[manifold|reality]

With stops in Lon­don, Köln, München, and Tokyo, my two week busi­ness trip went by in a blur.

The trip was good from busi­ness stand­point and I was lucky to be able to see good friends in all three coun­tries, but boy am I thank­ful to be back home. Two weeks on the road is about my limit for a work-related trip.

Some ran­dom thoughts from my trip last week to Munich and London:

• Flughafen München is the clean­est and qui­etest air­port that I’ve been through in recent years. It’s a strik­ing con­trast (and a bit eerie) to sprawl­ing com­plexes like LAX or or LHR.
• Cor­po­rate rival­ries play out in inter­est­ing ways. Just after the giant BMW grille in the bag­gage claim, there’s an Audi S5 on dis­play right by the exit and enor­mous Audi ban­ners in the out­door square of the air­port. Seems like a bold move given that Munich is BMW’s world headquarters.
• Bread is gen­er­ally very good in Ger­many. I would eat brötchen all the time if I could get some­thing com­pa­ra­ble here in California.
• There’s noth­ing like the sense of déjà vu that you get when you return to a city that you were last in years ear­lier. In my case, strolling down Kaufin­ger­straße and end­ing up in Marien­platz brought back a flood of mem­o­ries from a trip to Munich a decade ago.
• The street cars in Munich are Prius-sneaking-up-on-pedestrians quiet. The N-Judah that runs by my flat in San Fran­cisco sounds like a stam­ped­ing herd of buf­falo by comparison.
• Lon­don Heathrow, unlike the Inter­net, really is a series of tubes. Catch­ing a con­nect­ing flight at LHR involves a series of mov­ing walk­ways con­nect­ing a seem­ingly end­less sprawl of terminals.
• The EmPower power out­lets built in to many air­plane seats seems rather cus­tomer unfriendly. Is there actu­ally a good tech­ni­cal rea­son for not pro­vid­ing stan­dard AC out­lets in-seat instead?

Giant kidney-shaped grill and roundrel on the wall in the bag­gage claim?

I must be in Munich.