Category: Uncategorized

  • Wolfie! A Trip to Salzburg

    Wolfie! A Trip to Salzburg

    It’s summer in Deutschland, and now that we’ve had our first vaccine shot, we feel a bit more comfortable travelling again. It was finally time to head out of Munich for the first time since the Zugspitze last year. And where did we go? Salzburg, Austria.

    On the train

    We actually started the day with a Covid Schnelltest at our local shopping center. Austria has lifted a lot of its restrictions, but we knew that it was important to have a negative test result. By the time we got to the Hauptbahnhof (central train station) 20min later, the results were in our email inboxes. Protip: Bavaria offers a special discount ticket called the Bayern Ticket, which lets you ride regional trains and most public transport through Bavaria. It also gets you to Salzburg, which is about two hours from Munich. The weather forecast was for clouds, but it was a beautiful sunny day as we headed southeast towards the mountains, whizzing through idyllic German villages and rolling green fields…

    First glimpse of Salzburg

    We crossed the Salzach River and got our first glimpse of the Festung Hohensalzburg (“High Salzburg Fortress”) atop the Festungsberg as we pulled into our destination. I had planned some activities based on this blog post, including booking tickets up to the castle. We had a few hours to kill though, so we started by walking to the Altstadt along the river. We crossed over at the Marko-Feingold-Steg, a pedestrian bridge decorated by visitors with thousands of padlocks.

    Snookums on the Marko-Feingold-Steg

    We headed to Getreidegasse (“Grain Lane”), a busy shopping street in the heart of the old town. It’s narrow and historic and super charming, even despite the fact that many of the shops were the same as you’d see in any major city. It was also surprisingly busy, and I found myself feeling a little wary of all the unmasked folks! (It’s been a long lockdown. šŸ™)

    Getreidegasse

    It was lunchtime and we were hungry, so we headed to the Zipfer Bierhaus. We got a table out the back in University Square and enjoyed a couple plates of sausages along with some local Austrian brew…

    Zipfer Bierhaus

    Our next stop was back on Getreidegasse – Mozarts Geburtshaus (Mozart’s birthplace). It was fairly empty at the time, and we enjoyed wandering the rooms andĀ  learning a bit more about his life and his family. Did you know that Mozart’s sister Maria Anna (nicknamed “Nannerl” by the family) was also a musical child prodigy, but because she was a girl, she eventually had to stop touring and performing? (I found myself feeling so angry on her behalf.) I was also surprised to see that pianos in Mozart’s day had the black and white keys reversed!

    Mozarts Geburtshaus

    We ended the tour in the gift shop, of course, where I bought a cool lenticular magnet to add to our collection. They had a TV set up showing scenes from Amadeus, and I confessed to the Snook that I’d never seen it. That was going to have to be rectified, I decided…

    Mozarts Geburtshaus

    And then it was time to head up to the fortress! We caught the Festungsbahn (funicular) up to the top and were greeted with stunning views across the city to the mountains beyond.

    View from Festung Hohensalzburg

    The day was turning out pretty hot, so we headed into the Zeughaus (Armory) Museum to cool off and learn about medieval weaponry. They had a lot of interactive exhibits, including a kiosk where you could picture yourself as a knight. The Snook also enjoyed creating virtual gunpowder and seeing how far he could fire a cannon.

    The real highlight of the Festung is the view over the city. How stunning is this? This is why we came to Europe. ā¤ļø

    Me and Snookums

    It really was quite hot though. šŸ˜… We were also getting tired from all the walking so we caught a quick rest in the shade.

    Catching some shade

    Our tickets also included access to the Prince’s Chambers, the richly appointed staterooms installed by Prince-Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach. My favourite part was the Golden Hall, with its 17m-long beam, carved columns, and decorated ceiling.

    Golden Hall

    And from every window, an amazing view…

    Mountains

    We were really flagging by this point, so we caught the funicular back down to the Altstadt. In need of refreshment, we headed to the nearby Stiegl-Keller where I was delighted to sample their Grapefruit Radler in the rooftop biergarten. What a way to end the day!

    Stiegl-Keller

    We walked back to the Hauptbahnhof and caught the return train to Munich, exhausted and happy. What a perfect day! Can’t wait to do more exploring over the next few months…

    OH! And the first thing we did back in Munich? Watch Amadeus, of course. I loved it. ā¤ļø

  • My first ever GPS art!

    My first ever GPS art!

    The AWS Summit EMEA is coming up next week, and a few of my colleagues created funny videos to drum up excitement. Seb documented his preparations, as did Darko, but a bit more retro. Isa did a super cute one with her pupper Jago, a “Solutions Barkitecht”. šŸ˜‚

    My first impulse was to do something similar for mine, but of course include myself surrounded by knitting projects. But the more I thought about it, the more boring that felt. I knew I really needed to raise the level of creativity.

    Teaser video plan

    And then I had a flash of inspiration – GPS art! This is where you run/walk/cycle a particular path and the GPS path in your tracking app draws a picture. What if I could cycle my way across the AWS logo?? I immediately started searching for an app, hoping there was a way to automatically plan out a route. But guess what? Tech has not cracked this particular problem yet. My only option was to do it the hard way.

    I opened up Google Maps and realised immediately I was going to have a problem. Munich is an old city, and it doesn’t have a nice rectangular grid for its streets. It’s also got the Altstadt (the medieval city center) and a river running right through it, all of which really limited my options. I decided to focus on looking for something suitable for the smile part. It probably took me half an hour to find a nice big curving bit to the south-east. I used the drawing tools in Google’s “My Maps” to draw on the map and plot out the rest of the logo. Not too bad! All I needed then was to join it up into an actual cycling map that I could follow.

    For that I used Strava, which I’ve been using to track my cycling for a few years. It has a feature where you can create your own Routes and it will help plot out the path. I ended up creating it as a “walking” route because that gave me finer-grained control over which streets I could take. (When you select “cycling,” it will push you towards cycleways – which is normally great, but for this I was willing to forego that.) It turns out this caused me one slight issue, which I’ll get to shortly. But pretty quickly I had my route, as well as an estimated distance – 21.8km. Yikes! And that didn’t even include getting from the start/finish to my house. I knew this was going to take me a couple hours to complete.

