Happy New Year - January 1 to 17

Jan 2 - We took the boys on a beer (bier) tour.  It started at a small local restaurant that is famous for their weiss (wheat) beers, where we learned a little bit of history about making beers and why the monks started brewing beer.  They fasted during Lent and they needed something to sustain them.  Bier or liquid bread was their solution.  During Lent the Bavarian breweries brew a strong beer with a higher than normal alcohol content.  Weissbier ranges in strengths of alcohol from 5% to 12%.  The tour continued to a micro brewery where we had a tour of the brewery and learned what goes in the beers and how long they are brewed.   They only put 5 ingredients in their beers - wheat, water, barley, hops and yeast which is regulated by the German Purity Law from 1516.  We also ate dinner at the micro brewery.  They were having a buffet that night which had all the German favorites.   After our tour, tasting and dinner we head off to our final stop, The Hofbrauhaus, where we had a final liter of beer.  In Germany they call a liter of beer “A mass”.  At the Hofbrauhaus the regulars sore thier mugs in locked racks.  You have to wait for someone to die and will you the spot or marry some one with a spot.  The boys really enjoyed this tour. 

Hofbrauhaus Bier Mug Storage

We also took them to the Olympic Park and the BMW museum.  The boys also visited the Deutsche Museum.  The Deutsche Museum is huge; you can easily spend two to three days in it.  We really enjoyed the time with them and it was sad to see them leave.

Brian put on Jay’s lederhosen while he was here and wanted to take them home, but Jay wouldn't let him.

Jan 8 - Jay and I joined a ski club here in Munich and we went on our first trip on Saturday and tried out our new skis.  We went to Fieberbrunn in Austria, a two hour bus ride from here.  It is a small ski area, but it had a nice mix of ski runs.  On the bus ride up they cook sausages for breakfast.  The weather was a little warm and there wasn’t much snow.  The Alps are a litter steeper than we are use to.  The blue slopes are supposed to be equal to our green, but I found it a lot harder to get down since they were steeper.  Even though the skiing wasn’t the best, we still had a good time.

Jan 15 – Went with the ski club to Leogang / Saalbach Hinterglemm in Austria.  This is a HUGE ski area, with some runs over 7 kilometers long.  The day didn’t look like it was going to be a good day to ski since it was raining when we got there.  As we rode the lift up, luckily the rain changed to snow.  It was nice skiing of fresh snow but the visibility was very poor.  We stopped for an early lunch at one of the many restaurants and by the time we finished the sun was shining.  We were finally able to see what the mountain we were skiing on looked like.  The skiing conditions ranged from fresh snow to ice to slush.  I thought the mountain was very steep and it took us 1 ½ hours to get back to the parking lot to our bus.  It’s nice having a bus take you since we can drink and relax on the way home after a long hard day of skiing.  The ski pass tracks the lifts you ride and it estimates the amount of skiing you do.   I skied approximate 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) and Jay skied 33 (20 miles).

Morning ski conditions



After the snow stopped



Log of our skiing