Meat Poisoning

Back from Germany and don't need to eat meat for a long time.

Before I went to Germany the first time I read descriptions of the cuisine as "hearty" and "homey", but there wasn't quite an adequate emphasis on how much pork would be involved. The last time I went I was on my own and eventually starting eating mostly Italian, but this trip was with a sizable contigent and we went to Bavarian restaurants almost every night, where meat was the name of the game.

I think I had pork three nights in a row. Schnitzel the first night. Pork medallions the second. Pork in a pepper cream sauce the third. The fourth night some of the men from my office had already left so the remaining three of us went to an Indian restaurant so the one vegetarian could eat something other than potato-based side dishes.

The meeting itself was successful, but I learned an important lesson about setting agendas: include breaks! The first day I made the mistake of sitting on the far side of the conference table, where it was impossible to get out without asking two other people to move. I have rarely regretted two cups of coffee more. If we had had the foresight to put on the agenda "10 to 10:15 - break" everything would have been much more enjoyable. For me. Maybe no one else cared.

Saturday morning my boss's boss and I stopped in downtown Munich on the way to the airport. I had seen it several times when I stayed there for a month last time, so I knew my way around pretty well. We went into three churches and climbed to the top of Peterskirche for the view. Here is the quintessential view of the Munich skyline with Frauenkirche on the left and the Neues Rathaus on the right.

Since I had a 7 am meeting the day we left, and an 8 am experiment commitment 36 hours after we got back I am slightly worn out. While I bounced to either time zone fine not having a good day to sleep in for a while is messing up my internal clock. Yesterday afternoon at work I could tell I wasn't perfectly coherent, so I stopped doing email and solely did data analysis, which is hard to mess up with the tools we have.

Also in Munich I saw pointy cabbages. Weird!