else. 

David and I went into the famous Hofbrau Haus, strictly for research purposes. This is a Mass locker, a place to store your liter-sized glass safely behind a padlocked door so that it will always be in the beer hall when you want it. There were a lot of these lockers in the Hofbrau House, and every one of them was completely full.

And a happy ending: For those of you concerned about the fate of the van, a lucky accident ensured that the problem of the damage to the paint was easily resolved. When the guys at the car rental agency asked my father, whose German is minimal at best, about insurance, he told the them that his credit card would cover him in case of an accident. He told them this in English, and held up the card to make his point. Reading his gesture, rather than his words, the agent dutifully charged him, via his credit card, for insurance, and so the scratches on the van were not a problem when we returned it to Berlin about five days later.

Next stop: Mittenwald!