Hello from Munich

Hello all –
I decided to start up this blog as I was riding around Munich, Germany today, and I wanted to be able to share my experiences and thoughts, because 1) some of you might care, and 2) I seem to have a terrible memory, and events don’t take long to fade, so this will be my little thought-archive.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know me, so I’m not going to do introductions or anything like that. I figured a good first post would be to explain why exactly I’m in Munich. The short answer is, I am on a 6 month delegation for my company, Infineon Technologies, which is based in Munich. Infineon is a large company (35,000+), but only about 3,000 in the US, so they often send engineers to HQ’s in Munich to get training and learn new products. I will be working on a brand new memory product for about 6 months, then when I return to Cary I will be the “technology expert” for that product for the office. This all came up, though, because my wife, Alisha, who is a professional bike racer, had several European races on her schedule in August and September, so I asked my manager if there was any way I could get over to Germany around the same time. I was thinking maybe for a couple weeks or a month, but he came back and said “how about 6 months?” At first we balked because she has more racing, we have a house, etc, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized what a good opportunity this could be for both of us, so we jumped on it! This will help me with my job, and Alisha will get to train like the Europeans do – in the Alps!

So anyways, I left yesterday, Friday July 8th (Alisha is coming in August after a couple more races in the US), and arrived in Munich at 8AM local time. Surprisingly, the flight went very well – it was 9+ hours from Atlanta to Munich, so I thought it would be miserable. But after eating dinner and watching the inflight movie, I went to sleep and slept like a log for 5.5 hours, waking up in Munich feeling quite rested.

I took a cab from the airport into the city, lugging around 2 ginormous suitcases and an 81 pound bike box. I’m checked into a short-term apartment/hotel, and will begin a more permanent apartment search next week.

Next Post: first day in Munich