Hitting the Swingin 60s

Lame pun in title works only in Fahrenheit of course ("early swing" would've been a bit more international). But it was indeed a rather balmy day for February with the strollers out in force. After the long winter stretch Karl reclaimed all parts of the donwtown playground (which is actually the one down by the hill and full of hipsters contrary to the one up the hill full of a rather affluent international crowd, so the whole analogy does work). Later on he got to accompany me on an assignment. Being one of the infamous anonymous food critics of my paper my current test assignment is a homey Italian restaurant more famous for the heated debate of it being a symbol of gentrification than for it's food. Karl very much embarassed Fred and me by demanding: "lobster! lobster! lobster!" (he did get lobster pasta when we went out with the Gorkows the other Sunday), thus reconfirming all fears about this being an outpost of gentrification.

No pics from the not so undercover assignment. Instead some more swinging (disclaimer: dad made some really stupid faces to get those giggles out of his son)....

Telltale Sign Of Spring Approaching

When there's a ray of sunshine in this town, people come out of their holes immediately. That of course includes the Eisbach surfers. So after picking up Karl on Thursday I was pretty sure we would see some of those fearless, thick-skinned guys.



And yes, their season is opened and Karl intensely studied if their techniques had improved during winter while comfortably seated in his stroller, chewing on a pretzel.



Later on we also went to check out the beautiful Ed Ruscha show at the Haus der Kunst. Karl actually insisted that we would go in when we walked by the museum on the way to our subway station. Once we were there though I soon found out that he only wanted to lure me into their bookstore to get him more reading materials. I'm wondering: is it already time to get a membership at the public library?

Llamas do it! Zebras do it! (...a day at the circus)

Nobody expects a subtle display of fine arts at the circus, but when we took a backstage peak before the show, the level of crassness reached new heights. So instead of the birds and the bees Karl got the llamas and the zebras.



He also does know where his little brother will come from. Yet to put two and two together though, so we'll leave it at wrestling llamas for now. You never know. At the circus. They could have wrestling llamas, no?



The show at Munich's traditional Circus Krone was all about gleaming eyes and bright smiles though. Just like last year. And just like last year the candied popcorn helped get through the still rather boring clowns' numbers. Winner of the day - the elephants. Huge hit. Literally.

Window Seat

I'm not very fond of sitting around in coffee shops with your kids, but Karl insisted on having chocolate cake and apple juice at Kaiser Otto yesterday. As I've mentioned before, their kids lounge is great and I saw myself sitting in the front reading glossy magazines. That didn't really happen though. Instead Karl explained to me all the different flyers and postcards that were lying around as well as the decor while snacking on the requested chocolate cake. Almost as good as my original plan.

Action Hero

After being all creative last year by dressing up Karl as a green Lego brick I took the easy way out for this years carnival and simply bought him a Spiderman costume (or Esbidersman as Karl pronounces it).

Ever since his dad brought home a Spiderman t-shirt from his last trip to New York he's in love with the cartoon character. And just as much as last years Lego brick he stuck out between all the princesses, lady bugs and cowboys at his day-care center.

More Winter Sports

Finally we got to introduce Karl to the great sport of riding a sled down some hillside at breakneck speed. Even though there was some steel heel slowdown action happening, Karl thought this was the greatest fun ever (so did his dad, i.e. me). To distribute the fun evenly Karl got to enlist all relatives present. Granddad was the most daredevil sledrider....



...while aunt Milena seemed to be the most pro, making sure rides don't end up as human snow salads (as did some rides with the male members of the family).



After exhausting ourselves to the point of reddest cheeks ever we stopped by grandpa's neighbors who had their very cosmopolitan German-Italian-London-living grandson Camillo houseguesting for a week. Camillo showed Karl the ropes in his very elaborate play-kitchen, which led to the preparation of a 15-course meal for everybody.



The home stretch on the highway was spent in deep-sleep non-rem mode.

Winter Sports

Karl seems to be immune against cabin fever, at least he put on a struggle when it was time to go to the park yesterday. Didn't take long though and he realized that it's much more boring to insist on a previous stance, when you could actually throw snowballs at daddy. Or stomp snowballs to mush. Or take snowballs and plunk them onto ancient gravestones (it's Bavaria, even the dead are thankful for any kind of distraction from all this idyllic-serenety-tranquility-business). Most fun of course was to chase dad down the pathways of the Südfriedhof (the Southern Cemetary, which has been defunct for over 60 years, but still hosts a variety of art nouveau gravesites of Munich luminaries who had streets named after them). Especially when dad was "really scared".