    On the day of the ride, I had the Snook film me getting ready. I filled up my hydration backpack and wore my new padded cycling pants. Then I was off! I have a mount for my iPhone on the handlebars, which allows me to easily see the map as well as film footage of both the road and my face as I’m riding. Everything went pretty well, until…

    Yeah. My route had me turning left… onto that bridge way above my head. There were stairs, but at that point I was in no state to drag my bike up there. This is the downside to using a walking route! So I had to improvise a bit, going down a side-street and walking my bike along a path to get back onto the route.

    The only other mishap was a wrong turn at the base of the second point on the “w”, which I thankfully caught quickly. Unfortunately Strava doesn’t allow you to remove points afterwards, but it was small enough that it doesn’t really detract. On the upside, I also discovered that when you “pause” tracking on Strava and then “un-pause,” it will draw a straight line between those points. I realised I could use this strategically to create diagonals and smooth out some of the rougher bits along the “s”.

    As I got back to the house, I messaged the Snook to come out and meet me so he could film one final bit of me arriving and saying “I’m getting ready for the AWS Summit. Are you?” I was pretty puffed at that point, and the hydration pack was completely empty. šŸ˜…

    So here’s the final cycling workout!

    Then I used iMovie to cut together all the footage I’d created, along with a final screenshot of the map. I was really pleased with it and sent it to a few folks. One of them loved it and was really enthusiastic, but the other reactions were muted. It was only when I probed them further that I realised they didn’t get it! They weren’t seeing the logo at all. Once I pointed it out they could see it, but without that context it just looked like I was riding around Munich aimlessly for no reason. šŸ˜‚ So I had to do a lot of explaining, including for the lovely marketing folks who cut together the final version with music and graphics.

    Anyway, here it is! My first ever attempt at GPS art. And if you’d like to attend the AWS Summit next week (it’s free!), you can register here: https://amzn.to/3fbS1wA.

     

  • Geimpft!

    Geimpft!

    The Corona situation has been improving in Germany, mainly because the vaccination rate has been steadily increasing. Supply seems to have increased and we even hit 1M vaccinations in a single day! Here in Bavaria the situation is even better. While the big Immunisation Centers are still adhering to strict prioritisation, the local government recently announced that GPs could administer the vaccine regardless of priority groups. Weā€™re at about 40% of the population with one shot, and 13% fully immunised. And thankfully, the Snook and I can now count ourselves among that 40%!

    We were able to get appointments at MVZ Laim through the Doctolib app. The Snook had seen on Reddit that some folks were managing to get appointments there, and he started checking the app periodically. When appointments appeared for Saturday, he jumped on it. Then we debated whether to go through with it or cancel. MVZ were only offering AstraZeneca with a 12-week wait for the second shot (putting us into August for full immunisation). If we cancelled and got an mRNA vaccine, weā€™d be able to get the second shot sooner. Ultimately we decided it was better to have some protection now rather than risk waiting any longer.

    At MVZ there was a steady stream of people in for their vaccinations. We checked in and were happy to find that the staff swiftly switched to English once they heard our accents. We were asked if weā€™d brought our safety waivers (acknowledging the risk of the AZ shot), which we had. Then we were directed into a waiting room. After a few minutes, the doctor called Rodd but realised we were together and brought me in as well. We had forgotten to bring our ā€œImpfung Ausweisā€ (vaccination card), which is a little yellow book where your doctor records all your vaccinations. He instead gave us a form that recorded our first shots and made us promise to bring the Ausweis next time. Then he swiftly gave us the shots in our left arms and directed us to another waiting room for 15 minutes in case we had any adverse reactions. Then we were allowed to head home.

    I honestly teared up a bit when he gave me the shot. I havenā€™t been particularly worried about myself through the pandemic; it was more the thought of how much human ingenuity and hard work and sacrifice had gone into this massive effort around the world. SCIENCE, YEAH! Humanity is amazing. ā¤ļø

    For that first day, I didnā€™t really have any side effects other than perhaps a mild headache. By the evening though, the Snook was responding as he does to any viral infection: fever and chills to the point of teeth chattering. During the night my usual response kicked in, with a fever, muscle aches, and my arm getting very sore. We both spent the next day resting and hydrating. Now on Day 2 weā€™re feeling better, but both of us still have slightly elevated temperatures. Our arms are still sore.

    Still worth it.

  • Letā€™s make Flammkuchen!

    Letā€™s make Flammkuchen!

    A German dish that we really enjoy is Flammkuchen, which is essentially an Alsatian pizza. Itā€™s a common thing you can buy in Biergartens, but you can also make it at home pretty easily!

    Flammkuchen ingredients

    Here are the ingredients you need: pre-made Flammkuchen dough (or you can make your own using this recipe), pesto, crĆØme fraĆ®che, mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, and beer. (Well, actually the beer is just for the chef! šŸŗ)

    CrĆØme fraĆ®che and pesto

    The first step is to mix up the crĆØme fraĆ®che and pesto in a bowl…

    Flammkuchen dough

    Hereā€™s the flammkuchen dough unrolled out on the baking tray. Itā€™s rectangular, but you can also make them circular if youā€™re making your own. The dough comes on baking paper, so you can just bake it right on that.

    Flammkuchen dough with sauce

    Then you spread the crĆØme fraĆ®che and pesto all over the dough.

    Adding cheese

    Next you add the mozzarella. The one I like comes in a single lump and I just tear it up and scatter it around.

    Cherry tomatoes

    Lastly, you add the cherry tomatoes and then season with salt and pepper. Obviously you could put other ingredients on there too – little bacon lardons are pretty popular! Then the whole thing goes in a hot oven for like 15 minutes.

    Flammkuchen

    And hereā€™s the finished Flammkuchen! šŸ•šŸŗ

  • April Cycling Update

    April Cycling Update

    We were still getting snow flurries at the start of April, but as the weeks went by the weather finally started to warm up. I decided it was time to get my butt in gear and make up some ground towards my cycling goal.

    On Easter Sunday I went forĀ  16.7km (10.4mi) ride to the Englischer Garten and back home along the Isar.


