Music and Museums in Germany, Austria, Switzerland

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Easy through customs. Exchanged money at the RieseBank at the airport. Glenn felt the rate was the best at the airport although that has never been my experience with foreign currency transactions. We got a little over $.77 per euro. I get $.79 per euro on PayPal and the rate today on the exchanges was $.81. It's not a big deal in the scheme of things but it is something to be mindful of when changing money. Some of the small vendors may charge much bigger fees for the exchange so be alert.

We took the S bahn to the Hauptbahn Munchen which is arelatively short walk form the station. Wearranged the room in January and hadexpected our usual very large room. What we got was one of the smaller rooms which makes working difficult. It turns out that some rich tourists had decided to extend their stay so our room was unavailable for two days. In theory we can make a move to the new room on Friday.

I was inconsiderable pain after we arrived. My kidney stone had been acting up for the last week and lugging all of the suitcases from train to plane and back again had not made things any better. I need a few days off my feet to let the stonesettler back down.

We went to the opera house to pick up the tickets for the operas we were beingscheduled for and unfortunately only one ticket for one the Ring performances was available. I was hoping to see the Ring cycle here after having seen Zambrella's San Francisco Opera's brilliantproduction last summer. I will be going to six operas here over the two weeks in Munich which is not a bad thing.

We returned to the hotel for a restorative nap after ten hours of flying. Glenn needed a rest before going ttyre opera and I needed to get the pain under control. I spent the evening trying to get the Internet service to work correctly. Last year's experience with Deutshce Telekom had made me reluctant to use theirservice again but I ended up buying ten hours of service until I couldwork out a longerterm solution. I shut down my machine for a couple of hours only to discover that I could not log in to the service. I endepaying paying 20 euros for two hours of service. A very expensive connection fee. Their customer service is worse that Verizon which I know is hard to believe. The support number they list in theirbrochure and on the web site is a non-working number. Do your homework on an Internet providerbefore you travel to Europe. I thought I had it worked this time but I was wrong.

The new day arrived and I signed up for internet service for a month since it works out to be the best option even if I won't be able to use it every day.

There was nothing critical on the day schedule today so it was stay close to the hotel and get some computer stuff done. Tomorrow begins the travel around the city. Stay tuned. The pictures and stories are in the wings.

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