The White House is located in downtown Washington. It always looks so far from everything in the movies.

People are really friendly (even in New York). When I was travelling along the west coast of the USA I was consistently told that people on the east coast are rude.

Security for the Washington Monuments (including the Capitol) are not tighter than for the German parliament. The only time I had to show my passport in Washington was at a liquor store.

It is easily possible to get around by foot / public transport. We walked all around Manhattan and Washington. Mostly we were done earlier than expected and had time to have a slow evening with cocktails.

Cocktails in rooftop bars in Manhattan are not more expensive than cocktails in Reykjavik. And very yummy.

I don't know how much blogging I will be doing this week as I will be visiting my friend in Washington and New York!

At the moment I'm enjoying the free wifi (a new thing) while waiting for the passport check for people going to USA to open. Keflavik is a very stress free airport and I'm always too early especially opposed to London airports where I always have to run even when arriving 3 hours early. Here I manage to be at the gate in an hour, thanks to effective organizing of security and self check in stations.

I was 3 hours early, so I bought a silly puffin T-shirt for my friend and could be relaxed when I was selected for a "random" security check from the TSA. They checked for explosives I think. I hoped that this was not going to be a thing from now on and was a bit nervous when standing at the passport check at Washington airport. The immigration official marveled at my south American passport stamp collection and then let me go through without any problem.

Hello dear readers,
this is my 200th post on this blog. When I started playing around with the blog software I found on my distro, I never thought I would keep up with it so diligently. My attempts to keep a diary were usually short lived, unless I was travelling. I spent today importing old posts, from my first ever blog, they can be found here.

Dear readers. I'm sorry I have not written any blogposts this week. It was an emotional strenuous few days and my milk is sour, so I am left without my morning coffee today .
I have a few blogposts planned, such as the history of my workplace (an old Tuberculosis sanatorium), my neighbourhood in summer, safety advice for Iceland and German words every language should have.
Until then

My culture has been mutilated beyond recognition. Even the seriously delicious beer and finally having found a decent hot dog in this town cannot stop me from feeling confused. I keep hear myself saying

But this is not a beergarden?

See Fosshotel, you got the beer part right. Actually, you got it amazingly right. For a beer enthusiast this is a place to get to know Icelandic beer. You have basically every beer brewed in Iceland, a lot of them even on tap. Whether it is a classic, like "Norður Kaldi" (a pale ale brewed Czech style) or a seasonal beer like Skaði, which is my new favourite summer beer, there is one for every taste.

However, you completely failed at the garden part. See a beergarden is a very basic affair. It is supposed to have the relaxed atmosphere of a garden party.
With your fancy hotdogs, the wide variety of beer and the slightly upscale atmosphere you might want to rename yourself to something like "gastropub". Though some people also seem to have strong opinions about these, it might prevent poor Germans from being disappointed because they expected to be sitting on hard benches under trees.

Now this is just sad...

A real beergarden