Blogging turns out to have been even scarcer than originally anticipated over the last few days, due to a combination of (a) Ryoh-ohki’s Bluetooth card throwing some kind of obscure fit— he card’s lights show it’s getting power, but the computer doesn’t seem able to see it: (b) my forgetting the password I need to post to Blogger via e-mail from the Clie: and (c) the hotels I’ve been staying in all being more or less computer-unfriendly—nowhere to plug in the wires, or the phone systems have been digital rather than analog, or variants on the theme. Oh well. Tomorrow I go wireless again—the hotel where Peter and I will be staying for our meetings is 802.11-friendly, and so is Munich Airport.
Weather has been iffy. The night I hit Munich it was surprisingly cold, and the guy at the hotel told me they’d just had a rather unseasonable snowstorm. Sure enough, the next mornings “panoramabilder” program on cable showed livecams from ski area after ski area, all boasting new snowfall up in the mountains—in some cases up to a foot of it. Nights have been uniformly cold, with temperatures hovering around freezing, even though days have been growing warmer than usual—upper 60s to low 70s. I’m presently sitting in a “country” beer hall in Aying, a suburb of Munich, and it’s about 70 out. Not quite warm enough for me; I’m inside. (Ryoh-ohki’s screen isn’t much good outside when the sky’s too bright.)
It’s been a frustrating few days in terms of hardware failures of one kind or another. Just when I could really use the Bluetooth to go online, I can’t do it: even the Clie is suffering because its charger seems to have gone belly-up, and the “trickle” charge from the USB-to-Clie hard link is too slow to do much good. The Clie’s implementation of the iPass local-dialing software is also acting up for reasons I don’t understand. I take all this as a subtle message from the Universe that I shouldn’t get too hung up on the hardware, and should kick back and enjoy the scenery. Nonetheless, I have my excerpt from Wizard’s Holiday ready to post, and it’s frustrating not to be able to do it today, since I know people have been waiting for it. Oh well: tomorrow is going to have to be soon enough.
Meanwhile, two nice hotels to add to the collection: the little Hotel Kaiser in Bregenz—very good value for money, a snug and luxurious kind of place—and the Brauereigasthof Aying, run by the Aying brewery. More luxurious yet, though a little more expensive than the Kaiser (which was not terribly expensive at all). Bregenz is a nice little town by the Bodensee: in some ways it reminds me of Chur, in Switzerland a compact “old town” full of intent shoppers and good small restaurants and pubs. They were setting up the Saturday market in the marketplace when my cab arrived this morning: I was sorry I couldn’t stay, but my train schedule was more or less set in stone if I wanted to be in Aying by early afternoon. Aying is more of a village: very small, quite rural, about half an hour out of Munich on the S-bahn. A nice place for a summer day out, in slightly better weather.
The Liebhard “beer hall” across from the hotel has a surprisingly adventurous menu for such a place. One offering was medallions of venison in a juniper and oyster-mushroom sauce. Another was geschnezeltes of springbok with wild mushrooms and buttered spaezli (teeny little dumplings, often panfried when they don’t come in a sauce). I wasn’t up for anything quite so heavy, and settled on Nurnberger sausages (they’re small, and always come in sixes) with some sauerkraut, brown bread and horseradish, and a couple of glasses of the Aying brewery’s “Celebrator” dopplebock. A rich beer: you wouldn’t drink more than a couple of these.
There’s only one problem with these wonderful foreign beers. They introduce you to wonderful foreign yeasts, and the result is what Peter tends to characterize as “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing.” Or not so faintly. I think tomorrow I go back to wine, and wait for the wind to die down, as it were.
