Biergartens

For years I've heard the German term biergarten and assumed that garten must have a broader meaning than the English term garden. Coming from a place with open container laws and an almost neurotic anxiety about where open drinking can and cannot occur, I thought surely Germans wouldn't allow alcohol consumption in a setting that sounds synonymous with park. Yet that's exactly what they do.

 My friend and coworker Paul is from Munich. He tells me the biergartens can be cliquish. The goal is what the Germans call Gemütlichkeit, a place or feeling of warmth and friendliness. This is the original place where everybody knows your name. It looks downright civilized. There’s no ear splitting music, no drunk twenty year olds crashing into each other and tossing back Jell-O shots. No bouncer keeping out The Ugly People™.

In fact, there’s no bouncer at all. Nor is there a barrier separating the drinkers from the non-drinkers. I can’t tell you if that’s true of all the dozens of biergartens in Munich. The biergarten in the photo is literally in the center of a public park called the Englischer Garten. The other biergarten I visited is the Viktualienmarkt, an open public square a block off the town center, the Marienplatz.

Every biergarten has copious trees, even more tables, places to buy beer, and places to buy food. Some people bring their own food because that’s allowed. I suppose it’s also possible to bring your own beer as well, but nobody seems to be doing that.

Most of the beer steins are glass instead of the traditional ornate covered steins that everyone associates with Bavaria. According to a tour guide, clear glass is required by law. About a century or so back, beer sellers were using the fact of dark covered steins to cheat customers by underfilling and charging the same price. Glass lets customers see exactly how much they’re getting for their money. Bier steins are a full lite. The glass in the photo is typical of the typical biergarten stein around here, it's actually one from the Hofbrauhaus. It’s 2.11 pints, in case you were wondering. Beer sellers keep them from wandering off by charging a stein deposit with the beer purchase, for which the buyer is given a metal token or ticket.

I wish I had better pictures of all of this. No matter how many pictures I take on a trip, inevitably, when I start processing them, I find there’s something I missed, something I didn’t get enough of. For Munich, biergarten’s are what I missed.

Lead in Water

I share the disdain of many people for our media, but not because they're too liberal or too conservative, or too whatever. I accuse them of other things. I accuse them of being lazy and incompetent. Today I'm adding to that list irresponsible.

The National Resources Defense Council a few days ago released a report indicating that more than 5300 communities nationwide, like Flint, Michigan, suffer from some for of lead contamination in their drinking water. The first question I want answered is, do I live in one of those communities?

If you read about this story on CNN or NBC, you wouldn't immediately know. To their credit, CNN, provided a link to instructions for investigating your own water for lead. But instead of linking to the NRDC report with interactive maps that let you zoom in on your part of the country, they created their own static maps that make that difficult.

I don't foolishly think that news organizations exist for the public good. They exist to make money for their owners. The marginal cost of adding a link to a news article in negligible, which is another way of saying it costs them nothing. To leave out links to answers when 18 million people are being poisoned, that's irresponsible.

Everybody’d be Surfing, Surfing Isar Fluss

When you hear the name Munich what comes to mind? The world’s best Lagers? Bier gartens the size of fusball fields? Maybe you’re a history buff and you think of darker things. One thing you won't think of is surfing.

It’s after lunch and the group I’m with leaves the bier garten in Munich’s Englischer Garten. We’ve got some time before our next stop at the Deutsches Museum so some of us decide to walk. One of my companions mentions something she specifically wants to see: a standing wave on the Eisbach, an artificial branch of the Isar fluss (river). It’s here that some locals in this land-locked state practice their surfing skills.

I don’t know much about this and didn’t think to ask any of the surfers at the time. If you’re curious, you can read the wikipedia article. Meanwhile, here are some pictures I took.