Day 8 - Vienna, Munich (7/4)
Before leaving Vienna, we popped over to the UN centre in Vienna. It was quite non-descript, and we didn't want to wait almost an hour for the tour, so we left.
Weird structure in the Neue Donau
I offered Jiekai €10 to jump into and €50 to swim across the Donau (Danube) but he refused. Bah.
Donau
For some reason, there was lots of snow in the mountains near Salzburg (when we arrived in Munich we found that it'd snowed there on Thursday [6/4]. In April.] One forecast said the temperature would range from -2 to 12 degrees. In any case, the mountains were very beautiful covered in snow. The pictures are a bit dark, but I doubted the snow would have come out if I hadn't bumped the exposure down (probably, but oh well).
Snow on mountains
Polyglot
In Munich, Jiekai and I went to the Hofbrau beer hall. He had 1l of beer which, litre for litre, was cheaper than my apfelschorle (apple fizz).
Haxe
Jiekai claimed that the Haxe (pork knuckle) there is the one with which all other pork knuckles must be compared (...), but I thought Marche's was better. I also tasted fresh sauerkraut for the first time, and it was much better than the canned variety, which tends to be too sour and soft. There was a lot of atmosphere there (I suspect it's for tourists' benefit) - there was a cigar woman, and a band playing there, the pictures of which Jiekai has. He's supposed to send them to me, but his head was probably stuck on a spike at the top of the Berlin wall as of the time of writing, so. The only things about the band were that there weren't real drums - the guy was playing a synthesiser - and more disturbingly, at least 1 of the band members' scores had chinese song names written on them (wth?!). Maybe they weren't real Bavarians but really Foreign Talent with wigs and garbed in Bavarian shorts!!!
Roasting haxe
Most number of haxe I have ever seen at one time, roasting or otherwise
Cock cars
The fuel caps appeared screwed shut. Uhh.
I was surprised to see cock cars in Munich (and so many). I thought the Germans took pride in their cars.
I stopped by a McDonalds at Munich to try a new McFlurry flavour - Milka bits with Cherry powder. It was hideous - perhaps the worst I've ever tasted. In fact, it smelled like pesticide. They had McRib though!
Along the way back to the youth hostel we also had a very good hotdog from a stand in the middle of a pedestrian mall ("Thuringer Roster") - the sausage was flame grilled, and so had split open at many places. A real fire really makes a difference to the taste - the skin was crispy and the sausage extra juicy.
The map of Munich we got from the youth hostel was hilarious. Half of it was filled with ads for escorts, sex shows and even one for a transsexual. Lots of businessmen visit Munich, it being a city of business, and they must get real lonely at night.
I didn't know that Red Bull came from Salzburg.
Some Jap tourists were taking a picture of the "Munchen HBF [Ed: Hauptbahnhof - central train station]" sign. Uhh.
Jiekai and I were reminiscing about the time we sat in a Perodua (sp). The car felt like shit, and I remember that it felt like it'd fall apart at any time. No wonder Jeremy Clarkson smashed his. Jiekai also mentioned that his Creative MP3 player, though only 1 1/2 years old, had problems with its audio jack. To no one's surprise, it was manufactured in Malaysia (I think my other friend whose Creative MP3 player fell apart in 3 months was also manufactured there). I then recalled that my Palm IIIc had given up the ghost after only a year, while the m130 was still going strong after more than 3 1/2 years. Guess which was made in Malaysia and which in China? Cadbury's chocolate milk powder also tastes very different depending on whether it comes from Malaysia or Australia.
In a Herculean feat of cockitude surpassing anything he had yet done or will ever do (at least for the rest of this academic year), Jiekai dropped the Anvil (or grand piano, if you like) which broke the (my) camel's back.
With his unequalled powers, he managed to make a 128MB CF card containing all my Paris photos and some of my Salzburg ones disappear into the bowels of a Turkish-run Internet cafe in Munich.
He was trying to transfer my photos into his Creative MP3 player's hard disk, and was trying to insert it into the slot of the card reader in the terminal. He slipped, cursed and the memory card was suddenly gone. The man at the counter at first pretended not to speak English, after shouting at us not to touch the CPU, but eventually kindly consented to open up the casing.
Miraculously, the memory card was nowhere to be found in the case. With his singular and unsurpassed powers of cockitude, Jiekai managed to bend the laws of reality, space and time and cause a 128MB CF to disapparate, and it is probably floating somewhere in the Astral Plane now, in the dimension where lost memory cards go. He would certainly make my brother-in-law proud.
Moral of the story: Never travel with Koh Jiekai and even more especially, don't let him touch anything of yours.
The bigger idiot in this case is of course me, for consenting to travel with Jiekai in the first place.
Now I really have to go back to Paris one day, "with my future girlfriend/wife" (as he always likes to say) or otherwise.
Cock files, or things for which I would've pelted Jiekai with the Biggest Snowball In The World, Part Deux, if there'd been snow:
- He kept blocking the escalators by standing on the left and I'd to keep yanking him to the right
- We needed to cross the road to get a hotdog for my breakfast (he had vile fries) and he insisted we go underground through the train station. When we emerged, we were further from the hotdog stall than when we'd started.
- He claims all fishball noodles must be benchmarked against the one near his house, and all hae mee with the one at Beach Road
- He wore the same shirt for 5 days
- After drinking 1l of beer, he couldn't walk straight and I had to hold his hand. I asked how he would come in future, then, with his "future girlfriend/wife". He said they'd hold on to each other, go back and have sex.
- He left his (dirty?) underwear on the floor of a shared youth hostel toilet
- He locked up his chargers because he thought other people in the room (accessible only to people sleeping there) would steal them.
- He changed pants in a mixed sex room.