Month: September 2004

My favorite sitcom „Friends“ ended a couple of months ago. It was kind of sad to say good bye to all the characters and their weekly stories. I wasn’t familiar with Friends until the seventh season aired on German TV , but I immediately fell in love with it.

In the final episodes the Friends all walk into different directions, Rachel and Ross get back together, Chandler and Monica move away from Manhattan, Phoebe and Mike get married. The only one left alone is Joey and we don’t know what is going to happen to him when the final curtain falls.

But now the pilot for Joey aired. Mr. Tribbiani has his own serial now. Joey moves to LA to work on his filming career. Of course there are new characters, his nephew Michael and his sister Gina and the lovely lawyer Alex. But its not Friends anymore, it feels a bit empty without all the perfectly drawn out characters I was used to and his new apartment is missing all the little details.

Joey is Joey, just like I know him, and I like the new characters, but I think I have to wait a few more episodes to tell if this is going to be a worthy spin off and if I can be “Friends” with Joey…

I spent the last three days in Munich. It’s a noisy and weird place right now, crowded with people from all around the world. Most notable among all the nations are Italians, Dutch and people from England and the United States. They are only recognizable by the accent, everybody seems to wear traditional Bavarian cloths, such as the infamous “Lederhosen” and the “Dirndl” even if they are not from Bavaria or Europe at all.

The origins of the Oktoberfest date back to 1810, when a lavish five-day celebration was held all over Munich to mark the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince. There is not much left from that royal celebration. Get pissed or get lost might be a good tagline in the year 2004.

I myself drank my first “Wiesn Mass” (one liter of beer) this year, so that I can tell everyone “been there, done that”. Being on the Oktoberfest and not having a beer – or in my case two – is like visiting New York and skipping the Empire State building. But like many New Yorkers never actually visit the Empire State Building, there are many Bavarians that avoid the Wiesn at any cost during the Oktoberfest.

I arrived around 11:00 am at the Theresienwiese, the subway station closest to the “Wiesn”. We, my two cousins and my father, walked around and tried to find an empty seat in one of the beer tents, which where all already very crowded. Luckily we got a table in the “Hofbräuzelt” one of the 14 massive tents. After an overprices “Weisswurst” and two “Mass” beer we left the scene. I can’t understand people who sit and drink for 8 or 10 hours.

I saw pretty much everything within the first 20 minutes, after that, its like a loop. Every now and then, someone starts screaming, raising a “Mass” and the entire crowd follows. A band plays the “Wiesn-song” – that’s pretty much everything. If you are lucky enough, you see some Australian dude standing on a table and pulling down his pants, before he gets pulled away by security. If you are unlucky like me, someone vomits in front of you, while you try to enter the toilet. Please consider that its noon! By the end of the day…, well I leave that open for your imagination.

After all, the Oktoberfest IS a unique experience, it’s the largest Volksfest in the World, the only goal is to drink beer and for 3 weeks, Munich becomes the center of insanity.

I posted this a couple of weeks ago:

„I and my workmates are planning a little prank on a fellow colleague of us. He is on vacation right now and received a package yesterday. Today we scanned the address field and modified it, so it now looks like he received a huge package from an online sexstore. On the day he returns we will put the package to the incoming post at the main entrance of the building…!“

Here is how this little prank turned out:

My workmate returned to the office and saw the package, at first he thought it was just a mistake, someone else must have ordered this under his name. Then our boss came in and yelled at him for receiving such a kinky package in the office. My boss knew about the prank and was just messing with him. My boss also said that he does understand my colleague and would’nt want to receive such a package at home neither. Unfortunately I wasn’t there to see it all by myself, I probably would have loughed myself to death!

Below is what I wrote that day while I was travelling around Australia. I got the news about what happend in NY and Washington a day later, I did not experience the whole event in real time.

12th of September 2001

The day started very early, at 4:00 am. I didn’t had a clue at this time about what had happened just a couple of hours before on the other side of the world.I first got the news on the boat and thought the tour guide made a very sick joke. But I wasn’t sure… He was too serious, too much details, so I took my binoculars and looked at the TV-screen of another boat across the pier. I saw a fire-fighters and started to believe the story of our tour guide. Yet, it was hard to believe.

We then started our tour to watch one of the most beautiful an peaceful creatures in the world, whales, to be exact ‘hunchback whales, the fifth largest animal in the world.The first whale I saw was jumping out of the water, a very powerful moment. We later watched a group of four whales and followed them about 2 hours before we had to go back.

The five hours on the boat went by very fast, we all talked about the possibility of the story the tour guide told us, if this could be true.

All my fears came true when we finally got back to the harbour and I first walked into a restaurant which had the TV set switched on. I had planed to rent a bike that day, to go around Hervey Bay, but that was impossible for me. Instead I spend the whole day at the hostel, following the shocking news from New York. I have a relative in New York, and of course the whole Worldsurface crew, which I knew work at Wall Street.

It was a big relive to read that the whole worldsurface team was doing well, and I feel very sorry for all those, who where on the planes, in the World Trade Centre or at the Pentagon. Thanks for updating the page and sharing your thoughts, even during such a horrible event!

Hervey Bay was a very quiet and strange place that day, everybody was talking about what had happened that day, and a taxidriver told me it was the most quiet day for him ever since. It’s hard to believe what happened, I know that the world has changed that morning, it’s never going to be the same again.

Around the Rialto-Bridge in Venice are a lot of signs that advice people to look after their luggage and especially their wallets. A few years ago I witnessed pickpockets at work in Venice. Since that time I always wanted to play a trick on the infamous thiefs of the Lagoon city. I attached a mousetrap to an empty old wallet, which I will carry around visible for everyone. Let’s put it that way, the wallet is begging for a theft. If things turn out the way they are supposed to, I will hear a snap at some point and hopefully a whimper.

Unfortunately they don’t sell those huge rat-traps these days, which would most likely put an end to the successful career of a pickpocket due to the fact of his broken “speedily fingers”.

I will be in Italy till the 12th of September, so there will be no new entries to this blog.