    There were so many people in the park for the holiday. I was delighted to pass a little old guy playing the accordion and managed to record a bit as I passed. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the blues and greens of Germany. It’s such a different landscape to back home in Australia! I found this public artwork along the Isar that was a bit of a platform sticking out over the river that you could venture inside.

    A few weeks later I went on another long 20km ride to Olympiapark. The Snook and I had ridden there last November, but this was my first time venturing on my own.

    I really like the particular style they used for the structures at the park. Wikipedia says, “The eye-catching tensile structure that covers much of the park was designed by German architect and engineer Frei Otto with GĆ¼nther Behnisch.” Nice job Frei and GĆ¼nther!

    Olympic Stadium

    I also made a point of visiting the Memorial to the 1972 Olympic Games Massacre. To my surprise, the memorial was only formally opened four years ago in 2017. Unfortunately it appeared to be under renovation, and I couldn’t get any closer than this. The Jewish Museum of Munich has a nice depiction of what it normally looks like

    Memorial

    I left Olympia Park and rode past BMW World, which is evidently the most visited tourist attraction in all of Bavaria. Then I rode through Luitpold Park, which features another giant “hill” created by rubble piled up from WWII bombing attacks on the city. Looks like it would be great for sledding down in winter! I stopped for a photo by the obelisk at one end of the park.

    A couple days later I did a quick 10km loop along the Isar and back…

    The highlight was crossing the Thalkirchner BrĆ¼cke on the way home and discovering the local kayak club out practicing!

    Last weekend I finally gave in and started my Strava subscription trial, which gave me access to routes other people have added. One of them looked pretty fun, a big loop around Nymphenburg Palace and through some suburbs that were new to me. It ended up being another 20km ride!

    We went to Nymphenburg Palace last September but just explored the gardens. This route took me way around the back side of the grounds along the palace wall. Here I am crossing the canal on a little bridge, and you can just see the Palace way, way off in the distance!

    Nymphenburg Palace in the distance

    I’ve been experimenting with taking some photos while I’m riding. My iPhone mount works fine pointing up, but it does cover a little bit of the camera lens when looking forward. Still, you can see the castle wall there and lots of other people out enjoying the sun.

    While riding back through the city towards home, I was delighted to see an honest-to-goodness Goggomobil pass me. The thing looked like a museum piece! Fortunately it got stuck at a stoplight so I was able to pull over and take a quick selfie for the Snook…

    Goggomobil

    Can you tell it was a warm day? I took a bottle of water with me (that’s why I’m wearing a backpack), but I actually finished it long before I got home. I realised that hydration was definitely going to be a limiting factor on these rides, so I ordered myself a backpack with water bladder off Amazon.de.

    Hydration backpack

    This baby holds 2 liters and has a nozzle that clips over my shoulder, so I don’t even have to stop. I was excited to try it out on my longest ride yet. The Snook had told me recently about Komoot, which is another site where you can find recommended riding, running, and hiking routes. I found a route, filled up my backpack, and headed out today for a 30km ride…

    The weather was cool and cloudy, but there wasn’t any rain forecast until the evening so I figured I’d better get out there. I first rode back to Nymphenburg but then turned northwest and meandered through Durchblickpark. “Durchblick” refers to a glance or a view, and apparently the park is so named because you’d have originally been able to see all the way across it from Nymphenburg Palace to my first destination – SchloƟ Blutenburg, a nearly 600-year-old castle on the banks of the river WĆ¼rm.

    Durchblickpark

    See? You can just spot the castle a looooong way in the distance. Eventually I got there and parked my bike so I could look around. The courtyard was open, and took some photos of the apple trees in bloom and the decorated chapel. There was a biergarten outside along the water that was open for takeaway, and there were families enjoying lunch among the flowers.

    I was only about a third of the way into my journey at that point, so I hopped back on my bike and continued along the WĆ¼rm…

    WĆ¼rm

    As with all German rivers, it’s charming AF.

    Soon I left the city behind – I literally passed the sign marking the borders of Munich! – and found myself riding through fields.

    Olympiaturm in the distance

    If you zoom way in, you can see the Olympiaturm way, way off in the distance!

    Pretty soon the fields started to smell strongly, and I wondered if they’d just been fertilised. But then I solved the mystery! We’d been wondering where all the organic food waste goes, and today I found it: a giant “Kompostwerk” just outside of town. (Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural area, I much prefer the smell of compost to manure!)

    Compost!

    My end destination – well, the point where I turned around to head home – was the Langwieder Lake District. I rode under the Autobahn and headed out along the narrow strip of land between the Langwieder See and the LuƟsee, and eventually I came to a little pebbly “beach”. I stopped for a bit to drink some water, eat some trail mix, and send an update to the Snook. It’s a far cry from Aussie beaches, but it seems like it would be nice on a sunny day. I was surprised to learn just now that this whole area was man-made, and the lakes are actually dug out gravel pits from the building of various highways! I’ll have to bring the Snook back here one of these days…

    Beach at the LuƟsee

    And then at last it was time to head home. My legs were feeling pretty tired, as was my bum. (Note to self: look into padded cycling shorts!) I also started to get nervous that my phone battery was going to run out, so I tried to keep the screen off most of the time. My feet and lower legs started to feel a little crampy too. When I was about 5km from the house, I realised I’d missed a turn to get into a cycling path and stopped to do a U-turn. As I slowed to turn and head back the other direction, I turned the wheel too far and was slow getting my foot under me, so… I stacked it! Fell right over. šŸ˜‚ Only a few scratches, and of course my dented pride. It was bound to happen eventually.

    Stacked it!

    I was really running on fumes by the time I got back to our neighbourhood, and I was so tired I walked my bike up over the DonnersbergerbrĆ¼cke. I definitely think I tested my limits today, both my fitness and my iPhone battery!

    Strava goal status

    So that’s the current goal status: 204km for the year, which is 127.4km behind where I need to be to hit 1000km for 2021. I racked up a lot of miles in April though, so if I can keep it up, I reckon I might be able to catch up by the time we get to Summer! šŸš“ā€ā™€ļø

  • Let’s make Rouladen!

    Let’s make Rouladen!

