beer bath in karlovy vary

they added hops and malt to karlovy vary's famous water....   so it wasn't LITERALLY a beer bath... but it sure felt luxurious and decadent...   and we drank quite a bit of local beer while we were there....
lovely!

christmas concert duet with uli

we sang "baby it's cold outside"... lotsa fun!

another photo from our trip to prague

here we are at the border between germany and the czech republic: no passport request, no guards, just a marker. ain't the EU grand!?

a week in ireland: the buddha and a leprechaun walk into a bar

there's gotta be a joke that starts off this way...
we saw many more leprechauns than buddhas in ireland. many gardens have cute little leprechaun statues, just as many german gardens have cute gnomes.
we were quite lucky in terms of weather: how often do tourists return from ireland with a suntan?
music everywhere, and literary references, too. our favourite event was a literary pub crawl in dublin, hosted by two actors who did short scenes from plays, and recited poems etc.
and i found several beers with much more character than guiness.
yes, guinness tastes better in ireland than it does when exported; but there are some craft micro-brews which have more hops and therefore more flavour. smooth is good, but REAL beer should be gnarly.

oscar wilde and a pal of his invited me for a chat. you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose....

bike ride! leipzig to prague

my good buddy randall had never taken his two boyz on a long-distance bike tour. we decided it was time to get them started, so we planned a trip here in germany and the czech republic.
they rode like champs!
we averaged around seventy kilometers per day on a five-day ride. we spent the first two days getting over to the Elbe river, and then followed it upstream to prague.
our first night's hostel was in a castle atop a hill. colditz is famous as the site of a WW2 prison camp for british officers.
some of our roads were rough, some perfectly smooth. very little interaction with cars: huzzah!

sinter klaas

here is my latest costume-clad role: sinter klaas makes his rounds on december sixth. the cartoon shows how he looks in a kids' book....

fear the beard

all right, it doesn't have anything to do with the Giants... but the beard was pretty awesome, no?

this beverage was available at a recent "viking camp" associated with leipzig's famous Goth Festival.
for them what cain't understand deutsch... it is HEMP MEAD....   yes, folks, honey wine flavoured with hemp seeds...    pretty tasty...  no psycho-active effects...

miko as jacob in "joseph"

has it really been three months since we performed "joseph and the amazing technicolored dreamcoat"?
it was great fun; and we sold out all three performances....

after i stopped shaving, the horns grew back

local booze

some of my favourite exotic local beverages. odin trunk is honey beer. satan gold is a strong beer, quite full of hops. met is mead: there are mead-makers at the local tuesday market and the medieval fairs all have several meadmakers selling their wares. the hirschblut (deer-blood) is fruit wine. i confess i bought it because of the devils! [on some browsers it is necessary to klick the photo and bring it into a new window in order to see the whole thing...]

      mega biblios, mega kakos....

i think i shouldn't put up anything current until i post this great shot from the local park: this is from february, but i keep neglecting this task... so now to catch up!

winter has come... (and gone already)

we had some excellent snow, and people were skating on the canals and ponds... but this is all just memories. it was a short winter. there was no snow at christmas, but it came in late january, even after my birthday. but two weeks of frozen canals and now we seem to have spring, although there are no buds nor crocuses yet...

solstice @ labyrinth

a night of music-making in the chapel

stelios knows this region well, and so he invited us all to go camping next to a sweet little chapel on the hillside above the town where he was busking. we played tunes and made up stuff for a few hours. we unfortunately had neglected to buy wine, so the energy of the party was somewhat compromised without the influence of dionysos...


i played finger cymbals...



and i turned the lectern into a drum.... mary surprised herself by playing the bouzouki well... i think it was her first time ever on the instrument!



but stelios is a MASTER musician; he was generous and patient enough to play with a bunch of hippies from the north... you ROCK, stelios! (well, in a traditional cretan kind of way...)

panorama from olympus

stelios master of lyra

my friends pete and mary introduced me to a fabulous fellow: stelios the lyra-player.... here he is busking for his fellow country-men in a quaint-as-heck village (on the southeast slope of mount olympus....

food of the gods

i took chocolate to the top of mount olympus and made an offering of it to zeus et alii, because the official linnean name of chocolate is cacao theobroma = food of the gods.




my new friends mary and pete shared a bit of the offering, and later we shared several liters of wine at the Refuge.

snow fields on mount olympus

keep in mind that this is QUITE high: 2800 meters or so.... this snow has already been melting off for a few days, but there is still quite a bit left on the trail....