In Munich stands a Royal drinking house... (Bavarian beer drinking tune)

I ended up in Germany again at the weekend. Back to wonderful Munchen town. Home city of my good friend Thomas Bindl. We got together and had dinner and a catch-up on Friday night. After all, we hadn't seen each other for almost 48 hours, when we had dinner together in London!

One of the main reasons (other than a little business) I was in Munich, was to make up for the fact that I forgot to take my son to Oktoberfest. I had promised him some time ago that I'd take him to the beer festival in Munich, because I'd been away most of his summer vacation and had hardly seen him at all.

So the weekend before last, I was in Germany with my buddy Ralph Tegtmeier. And at dinner, when I told him I'd be coming back to Germany soon for Oktoberfest, he told me: "No you won't." And then went on to explain that I'd missed it!

What could I do? I just had to tell my son straight: "Blue (his nickname) your Dad's a complete asshole. I got the dates wrong for Oktoberfest." He didn't as much as bat an eyelid. Nor did he disagree about me being an asshole, either, I should add.

So, there was nothing else for it. I just had to take him to Munich for our own little beerfest at the weekend. And so it was that we met Thomas, who took us to one of his favourite eateries, where we were served Wiener Schnitzel of gigantic proportions.

Thomas, being the SEM international man of mystery he is, prefers not to have his picture taken (probably doesn't want the spam cops at the search engines to recognize him :-)

So, we'll concentrate on the food, and look with complete disbelief at the size of the Wiener Schnitzel on my son's plate.

Next day we hit the famous English Garden. It was cloudy, grey and raining. That being the case. It was a pretty empty English Garden (unlike when I first visited it earlier this year). I took a pic of Blue standing in front of the Pagoda style tower which is the central feature in that part of the garden. I have no idea whatsoever, what that beam of light is pointing to his head from the tower. Could be aliens looking for some sort of brain activity... It's possible they may have chosen the wrong person for this experiment :-)

So, anyway, in the pouring rain, Blue and I headed for the wonderful Seehaus beer garden on the lake (which Thomas had recommended). Here, Blue was able to practice posing for his own blog (in typical Dad style :-)

The English Garden is very pretty and has some wonderful inhabitants.

Joe (Blue, that is) is a big football fan. In fact, a huge supporter of our local team, Newcastle United. But, he's also a fan of Bayern Munich. The city is full of multi coloured Lions this year (I don't know why?) and this one certainly caught Joe's attention.

He got quite attached to another when we hit downtown and headed for... yes, that's right, the Ratskellar!

There's some fine architecture in Munich. It really is a wonderful city.

There's one building Joe really wanted to see (the world cup stadium)... But we could only catch glimpse of it on the airport bus as we were leaving.

Not quite Oktoberfest. But we had a great time just hanging together. Okay, I'm off to China next for ad:tech, Shanghai.