road to hell

U2 have been doing their thing all over the BBC for the last couple of days. Someone commented somewhere that the BBC was acting like their own personal publicity machine, which would be really cool if if only it were true. Anyway, they just signed a big contract with Live Nation to handle their concerts and merchandising for the next twelve years. This morning I went to take a look and see if there had been any more details about the tour released yet, but alas there was nothing. I did find some other groups of interest playing in Munich though, but fuck me were they expensive. Tickets for Madonna range from €70 up to €195! Eagles are coming in June, priced at €110.50 or €127.75.  Springsteen prices range from €79.40 to €96.65. Compare that to Bell X1, whose tickets are €15.16, or Simply Red for €48.05.  Its a fucking crime. If it were just me then I’d be hard pushed to justify spending €80 on a single event, but it isn’t just me.  There are two of us, which drives the prices sky high.  Oh this is interesting… I would never actually have complained about these sorts of prices when we were living in London.  That city was substantially more expensive, and I had a well paying job.  Here though my awareness of the price of expensive things is heightened probably because everything is cheaper and I don’t have a regular job.

Anyway, we went on a walking trip yesterday.  We started in Starnberg, walked through the Maisinger Gorge to Maising and the lake, then on to Aschering. We were supposed to walk through about 2km of forest west of Aschering and then turn north, but there was a navigational malfunction and we ended up heading south to Machtlfing and then on to Erling and up to Andechs.  All in all we covered about 20km. I have to say, walking through snow is incredibly difficult.  When it comes up to your knees you discover just how hard water is to walk through.  I haven’t had any exercise in the last three weeks, and am dreadfully out of shape (even more so than usual) so I found everything beyond Machtlfing fucking hard.  Every step to Erling was hell, and even the thought of getting some good food and a few beers at Andechs wasn’t much consolation.  Still, we made it, and there’ll be more too.  I badly need to get in shape, as does Anna, so this is a good start.  Click the picture to see the route we took, the red line is where we walked, the yellow where we should have gone.