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On the train again this morning, heading across Germany.Next base stop is Nuremberg.
I’ve been to the city before but only in winter,it will be interesting to see it in the summer.I also have some day trips I want to do from there.
As we’re passing through anyway,I decided to break the train ride up with a few hours in Würzburg as well.
We just came back from visiting family in Romania, good god the heat.
We are back here for a couple days then leaving for Japan. We have a house in Hokkaido, and you guessed it, mid 30’s and humid. Not even going to venture to Tokyo, concrete jungle in the summer, no thanks, I honestly don’t know how my brother and his family do it.
I love winter and snow and the cold, and the little daylight.
I need to live in a cave. lol
One thing that people never used to do when I was a kid was idling their cars for too long, and it was never done in public places like supermarket parking lots.
Now, I keep seeing people leave their kids/spouse in their cars, leave the car idling, and go for groceries. I’m guessing the way in which most cars nowadays have A/C, as well as displays telling you you’re only using 400 ml or something of fuel per an entire hour of idling, has made people think it’s worth it.
There’s actually a law about idling. It’s simply not legal, unless it’s so cold you can claim you’re idling to warm up your engine. And some people in the know have actually said the best thing to do is start driving: idling a cold engine wears it down more than the few minutes of driving do, and bringing the engine up to temp is more important than avoiding driving with a cold engine.
Something I like doing when moving to a new city is to join the local vegan meetup group that usually holds regular socials in a random vegan restaurant somewhere in the city. I don’t really care that much about animal rights or healthy eating or anything like that, I just a) like eating interesting food in a restaurant where I have loads of options, b) like meeting new people who aren’t exclusively other foreigners and c) have a reason to explore different parts of a new city that I wouldn’t otherwise visit.
Here’s a problem I have with more, how do I put it…*outspoken* vegans though (who, despite the stereotype, are very much a small minority of vegans). See, the problem is that these kinds of events attract not just people who live a bog standard vegan diet (fair enough, as long as you plan it carefully), but also people who are really into [weird fad diets that don’t seem to be based on any understanding of human biology or nutritional requirements whatsoever.](https://youtube.com/shorts/zLvcA4U55lY?si=DQG-okutH_4fH9rx). What weirds me out so much about these people is that they clearly spend an enormous amount of their own time “doing their research”, and yet they somehow seem to exclude all but the craziest sources possible.
So I sat with this Russian couple, who were apparently raw vegans. They almost never eat cooked food, they said. Why? Because cooking fruit and vegetables allegedly destroys enzymes, and that supposedly makes them less nutritious. Also, the more you process food, the worse you make it. Apparently glossing over the fact that Homo sapiens sapiens actually *evolved* to eat cooked food because cooking food actually makes nutrients *easier* to digest. “We’ve just moved to the Bay Area to try and find people to invest in our business making raw vegan gluten-free bars. You’ve seen raw vegan bars, and you’ve seen gluten-free bars, but have you ever seen raw vegan gluten free bars? Giant gap in the market waiting to be tapped. You want to try one? It’s all natural, no artificial ingredients.” *Gives me what looks like a pretty standard vanilla wafer* “Oh, thank you, that’s very kind of you, so…remind me how wafers can be raw vegan again? Do you just pluck the wafers directly from the wafer tree?” *Looks at ingredients list that’s about a paragraph long full of all sorts of shit that I don’t recognise*.
I did end up eating the wafer. Had a slightly odd aftertaste, but eh, I’ve had worse.
Three days in, and I am still just a little obsessed with Flow. I am wondering how many days I should wait before rewatching becomes less weird. Teen me didn’t have this problem when watching the Fellowship of the Ring for the 21st time in the movie theatres.