I just HAD to post this!
I read A LOT of blogs on various things that interest me, one of which is EuroCheapo because well, I love Europe and FamilieSchmitt is a little "cheapo." Usually they post entries about cheap Parisian lodging, free tours in Prague or something equally helpful and interesting. Today though, they posting something that is near and dear to our hearts - Biergartens in Munich!

You see, Mike and I vacationed in Germany for our honeymoon. We left the day after the wedding having experienced one of the best days of our life mere hours before getting on a long 12 hour flight. Luckily for us the ticket counter attendant was a kind soul and when we told her that we were honeymooners, she upgraded our seats to a sort of above average coach section (more legroom, no babies) of the plane. When we arrived in Germany just around lunchtime, we were so overwhelmed by lack of sleep and excitement that we found ourselves wandering around Munich like zombies. After visiting the Glockenspiel with heavy, tired eyes, we retreated back to our hotel for a nap. Our jet-lagged bodies let us sleep until about 7:00pm when our hungry stomachs awakened us in expectation of good GERMAN food. We set off down the street to find something tasty. Just about a minute down the road we found one of the coolest places we had ever seen: it was a biergarten nestled in a grove of trees. It looked like something out of a tour guidebook about Germany. Near perfection. Germans were lazily seated on picnic tables all over sipping their beers and talking excitedly about who-knows-what. We weren't exactly sure what to do, so we found an empty table and waited for a server to find us. Soon after being seated, a stereotypical large German woman in traditional dress, carrying an armload of biersteins called over to us and simply yelled, "Zwei?!" Mike and I both took German in highschool as our language requirement and had stored enough of that knowledge to translate what the woman was asking us, but not enough knowledge about the place we were visiting to understand what she meant. We interpreted it as "Two menus?" or "Two people?," so we excitedly answered: "Ja!" We were wrong. Minutes later that same woman brought over two Colosseum-sized mugs of beer, one for each of us. So let me just put this into perspective for you:

• We are operating under extreme wedding-related fatigue and major jet-lag
• We have not eaten in probably 10 hours
  
• I was not a beer drinker at this time

We were expecting to order food, not consume the equivalent of a small lake of beer. But hell if we were going to tell this stern, German woman staring back at us that she was wrong! We drank all 64 (or whatever) ounces of those beers happily. We paid our waitress and then stumbled back up the street to a pizza place where we SUCKED DOWN a pizza and laughed about our experience.

We often recall this adventure and one of us will ask the other "Zwei?" when we find ourselves in similar situations. I have never bothered to look up the biergarten though and to this day had no idea what it was called or anything about it except that we fell in love with it. The blog post on EuroCheapo lists it as one of the top 3 best biergartens in Munich. They also say, "the beer, Augustiner, is from Munich’s oldest brewery and has been proclaimed the “state’s best beer” twice over." Who knew?! I'm so glad that I came across that list though so I could once again relive one of our fondest travel memories.

As I said in a few posts back, I am working on uploading all of our old photos to Flickr and in doing so, memories come flooding back. I’m going to try to document some parts of our adventures in England and abroad during that time by linking to some of these photos.

Mike and I were married nearly 7 years ago in May 2002. Mike was working at IBM as he is now and I was working at Mayo Clinic, also where I am now. About a month after our wedding, an opportunity came to Mike at his job that we could not refuse. Betsy Baartman, Mike’s manager at the time and still a dear friend of ours, presented Mike with the chance to work in Hursley, England for a year as part of an exchange of knowledge between the two locations. Betsy told Mike about this possible trip and asked him to go home and see what I thought of it. Mike told her right then that he didn’t need to ask me, he knew my answer (YES! YES YES!), but we still discussed it that evening. We were still living in our 2 bedroom apartment, so we didn’t have a house to sell or maintain while we were gone. We didn’t yet have any children. My job was expendable. We had NO reason to say no. The time from June until mid-August was insanity for us. IBM kept going back and forth over whether or not to send us. Ironically enough at that time another manager told Mike that “nothing was for sure until you were on that plane headed to England.” We had no idea exactly how true that was until we were at the rehearsal for our friend Tina’s wedding in the Twin Cities and Mike received a call on our cellphone from Betsy. She told him that the trip had been cancelled by some idiot executive and that we should come back to Rochester on Sunday instead of flying out to England. We had moved out of our apartment and put everything into a storage facility. I had sold my car and Mike’s was being stored. We had nowhere to live and nothing to drive. After the wedding Mike’s parents drove us back to Rochester where Betsy had reserved us a suite at a hotel and a rental car. She also stocked the room with goodies and a much needed bottle of wine. I remember being absolutely stunned by the whole situation. Here we were all ready to fly to England Sunday morning, but instead we were back in Rochester living in a hotel! It was all so surreal. On Monday Mike went into work and of course everyone was shocked to see him there. Behind the scenes Betsy and others were working to get the idiot executive’s decision reversed. By Wednesday they had succeeded, Mike and I repurchased airline tickets, turned OFF our cellphone and we flew out to London immediately!

We arrived in London very early in the morning and had a car drive us to Winchester where we had booked a hotel room for the time being until we could find a house to rent. The Wessex Hotel was our home for about 4 weeks.

We made friends with the staff, ordered an unbelievable amount of room service, ate out at every single restaurant in town and were awakened by the sound of the Winchester Cathedral’s bells every weekend morning. It was difficult living in a hotel where housekeeping disrupted my every morning and where we had no real place to just hang out other than our “bedroom.” Our first day in Winchester was probably an indication of how things were to go for us for the entire year to come. We were starving and totally unfamiliar with not only the town, but also with England in general. We walked down the High Street and the only recognizable name we could find was Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut – Americana – something familiar? Oh no! We walked in and sat down at an open table. Minutes later we were being reprimanded for not being seated by the hostess. Day one and we were already sticking out like sore thumbs!

This was our kitchen while we lived in England 6 years ago. SIX years ago. Wow. That house was such a dump, but it holds very precious memories for us and I will always love it for that. We were once told by a repairman that the "range" in this picture was so old that its twin is in a museum. He wasn't kidding. Before we moved out of that house, I cleaned behind and under the stove, which had not been done in probably as long as that appliance existed. It was disgusting. The washing machine in this kitchen - yes, washing machines are commonly in the kitchen in England - worked for maybe half of the time that we lived in the house. The woman who owned this house was completely disinterested in spending money on getting anything fixed, so we often had to wait weeks and fight with the rental agency for things to be repaired. Behind the kitchen is a small sunroom with a beautiful wood floor. As it is known to do in England, it rained a lot the first few days we were in the house and that wood floor was destroyed by leaking water. Sadly, the room was unusable for the duration of our stay. Living there was quite an adventure.

Anyway, I was looking through our England-related photos on our old Webshots sites today and was very frustrated to find that you cannot download photos from Webshots into anything other than their software. Well, that is just got good enough for me! So, I decided to start a new project. I am going to move all of our old photos onto Flickr with all of our newer photos. That way everything is contained in the same place. Heck, we pay for Flickr and have unlimited storage, so why not use it?!? So although it may take me days and days, I am going to be slowly adding these photos to Flickr. That means that when you see a bunch of photos of the Eiffel Tower on our main flickr page, it isn't that we've suddenly whisked ourselves off to Paris - we are just adding the photos from 2002-2003.

Maybe I'll even post some here with some stories about our travels. I promise it will be better than that one time that your Uncle made you watch the slideshow of his family's Smokey Mountain vacation.