    When you’re living the expat life, I don’t see a lot of point in only eating the things you did back home. If you didn’t want to try new things, what was the point of leaving in the first place? When I did a semester in London in college, I remember one girl would only eat from American fast food restaurants, and I was livid that she took a spot from someone that would have appreciated the experience more. I swore that would never be me. So when we got to Germany, I spent some time researching classic German dishes that we could try to recreate.

    Rouladen was one of the first*, and I’ve made them several times since. They’re rolled up beef parcels with bacon, onions, mustard, and pickles. Um, YUM. After my first attempt, I bought special Rouladennadeln, little metal skewers you can use to secure the rolls without having to tie them with string. I figured I’d document in case you’d like to try it yourself!

    Ingredients

    I’ve used a few different recipes I found online, but the most recent was this one from Edeka (our local supermarket). In addition to the beef (more of that in a second), the main ingredients are mustard, pickles, onions, sliced streaky bacon (I used this thin smoked ham), carrot, parsnip (or “parsley root”), leeks (I subbed in some very chunky green onions), and celery (mine is defrosting as the Snook likes to freeze pre-chopped baggies of it).

    Rouladen

    Here’s the beef itself. My understanding is that it’s slices of topside or silverside. Pretty much every German meat counter has a hunk of beef sitting there marked “Rouladen” and the butcher will happily slice off bits for you. My local store actually has pre-sliced bits wrapped up in cellophane, so I grabbed four of them. They were so large that I actually sliced them in half, into 8. If your slices are thick you can pound them thinner, but these were close enough to the recipe’s 0.5cm that I didn’t bother.

    Prepping the Rouladen

    You start by spreading some mustard on each of the pieces of beef, then sprinkling with salt and pepper. Then you layer on the bacon, onions, and pickle. Technically this recipe wants you to slice the onion, but I misread and minced mine as a previous recipe had had me do. I think I’ll try the slicing next time, as I’m guessing it’s easier to keep the onion inside when you roll them up. For the pickle I sliced each one into quarters. Another recipe also had me used thin carrot sticks too, but this one left them out.

    Rouladennaden

    Those are my Rouladennadeln (roulade needles). Fun, huh? Time to roll up the Rouladen.

    Rolled up Rouladen

    Look, I’m obviously not a 70-year-old Bavarian Grandmother who’s been doing this her whole life, but I’m pretty proud of this, okay? šŸ˜Š You can also tie them up with kitchen string, or use toothpicks to secure. (That’s what I did the first time, but it’s hard to keep the toothpicks from breaking.)

    Prepping veg

    Now to prep the veg. Everything is chopped up into little bits.

    Browning the Rouladen

    Now it’s time to brown the Rouladen in some oil. I used our cast-iron casserole, but you could also just use a big pot. I only did a few at a time and tried to let them get a nice bit of crust.

    Cooking the veg

    Once you’ve browned the meat and set it aside, you dump all the veg in the pot and cook it until it softens.

    Final ingredients

    You need a few final ingredients: tomato paste, red wine, and beef stock. You add the tomato paste to the veg and cook for a bit, then deglaze with the wine. Then you stir in the stock.

    Sauce

    Nice rich sauce for our Rouladen!

    Meat back in the pot

    The Rouladen go back into the pot, and the whole thing simmers with a lid on for 45-60 minutes at low heat.

    Cooking down the sauce

    When the Rouladen are done cooking, you pull them out and place them in the oven to keep warm. Then you strain the veg out of the sauce (and chuck it away!), and let it boil down a little to thicken.

    Adding butter

    And because “hey, why the hell not, we’re in Germany!”, you further thicken the sauce by whisking in 100g of cold butter cubes. Hells yeah.

    Finished Rouladen

    Now you can put the Rouladen back in the sauce before serving. I also pulled out the Rouladennadeln at this point.

    Rouladen

    And that’s it! Traditional German Rouladen.** We served it with steamed carrots and a bit of mashed potato (which had some leftover cabbage mixed in). Very tasty!

    * Funny story: I happily announced in a team meeting after my first attempt at this that I’d made “Rolladen” and everybody started laughing. Rolladen are… Venetian blinds. Yeah, don’t mix up the terms. šŸ˜‚

    ** I’m sure this is one of those things where there are a million regional variations, so if you’re upset that mine didn’t adhere to your family’s tradition, send me a recipe and I’ll try yours out!

  • Coming soon…

    It’s that time of year again…

  • Lockdown Thoughts

    Weā€™ve been in lockdown since December. Everythingā€™s closed. So much for doing something every weekend, huh? Thereā€™s nowhere to go. We could rent a car and drive somewhere, but thereā€™s no restaurants or hotels or museums or shops and itā€™s winter so the weather is crappy and weā€™re not really outdoorsy people anyway.

    I havenā€™t left the house in a week.

    People ask me if Iā€™ve adjusted to life here yet. I guess so? Hard to say. Havenā€™t been able to practice much German besides the meat counter at the supermarket.

    Work is fine. I like my team. But Iā€™ve just hit five months in my new role, which means Iā€™m due to hit the wall. Itā€™s a common thing at AWS. You start, and everything is hectic and exciting while you do your onboarding, and then at some point youā€™re like, ā€œWTF have I gotten myself into??ā€ šŸ˜‚ Thatā€™s probably contributing to my mood. I know I just need to push through and the cycle will restart. Iā€™ve got two open roles Iā€™m recruiting, and a bunch of new goals for the year, and training to complete, and certifications to get, and requests for mentoring and conference talks and projects and and…

    Weā€™ve watched all the Jeopardy on Netflix. I liked season two of The Mandalorian, but Iā€™m not fully au fait with the Filoni-verse yet. WandaVision is REALLY good. I loved Guillermoā€™s arc on What We Do in the Shadows. We also watched the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, because some Buzzfeed articles said it was like Bridgerton, but it is NOT. (Itā€™s still good, but thereā€™s no sex and did Dickens really use spontaneous combustion as a plot point??) I binged season 2 of Blown Away in one day, and Iā€™m still convinced A) Iā€™d like to try glass blowing someday, and B) I will burn myself badly when I do. I still have a couple eps of Bojack Horseman left, but frankly, I donā€™t think I can handle it right now. Instead I watched Bling Empire and now I follow a bunch of hot Koreans on Instagram. (ITā€™S MY HERITAGE YOU GUYS.)

