Weeknote 8 (2023)

✈️ 🇩🇪 Preparing a weekend trip to Cologne, Germany

It’s actually not for this weekend but the next one, but I’m all set ✅

I will always be speechless when seeing that a flight to Germany is cheaper than a shorter flight inside Spain. Both leaving on Friday evening and returning Sunday evening. It doesn’t make any mathematical sense, but that’s the airline industry for you 🤷‍♂️

What’s actually very different is accommodation. Sleeping in a single room with a private bathroom in Cologne’s city center (we need to sleep near the train station to catch a very early train the next day) has taken us back 90€ per person 😱

It’s the city center, what would you expect

You might think that, but for the second night we’re spending in a small town 1 hour outside of Cologne and we’re paying 86€ for it (single room, private bathroom again) 💸

Germany is very expensive when coming from Spain 💰

🍜 🇨🇳 Handmade noodles

This week I’ve tried this new Chinese place where a cook does the noodles by hand for each order. From the outside of the restaurant, you can see the man working his craft through the glass window.

Unfortunately, the promise was not fulfilled, the noodle itself was ok but the broth and meat were not my cup of tea. When I think of ramen (probably Japanese ramen) I see this thick and rich broth, usually not clear colored but darker or white. This one, as you can appreciate in the picture was quite bland. We had to drop some spicy mix to make it more interesting.

We also had “the best bittersweet chicken in Barcelona”, according to their business card. Sorry to say, it wasn’t the best.
I made the mistake to order a Tsingtao beer, not the best beer I’ve tasted. Fortunately, it cost me the same as a Catalan beer, so it’s not like I was ripped off 👍

📚 Cheap books

On the last one, I finished a book I was reading for a while. On my quest to find my next space opera novel, I stumbled upon two books (Against All Odds by Jeffery H. Haskell, and Contact Front by Rick Partlow).

The soft cover version of both was between 10€-15€.

Can you get what price was the Kindle edition? Less than 1€ 😂 There’s no possible logical explanation for how a book can cost 0.80€ How much the author made with my purchase? How much Amazon took? How much did the published take?

I don’t get but I’ll take it. Thank you

Ricard