We had a Berlin kind of weekend in Munich.

Saturday at the Reithalle to hear Wladimir Kaminer read some new pieces. I like his short stories – stuff just happens, he doesn't dwell on anything, and then the story ends. Afterwards they cleared the chairs away to have a Russendisko – lively Russian ska/punk music. But I don't think the audience really knew what to do with that.

Then Sunday in the Glockenbachviertel looking at lots of alternative fashion/crafts shops, open for the Werk Schauen. We found some wonderful stuff, and some odd stuff.

I've done some work on munichblogs.com, berlinblogs.com, and planet.gnome-de.org over the last few days. Now the front page of munichblogs.com filters some blogs, so it only shows entries with the words Munich, Muenchen, and M�. That's because those blogs often have techy stuff that's not relevant to a general Munich audience. This is possible thanks to the filter feature in Jeff's branch of the 1.0 planet code. I cleaned up the templates and stylesheet too.

I'm quite pleased with the success of munichblogs.com and berlinblogs.com, though not that many people know about them yet. The traffic is steadily increasing, and several interesting people have asked for their blogs to be added. When something happens, such as Moshammer's (Munich's Liberace-like professional-celebrity) murder yesterday, they are particularly fascinating.

I had a theatrical weekend in Munich:

• Friday at the FestSpielHaus, a kind of community youth theater.
• Saturday at the Kammerspiele for the Bunny Hill Staatsgrundung, the first of several events involving Hasenbergl, one of Munich's few non-toytown neighbourhoods. I don't think they've heard of the awful british comedian with a similar name.
• Sunday at the Studio Isabella cinema watching Rhythm Is It – about Berlin kids learning to dance in a performance of Sacre Du Printemps with the Berlin Philarmonic orchestra. They could remove (Sir) Simon Rattle's babbling, but the scenes with Royston Maldoom working with the kids are incredibly inspiring.

At the weekend I heard about a couple of interesting websites:

SprachDuo: Helps, for instance, an English-speaker learning German in Munich to find a German-speaker who wants to learn English, to practice conversation. They do other languages too. This would have been very useful when I arrived in Munich.

Kulturkueche: Reviews and interviews from a group of independent/aspiring writers in Berlin and Munich who pooled their work to promote their talents.

Tomorrow I'll be in Munich, where I have no english-language TV channels, but I've managed to find somewhere to watch the second US Presidential debate when CNN repeats it at 10:00am.

Also, my dedicated associate learned from one of the Munich For Kerry people last night at Cafe Puck's, that the Amerika Haus will have an election night event on November 2nd, so I might not need to rent a hotel room just to watch the coverage, but I don't see it on their schedule.