    My knitting Twitch experiment is still going, and itā€™s pretty fun. I recently got ā€œraidedā€ by another (more popular) knitting stream and suddenly had 40 people all chatting. That was amazing; felt like being at a Guild meeting again. If I start early enough on Sundays, I can catch some of my Aussie friends too.

    We had snow last week and that was pretty. I cracked myself up falling down on the way to the grocery store. Then the snow all melted. Now itā€™s just gray and damp.

    My grandmas in the US have managed to get vaccinated, as have some friends and family members who are health care workers and teachers. I love seeing people share it on FB. Sadly, Iā€™ve had lots of US family members come down with Covid, and so far one extended family member has died from it. Germany is vaccinating, but not as fast as theyā€™d like. Now theyā€™re investigating the Russian vaccine. Maybe weā€™ll end up getting that one?

    My attention span is so shot. I havenā€™t finished a book in ages, but Iā€™ve literally read hundreds of Aziraphale/Crowley fanfics on Ao3. (Protip: the ā€œpiningā€ tags are the best. Skip the AUs.) Hermione/George is now 100% headcanon too.

    We have a reservation at Osteria Francescana in two months, but at this point, it looks unlikely we will go. Even if the restaurant and the border are open, we might have to quarantine and do I really want to be those people who risk life and limb for an expensive meal? Iā€™d be too ashamed to share it on social media, and then whatā€™s the point??

    Kidding.

    (Not really.)

    I miss my friends back in Sydney. I didnā€™t think moving would make much of a difference, what with texting and Hangouts and everything, and the fact that we were in lockdown for months anyway. But it turns out the real problem isnā€™t solved by technology – itā€™s time zones. Iā€™ve become crepuscular, feeling happiest in the morning and late at night when I can actually talk to people back home.

    Iā€™m annoying myself here. Is there anything more boring than someone privileged whining about a situation they voluntarily entered into?

    Iā€™ll be fine, I swear.

  • Bavaria Park in the snow

    Me: The park looks so pretty! I know; Iā€™ll make a video. So peaceful… and tranquil… andā€”STACKED IT. TWICE.

    (Non-Aussies: That means I fell on my ass. Iā€™m fine. šŸ˜‚)

  • The Snook Talks Coffee

    The Snook Talks Coffee

    I’ve been promising for a while now to get the Snook to write a blog post about his new coffee machine, and I also recently realised that I left coffee out of my cost of living post. So rather than continue to nag him (he hates writing), I decided the easiest thing to do would be to just interview him! We spoke for nearly an hour, and I’ve transcribed the relevant bits below for you. Enjoy…

    Okay. You have a lot of different ways of making coffee. Let’s start with the obvious…

    We had an espresso machine back in Australia – a Gaggia Classic. I bought it around 2008, and I had it serviced a few times. I had the insides completely replaced at least once because I didn’t descale it properly. And we used that with a Sunbeam Cafe Series conical burr grinder.

    So what did you like about those? Why did you pick that combination?

    Price, mostly. I had bought a cheaper grinder from Kmart – I remember it had a tagline: “Grinds perfectly from French press to finest Turkish coffee” or something. And I got it, and it couldn’t even grind fine enough for an espresso machine. So I called Customer Support. They said, “Oh, yeah, we know, take it back; we’ll give you your money back.” So I did, and I got the Sunbeam. It was basically the cheapest decent conical burr grinder that you could get.

    As for the Gaggia, I got a good deal on that. The main thing I wanted was the commercial size group head, the 58mm basket. I always make double shots. We’d mainly buy beans from Toby’s; occasionally from a few other places like Mecca, or Campos, or Coffee Alchemy.  We also bought supermarket beans occasionally, and there are some that are not too bad. The Aldi ones in Australia are quite well regarded; they’re roasted by Veneziano in Melbourne. I tried the Dark Roast and it was a bit too oily, but they had some Medium and some Single Origins that were very decently priced.

    But you didn’t bring that machine to Munich…

    No. I was thinking about upgrading it anyway, so I figured it was a good time. We’ve passed it on to our friend Rory.

    Okay. So we’ll get on to the new espresso machine in a bit. But in addition to the espresso machine, the other method you used most frequently was the AeroPress, right?

    Yeah, AeroPress was pretty much the backup if the espresso machine crapped out or needed to go in for a service. Did you buy me the AeroPress?

    I feel like your mother did… I’m the one that broke your AeroPress.

    Well, you lost a piece. I’d take it to work occasionally, and I think you took it to work a few times, and that’s when you lost a piece. Yeah, AeroPress is great. Mum bought me the Able steel filter disk for it as well, so I didn’t have to buy new paper ones. Yeah, I like that a lot and I brought that with us here; we were using that for a while. It’s light and portable. And it does pretty well with different grinds of coffee; it was doing all right with the supermarket coffee here.

    I also bought a very cheap plastic drip cone filter on one of my trips to the US because I needed some decent coffee and I found a place in San Francisco and bought it. You get the filter paper and you pour through that. And I like that one sometimes for different coffees, or if you have a light roast coffee. I feel like it gives a slightly different character of coffee to the espresso, even when you water down the espresso as a long black. The filter makes it a little different. There’s a few different types of the conical filter: there’s flat bottom ones, but I think the one I have is most like a “V60”. I travel with that one because it’s extremely light and basically indestructible. You do have to buy filters for it, but they’re very cheap and pretty much universal. It’s very forgiving of the grind as well. With the filter, if there are a lot of “fines” in there, it doesn’t go into the cup.

    Also in Sydney I left behind the moka pots. We had at least two; maybe three. I had a little tiny one-cup one with a spout to take camping but I think I lost that years ago. I also had the small Vev Vigano moka pot, which I used to use quite a bit, an aluminium one. And I also ended up with a large one that was my grandmother’s. My grandfather picked up the habit of drinking coffee in America or Canada and so they always had the stovetop moka pot.

    A moka pot is basically a stovetop espresso machine, right?

