…and it looks great! I don’t think it’s looked this good since the freshly bepoped Pope came home for a visit in 2006 or so.
Posts Tagged ‘local (to us) stuff’
Almost all the scaffolding is down
Sunday, July 11th, 2010Pass the Peas, like we used to say
Saturday, April 17th, 2010Last night, our Budapest travel buddy Monet accompanied us to the Alte Mälzerei for the Fred Wesley and the New JBs show there. This was our first time in the Alte Mälzerei, but I daresay it won’t be our last. Nice little venue; we chose some standing room space across the room from the stage for the night and it felt pretty intimate.
The band came in one member at time, starting with the bassist, pretty much on time at just before or after nine o’clock, to the bass line of Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon and built up from there. They played most of the stuff I’d hoped for, plus some I hadn’t. A couple times they got a little too experimentally jazzy for our tastes, but I think they had a sense that the audience was there for the funk, so they brought it back around to groovy stuff right after that each time. It was a good show.
Here’s about six minutes of awesome music in crappy quality:
[audio:http://www.regensblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fred_concert.mp3]
No more Netto in Stadtamhof — at least not until 2011
Sunday, November 8th, 2009I got this information from TV Aktuell, the local TV station.
Our neighborhood grocery store closed last Monday, leaving our island in the Danube even more isolated. We’ve got no bus service due to the Protzenweiher Brücke being closed to traffic since it melted as a result of a barge collision a couple years ago. Up til now, Netto was very convenient and perhaps a reason why the citizens (not us) and inhabitants (us) have not yet revolted about the delayed bridge repairs and bus routes and transportation issues.
But I wonder if this was the last straw. One of the contributing factors when we decided to move here was the relative quiet — there’s really not a lot of car traffic around here, considering how close to the main drag we live, and all the businesses directly on it. But another major contributing factor was the availability of a supermarket, biomarkt, bakery, and butcher one 30-second walk out the front door of our building. Scratch the supermarket option, I guess.
Apparently, here’s what’s going on:
- The owner of the building housing the Netto store needs to renovate the building (and this is obvious to anyone who walks by — it’s decrepit).
- While the renovation is happening, no grocery store or anything else is going to be there.
- The city of Regensburg pleaded with Netto to set up shop in another vacant building on the island and even offered to pay for a tent or something as a temporary shop, but Netto refused.
- Renovation is scheduled to begin by March 2010.
- Another grocery store — perhaps even Netto again — will set up shop in that building after the renovation is complete starting sometime in 2011.
- So, this will be at least a year of hiking across the bridge back to the grocery stores we mostly used before we moved, unless they open up the Steinerne Brücke to bus traffic or fix the Protzenweiher Brücke and enable bus traffic via that route.
Here’s some local reaction. For the language enthusiasts, note the diversity of accents. It ranges from nearly hochdeutsch to pretty deep oberpfälzisch. Pretty representative of the various flavors of language we confront every day. Those of you who have visited Regensburg know what I’m talking about.
Return to teh Intarwebs
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009So Arcor/Deutsche Telekom decided to stop sucking! At the proverbial 11th hour, their reps showed up and spent a whopping 7.5 minutes flipping whatever switch needed to be flipped to connect us. In the final tally, we spent 16.75 hours waiting for them split up over three appointments, two of which were unsuccessful, made two irate phone calls to reschedule the no-shows and heard four different stories of What Happened, each of which contained at least one element of un-truthiness. And no apologies were received.
But we didn’t change services. So, I suppose, we have our own yoke of suck to bear.
another* snowy rooves post
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Cold, Wet, Jazzy Sunday
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Unfortunately, the music today was also pretty terrible. You could tell the motivation just wasn’t there, because so many people weren’t there, because it was just so insistent with the rain. We’d intended to get brunch at Vitus, since a zippy-looking band was scheduled to play there, but when we got there, the sky had already opened up and everything inside was absolutely packed. So we mosied over to the Hotel Orphée instead. After a little bit of confusion with the waitress (we didn’t know they had a special Jazzfest Weekend menu and she didn’t know we’d been looking at the ordinary one), huddling together under a drippy awning outside we enjoyed a lovely couple of Milchkaffees and Quiche Lorraine — known to the likes of Po fondly as “ham pie.”
So, without further ado, today’s audio samplage:
[audio:http://www.regensblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/jazzfest_20080713.mp3]
And just for good measure: here’s a couple of Döner spindles. I guess the one on the left is in the process of thawing.
Oh, and a THINGpad? (Click it and look closely.) I guess, for many around here, “sink,” “think,” “thing,” and “think” are all mutually indistinguishable.
Big Cuke / Chess Fest 2008 opening night
Saturday, July 12th, 2008First the interesting part — check out this cucumber we spotted at Edeka today while shopping!
Next, a sampler from Chess Fest 2008′s opening night last night:
[audio:http://www.regensblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/jazzfest20080711-or-why-sarah-will-not-be-leave-the-house-this-weekend.mp3]
Locals: wondering why Sarah’s not to be found outside the apartment this weekend? Here’s why. To be fair, the weather was positively awful. The wind noise at the beginning of the track was that of wind getting amplified through the salsa band’s microphones and speakers, not my MD recorder. It was pouring. So I gotta give ‘em credit for gumption inspite of the weather, at least.
I’m hoping for some less whitebread-sounding stuff this evening. Stumbling upon something as cool as the Jazz Police like at last year’s Bürgerfest would be redeeming.
what is that god-awful medley?
Friday, July 4th, 2008So I’m lounging comfortably with all the windows open enjoying the breeze, for the first time in days, I might add, where there’s been breeze and no rain, having worked all day from home.
Suddenly a piano-y folky terribly offkey uptempo version of Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Going to Take It which medley’d into the Proclaimers’ 500 Miles from the not-very-groundbreaking album Sunshine on Leith (ZOMG why do I know that?) .
Oh, crap. It’s Gassenfest.
Oh Lord, now it’s a gospel version of Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning.
Osteria Siciliana
Monday, June 23rd, 2008the free haircut that wasn’t worth it (or was it?)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008Prior to my trip to Romania tomorrow, I wanted to get a haircut. I’d been having very good luck at C&M on the corner of Am Römling and Ludwigstraße and their 11 € haircuts. Two quick, thorough, and very professional haircuts in a row done by the pleasant, if weird-looking Matthias, had me convinced I’d found a new favorite barber.
Third time wasn’t a charm, however. Matthias was busy with other clients (and I don’t know how to ask for a particular friseur — or whether they even do that, since this place works on the take-a-number FIFO format). I got a pleasant young-looking woman. I asked for a trim down to my usual 6mm and I thought all was well until suddenly another stylist came over to exlain that we had a problem. It seems the original one had cut a swath shorter than 6mm into the back of my head down by the neck and the only way to fix it was to cut that section of my hair down to 3mm or so and fade it longer up into the 6mm on the rest of my head. All staff members were apologetic and immediately offered to do this cut on the house due to their mistake.
But that looked dumb. So I had them do the whole head (barring the top) down to 3mm. OK, I like it short. But that made my beard look dumb. Once I got home, I tried trimming my beard so that it was shorter than the hair on my head, but that also looked less than optimal. So I trimmed the whole beard off (see below). I am kind of sad to see it go and return to the daily or nearly daily shaving regimen.
So, two points to ponder for the future:
- Should I go back there again next time? The first two haircuts were brilliant. The third one less so, but they did do their best to make up for it.
- Can you believe I wrote three whole paragraphs about my own personal grooming?