Welcome to Veitch Munich

Hello folks,

 As the snow storm called "petra" falls all around Germany, I'm finally getting to sit down and start writing about this adventure I've embarked on. Living in a foreign culture (as if Woodstock isn't I suppose) seeing how things are handled outside the States, meeting people from many different countries and sharing our inability to speak German. It's pretty cool so far.

Zoe is having a great time too as you can see above-feeding the ducks is one of her favorites as she waits for her piece of stale bread patiently and totally ignores the ducks. Across the street from the apartment is the largest urban park in Europe- The English Garden-larger than Central Park, and dog heaven, hiker heaven, bike heaven-just plain heaven. Laced with trails of all sorts, fast moving "canals" built in the 1700's, wooden bridges, giant trees, the mighty Isar River to the east, it's truly remarkable and very well maintained as is everything I've seen here in Germany.

The large green "balls" in some of the trees in the Park are actually Mistletoe that lives in the trees. Not sure how it does this of if it is doing any damage to the trees. In big wind storms, it comes falling to the ground in giant clumps.Very different.


To learn more about the English Garden, try 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englischer_Garten

Everything, or nearly everything, is recycled. In addition to having bins for paper and compost at each house, these large bins for glass,metal,plastic etc. are found on nearly every block of every street. Super convenient and of course, efficient. All the plastic wrapping we in the States throw out gets recycled here. Every leaf is picked up by the city from the streets and hauled away to be composted. (this picture was taken before they came through with crews raking and piling and hauling away.)

Grocery stores provide no free bags-you either bring your own or purchase a sturdy reusable bag for about 30cents. Organic food, called "Bio" is everywhere and very common. US meat is apparently kept out of the country as it contains banned antibiotics, steroids, or something of that ilk. Milk contains no BST-bovine growth hormones-many of the veggies, when not grown locally, appear to come from Italy. Chocolate is cheap and really great too!

This is called the "Victrolian Markt" and is a sort of year around farmers market with locally produced meats, cheeses, breads, veggies, wines, everything. It's right in the center of the City and is huge-40-50 various stalls that look to be permanent fixtures. Menus in many restaurants will have a small insignia next to locally grown menu items and a lot of effort is being put into the "eat local organic" campaign. All- organic groceries are fairly common.