    Sort of. It doesn’t get anywhere near the pressure of an espresso machine; just the pressure required to push the the water up through the coffee. It’s very popular in Italy as a substitute for espresso that you can make at home with cheap equipment. But the problem with that is we got an induction stove. The ones I have are all aluminium, and so they don’t work on induction. They do sell little steel plates so you can use them, and you can get stainless steel pots too. They’re great for camping because they’re fairly robust and self-contained, and they work well over gas flame or a fire. And they don’t require a separate kettle. If you take an AeroPress or a pourover filter, you still have to carry a kettle.

    We also had a French press which we rarely used…

    I’ve never been a fan of French press. I don’t know if I’m doing it wrong, but I always end up with too much mud in my cup. There’s this guy on YouTube, James Hoffman, all the Redditors love him. He’s the guru of modern home coffee making. And he has a special technique for the French press where you don’t press it. Pressing forces the grinds through the filter, whereas if you just let the water flow there’s less pressure against the sieve and it’s less likely to leak coffee grinds into the cup. He also brews for a very long time, I think. It’s nice, I think, for like an after dinner coffee, when you bring it to the table for a group. It’s also another one that’s useful for travel, like if you’ve got a place where there’s hot water, like a Zip Tap or something like that, and you’ve got a group of people, it’s easy to make a big pot. With AeroPress, it only makes a couple of cups at a time.

    All right, so we came Germany, and we needed to buy a machine…

    Yeah, so we were using the pourover and the AeroPress for a while, but I wanted to buy a new espresso machine.

    Why not a pod machine? Everybody’s got the coffee pods now. I think you have a problem with the pod machines, right?

    I have a list of problems with the pod machines. Firstly, the wastefulness of the packaging. I think some of them are starting to address this with, like, biodegradable capsules. I’ve also seen little mesh K-cups that you can refill with your own coffee, but I haven’t seen anything like that for Nespresso. A lot of them are proprietary. There is a generic style that you can get from different brands, but I’m pretty sure that at least one of the manufacturers got in trouble for producing a version of their machine that was DRMed so you couldn’t use a third party or reusable cup in it.

    Another thing that’s wrong with them – not enough coffee. I think the most any of them have in them is about 7 grams, whereas I use 18g, and your average cafe is going to use 18-20g. So to get a decent cup of coffee you’ve got to use two of them anyway, which makes them obscenely expensive per cup compared to supermarket ground coffee. Also, with those machines if you ask for the “long coffee,” all they can do is push more water through the coffee which overextracts and tastes bad. If I have to use one, I use the smallest setting possible and then top up with hot water separately.

    What about the coffee itself? The freshness of it?

    I think that’s the one thing they got right. By single dosing and sealing in with nitrogen, you do keep the freshness of the coffee better than other methods. It’s certainly better than having a jar of pre-ground coffee in your cupboard that you spoon out into your machine every day, which gets stale the day after you open it.

    What’s that little rubric you used to tell me about coffee beans?

    Green coffee beans are good for three years. Roasted coffee beans are good for three weeks. Ground coffee is good for three minutes. And an espresso shot should be drunk in 30 seconds.

    For the new machine and grinder – how much research did you do? Did you know ahead of time that’s what you wanted?

    I did a bit of research and knew what features I wanted. The r/espresso subreddit has a spreadsheet that basically lists all of the more popular machines by what features they have. I went with the simpler end of what I wanted.

    The things that I was missing from the Gaggia that I particularly wanted were: PID temperature control. So instead of just a simple thermostat, it’s predictive. It basically means that thing predicts that, “Oh, the temperature is dropping. I’m going to have to turn on my heating element now to make sure it doesn’t drop below the threshold.” So not like a bang-bang thermostat.  It’s slightly cleverer, and it holds a more steady temperature.

    Also, the Gaggia Classic is notorious for having quite a small boiler. And the temperature would fluctuate, and so people do things like “temperature surfing” when you turn on the steam function which boosts the temperature up, and then turn it off and wait, to try to trick it into keeping a consistent temperature. And the main point of that is mostly about consistency, especially if you’re making two coffees in a row, that they come out the same. And I was noticing that with the old one – I’d make our coffees in that morning, and I’d do yours first and then do mine, with the same grind and everything, but they would pour very differently. So I wanted that temperature control.

    And the other thing is a pressure gauge. The standard for espresso is nine bar (nine atmospheres of pressure). Having a pressure gauge lets you know that the machine is right, and that your grind is right, because the pressure will go higher if you choke up the machine. The way these machines work is they have a pump which can produce a certain pressure at a certain flow rate. Then they have a valve – and the Gaggia Classic has this, and I did try to twiddle mine but without a gauge it’s very hard to get right – and once the pressure goes above a certain amount, it actually starts to bleed off pressure by bleeding water off back into the reservoir. So it caps out the pressure, which is a safety feature to keep it from blowing out somewhere. But if you don’t put enough coffee, or you grind it too coarsely, it can’t build up enough pressure and the water just flows through the coffee. And so if your gauge needle doesn’t go high enough, you know you’re not doing it right. You can use that to spot problems with the grind. Sometimes the water will channel through the puck, and you’ll see the needle drop suddenly. It’s just another input that you can watch.

    So those were the two features that I particularly wanted. There’s a few other considerations, like whether you have a boiler or a heat exchanger. And there are a few things that I ruled out. You can get home machines that have a built-in grinder. I’m not a fan. It saves some space perhaps, but the problem with anything where you’ve integrated two functions is, what happens if part of it breaks, or you want to upgrade part of it?

    What about a milk frother?

    They all come with a milk frother (or steam wand) these days. There’s basically a couple ways of doing it. The Gaggia Classic, as well as the first one that I considered, the Lilet Victoria, are single boiler. They have a water tank which goes into the boiler, which gets to a certain temperature. And they have a switch which you can flip and it goes from the coffee brewing temperature (which is a little below boiling) to the steam making temperature (which is above boiling, because you need to get pressure of steam). So you can’t do both at the same time. If you want to switch backwards and forwards, you have to wait. The other way to do it is with a second boiler, but we don’t really drink steam milk coffees, so I didn’t initially consider it. That wasn’t really a feature that I was particularly looking for, to have two boilers.