A good hour of snowball action also broke down Karl's resistance to finally try out the bike honorary god-mom Maria gave him for his birthday. Please note the breathtaking formula 1 style camera pan showing (slightly exhausted and very, very focused) Karl on his first speed-run towards home (where hot tea and freshly baked almond cake were served).

Sunday Dinner

I think Sunday nights are the best when there's no cooking and kitchen cleaning involved. So today I got really lucky since we went out to have a lovely dinner with Julie and Alexander at the Trattoria Seerose. Karl especially enjoyed Julie's interpretations of all the books we brought along as well as Alexander singing him Rammstein songs (no link here – it's baby blog after all...) while having him riverdancing on his legs. Meanwhile Andrian and I were able to eat in peace. Yay!

Today At The Park

On the look-out for the biggest snow melting puddles.

Sunday Duties

Picking up Andrian from his Sunday office duty is always a big highlight for Karl. Not only can he ride the subway AND the train to get there, then run through endless hallways, check out the train depot from the 19th floor, rummage through all the desks in the empty offices and charm the three other employees that are on duty as well. No, he also gets to spin around on daddies task chair after having eaten a whole bag of gummi bears with Alfred Hitchcock watching from the photo in the back.



Luckily we had lunch with a lot of healthy pancake-and-jam vitamins at his usual weekend hangout Kaiser Otto. They have a great kids lounge where he usually chooses to read some more books. Because we don't have enough reading material at home, you know.

Subway, Where Are You?!

After Karl's buddy Leo moved away from our neighborhood, started going to a different kindergarten and had had a little baby brother we haven't had the chance to have a play date with him even though we made several attempts. Yesterday we finally managed to catch up with Leo, Patty and now three-month old Moritz. Karl and Leo picked up where they had left right away and took apart all of the toys as well as the library in Leo's room.



Before we left we tried to tidy up together with the boys in order to teach them to be organized and helpful, but as usual that didn't really work out. In those moments I'm trying to teach Karl the word 'counterproductive'. Something he doesn't seem to understand... We all still had a lot of fun catching up though!



Please notice redheaded baby Moritz all the way in the background of the picture. Yea, I guess he's really hard to see.


On our way back home we had to wait for the subway for quite some time which apparently bored Karl after a while so much to everybody's amusement he screamed out loud: "Subway, where are you?!"

Reading Supplies

Not a whole lot has happened over the past couple of days. The weather has been grey and cold, play dates have been cancelled and even a long promised trip to Omi didn't take place. Ergo: Not all that much to blog about. Most of our fresh air intake was done during grocery shopping at the market and most of our spare time was spent reading books – since drawing, play dough, lego or any other kind of constructive play doesn't interest Karl at all these days.



But we had to exchange a book anyways and Karl had begged us to buy Barbapapa On Mars for a while now, so we got it. It's totally psychedelic, he was thrilled and I think I've read it to him about a gazillion times since Saturday. If anybody has any questions concerning the culture of the Barbapapas, please feel free to ask. By now our household has gained quite an expertise in that field.

Geese Attack

Every now and then you get a gentle reminder of how incredibly dangerous life in a city can be. Or is it that we actually do live in the country side? Whatever the case may be, we had a very exciting trip back home when I picked up Karl from his daycare place yesterday.



It started out with the close approach of a huge raven who might have picked up the scent of pretzel in my bag. Karl was torn between enthusiasm and fear, but let the latter win: no pretzel for the raven.



We also met a big flock of grey geese a little further into the park. I thought it would be fun to feed them a little as we have done so many times with the ducks in the same place. These birds seemed to be very, very hungry though! Only taking a piece of Karls pretzel made them run after us. I threw some of it at them to distract them a bit, but they still came running after us.



Some of them even tried a flight attack! I had to hide Karl's pretzel-holding hand in his footmuff and start running towards the safety of an underbridge...

Inventory

Because it's the new year Karl started out this Sunday bright and early by taking a full inventory of all of his books. Here you see him pointing out the evil hunters in his favorite book of the moment Barbapapa rettet die Tiere (Barbapapa's Ark).

Holiday

Bavarians treasure their catholic holidays, so we got with a day off today (3 Kings' Day, go figure...) we took a trip to the country. Went to the Fischmeister restaurant by Lake Starnberg (the one we took "Onkel Ritz" to a few weeks ago). We had some amazing food (a few menu items is everything that's traditional about this place, it's actually quite hip, especially the kitchen). Afterwards we had a stroll down the pier and went to the beach for some pebble throwing. With serious sub-zero weather we did get to explore what water looks like in it's frozen state, but we also decided that taking a nice holiday cruise kinda beats the whole walking and hiking thing, so we toured some of the nicely powdered Bavarian landscape, before venturing to the great indoors with some cake.