    There is a third way, which is for machines with a heat exchanger, where they don’t actually store a reservoir of water. They just have a block that heats to a certain temperature and then you run the water through it. You still have to switch those between the two modes, but they are much quicker because you don’t have the water. There’s a few machines like this – Lilet make one called the Mara X; it’s very fancy and retro-looking with all the knobs. I prefer the midcentury styling of the Lilet Victoria that the Gaggia Classic has as well. It’s brushed stainless steel; it’s fairly smooth on the outside; it fits in a cubic footprint without pipes hanging off the sides; it doesn’t have knobs to turn. I’m not a huge fan of the look of the machines with all the bits hanging off them.

    So I was looking at the Lilets and the Victoria, and I made a post on Reddit asking what people thought about it, and I did some more reading. One thing I found was, they have an option for pre-infusion, which is where it gives a little bit of water into the coffee before it really engages the pump and makes the drink. Again, it’s mostly about consistency. It lets the coffee get evenly wet, so when you turn on the pressure it’s less likely to channel through or not fully extract the coffee. Some machines – the E61 Group Head ones – do this with a lever; you can let some water in and engage the pump. It’s very traditional to have pre-infusing with espresso, and the very first machines would kind of do it automatically. The single boiler Victoria uses the pump to do this, and I saw some videos showing that the pressure would jump right up to the full 8-9 bar and then drop down, and people were kind of worried that this would create a suction effect that could mess up the surface of your coffee puck. Whereas the two boiler machines use the steam pressure, which is about about 4 bar, to push a little bit of water from the steam boiler into the coffee, and then switches over to the coffee boiler to finish the job. And these Lilet machines have a microcontroller in them so you can set the temperature, the pre-infusion time, and other parameters. So you have a lot of control, and I thought that might be fun to fiddle around with.

    The other feature of the double boiler sort that kind of sold me on it was that it has a hot water dispenser, like the machines in cafes. We drink a lot of long blacks – that’s my favourite – and it means you don’t have to boil the kettle separately. Here in Munich the water is very hard, and so the kettle chalks up very easily. And so you can feed demineralised water into the coffee machine, and only have to worry about that in one place. That sold me on getting a double boiler model.

    So which one did we get?

    The Lilet Elizabeth. The style is nice – it’s got clean lines. It has some upsides and downsides. One thing that I like that it has over the Victoria is auto shut-off. They both have a timer to time a shot. But on the cheaper one, it’s just a countdown. You have to turn it off. On this one, if I set it to 30 seconds, it will turn off after 30 seconds. Once it’s dialled in, I can put the cup, hit it, and then walk away and finish making my breakfast. I’m lazy and I like automation, so I’m a big fan of that feature.

    Another thing – it’s a cute gimmick, but the group handle is designed in such a way that when you sit it down on the table, it’s flat. Most of them have prongs, and the handle comes out the side, so if you sit it on the table, it’ll tilt backwards. And when you want to tamp it to get it straight, you’ve got to use a holder or hold it straight. But on this one the handle kind of slopes away a little bit as well, so if you just put it on the table flat, you can tamp straight down and know it’s not going to be uneven. Like I said, it’s a cute gimmick, but I like it.

    The microprocessor controls are very good, and the coffee that it makes is very nice. So I’m very happy with the Elizabeth so far.

    You mentioned the hard water here. How do you handle that?

    The machine came with an ion-exchange cartridge that you can put into the reservoir and attach to the end of the hose, and it just sucks through that. You can get replacements of those; I think with our water here the cartridge would do about 35 liters before you have to change it, maybe even less. And they’re not cheap. Someone pointed out that Brita filters in Germany, and Europe anyway, in hard water areas, they sell one that does de-ionising. The ones you normally get in Australia I don’t think do. But the Brita MAXTRA+ ones you get here can demineralise like 100L of water and it’s much cheaper per liter than the built in one. So we do that. People here have told me they use the Brita filtered water in theirs and they’ve never had to descale it!

    You got a new grinder too. What did you get there?

    The old Sunbeam grinder was a conical burr grinder. A burr grinder is basically a mill that has two pieces that are held a certain distance apart which you can adjust. You can get conical burr and flat burr. Flat burrs are bigger so tends to be more commercial use; most home ones are conical because you get more grinding surface in less space. One thing I didn’t like about the old one was that it retained a lot of coffee. So the beans come into the cone, and then they had to go out to the side, and a lot of them would get caught up along the way, and so you’d have to whack the machine to get the coffee to come out. Obviously it also keeps a lot of stale crap in there from the day before. It also generated a lot of static electricity and the coffee would often fly around all over the kitchen. And it was getting old – the hopper didn’t come off any more without spilling beans. It also wasn’t super adjustable, like it was getting to the point where between two clicks it would be too coarse or too fine. It had about 20 “steps”. It wasn’t a bad grinder; it had these little shims or washers if you disassembled it where you could adjust the static offset so that the steps would cover a different range. It served us well for many years.

    There are a few trends in espresso grinders at the moment. There’s one that’s very, very popular at the moment called the Niche Zero. It’s this ugly looking alien thing, but it’s supposed to be very good, and the price is not too bad as far as fancy grinders go. It’s set up for only single dosing. You weigh the beans for one cup and grind all of them. It doesn’t have a hopper. A lot of people like this because it means you can know how much coffee is going in and out; and you can try different types of coffee very easily from day to day, or between morning and afternoon, or if different people have different tastes or one wants decaf. But the Niche Zero only has the single dosing; you can’t put a hopper on it. And I thought the idea of having to weigh out the beans every time might get a little tedious. So I was looking for something that could do automated dosing.

    The other one I looked at was the Baratza Sette, which contrary to what the name might suggest, is an American grinder. It’s called “sette” because the body is kind of a “7” shape. The hopper sits on the top of the seven and it basically grinds straight through to the void underneath. The idea there is that because the coffee goes straight through instead of going out to the side, it retains very little. Everything falls through. It’s also very fast; it has a larger burr, so it can grind your 18g of coffee in just a few seconds. I heard though that it’s also extremely loud. It’s fast, but because the burr is kind of out of the open, it’s very loud. It does have some fancy features; one of the models has some computer-controlled machine learning based  weighing mechanism where you tell it how many grams you want and it learns how long to grind to get to that exact weight. Which is very fancy, but you pay a lot for the privilege. It is very adjustable; there’s one that has 270 steps(!). It has 30 clicks and then each one has, like, nine subranges for very fine adjustment. I was very keen on that one, but then I was asking around on Reddit and someone suggested the one that I ended up buying, which was the Eureka Mignon Specialita.

    Eureka is an Italian brand and they make several different types of grinders. They’re pretty traditional – hopper on the top, goes through a conical burr, coffee shoots out the front. It’s what’s called a “stepless,” so there aren’t clicks. There’s a little screw you can adjust as much or as little as you like. It’s quiet, as much as a grinder can be. It’s also remarkably fast. The 18g shot I do takes about 10 seconds with the coffee that I have at the moment, which is pretty good. It also has a nice holder for the portafilter (the basket on the handle). You can put it in and it’ll just stay there and it’ll grind straight into that. It’s a very solid traditional style of grinder, but cubical, like a square prism, a bit modern. It comes in fun colours so I got a red one to match our kitchen back in Australia.

    The machine has timer based dosing, with two presets and a free running mode. (The espresso machine has two presets as well you can program.) So far I’ve found it works pretty well. It does what it says. However, it’s pretty limited to making espresso. I think you can get a little container to catch the grind, but it doesn’t come with one. They expect you to grind straight into the basket. Also, because of the way the stepless adjustment works – the screw will rotate multiple times, and it’s got numbers 0 to 10, but you might need to turn multiple times to get between settings – so switching backwards and forwards between two settings is kind of difficult, to remember how many times you’ve turned it. So once you’ve got it dialled in, you don’t want to adjust it too much.

    I’ve been pleasantly surprised that it can do single dosing very well. If the hopper’s empty and you just pour one dose of beans in, it works well. The retention is very low; what you put in, you pretty much get out every time. There’s also a thing called “popcorning” where the beans have a tendency to fly up in the air instead of going through the grinder. The old grinder would definitely do that a lot, and this one is much less. It also has a little a little gate you can shut off to close the hopper, like if you needed to remove the hopper. But you could also use that to kind of cap over them – as the level of the beans drops below the gate, you close it and that stops them from bouncing. It does take a little longer to run a single dose of beans – it takes about 12 seconds, as opposed to 10 when the hopper’s full.

    What do you think about the quality of the coffee beans in Germany so far? Were you worried about it?

    A little bit. But I figured Munich is a bit of a hipster city – maybe not as much as some of the other cities in Germany – but I figured there’d be some decent local roasters. And Germany is a coffee drinking country, rather than tea, so there’s a lot available. We were drinking the supermarket coffee for the first few weeks and it was surprisingly good, better than American supermarket coffee.

    Prices varies a lot here. There’s a place here called Man Versus Machine that a lot of people recommend. It’s extremely hipster. It’s also eye-wateringly expensive. But we’ve tried a few local places. There’s a place ten minutes’ walk from here called Gang und GƤbe that’s a cafe with a roaster in it. They’re doing a couple of blends which are reasonably priced and quite tasty. In Australia at Toby’s we could get 200g bags of beans for $12.50 (though other places would be 250g bags); or their 400g deal of two bags for $20. During lockdown when we were going out less, I was buying their bigger 500g bags for $28, I think.

    And so how does the price compare here?

    Well, it varies. I found another place run by a Colombian family that does mostly Colombian beans, but they also source from other places as well. Their beans are very reasonable. I bought a kilo from them to tide us over the Christmas and New Year’s period and it was something like ā‚¬18-19,  freshly roasted there in the shop. That’s about $28 AUD, so half the price of Toby’s (if you buy by the kilo). There are also some larger local roasteries that you can get that supply the local cafes. The supermarket here has one roasted in a neighbouring city and that’s like ā‚¬12-13 for 500g. We’ve bought that a few times because it’s convenient, and it’s mostly been okay. We had one bag that seemed a bit too dark for your taste, and I tried one of their single origin lighter roasts and I didn’t care for it much.

    Okay, we’ve talked about coffee and water and machines… There is one final adjustment you made to your machine. You made it “smart”!

    Well, that’s right. So there’s a few things about the new espresso machine that are maybe less than satisfactory. The water tank is small, and I have to fill it fairly frequently. It probably could have been bigger. That’s partly because we do the long blacks so I’m pulling two cups of boiling water out every day. It’s also quite noisy. The pump is quite noisy, and when you use the water dispenser, the pump that refills the boiler runs for a very long time. If you take five or six seconds to dispense the water, the pump will run for like 20 seconds to fill it up again. It’s obviously pulling water in a lot slower than it can pump water out. And the other thing is, it does take a while to heat up. This style, I think, heats up more quickly than other styles, and it probably heats up just as quickly as the Gaggia did, but this one won’t let you make coffee until it’s decided that it’s hot enough. Whereas I suspect that I was making coffee with the Gaggia before it was ready. The light would go out saying it had reached temperature, but it would oscillate on and off because it was a fairly simple thermostat. This one is a little bit smarter. The gauge will get to 95 degrees, which is what I have the temperature set to, but it will still wait quite a while. It basically  takes about 10 minutes to get to full temperature. So especially in the morning, you want your coffee right away. That means I needed a way to turn it on remotely.

    I ended up getting some smart plugs from IKEA. They’re Zigbee based ones and quite good, fairly inexpensive. So basically, I leave the switch on the coffee machine on, and it’s controlled by the smart plug. The smart plug actually comes with a little wireless mechanical switch which is magnetic. So that sticks to the body of the coffee machine quite nicely so I can actually still turn it on and off with a switch on the side, just not the main built-in one. And more importantly, I can turn it on remotely in the morning when I wake up. The IKEA system has an optional base station that bridges it to wifi and has an app. I think theoretically it could’ve worked with the Zigbee base station in the Amazon Echo Plus, but that would lock us out of controlling it with the Google Home too. Instead I’ve integrated it into our Home Assistant instance which is running in a Docker Container. It was super easy to add to Home Assistant. It’s a totally open protocol, and Home Assistant now sees all the IKEA devices as its own devices. And then you can add in support for Google Home or Alexa, and you can turn on the coffee machine by voice.

    Is it time for a coffee?

    Okay Google. Turn on the coffee machine!