Medium White Sliced, Please.

My eye (sty) problems continue and the tube of cream is running out. Until yesterday I had been administering the twice-daily doses myself and came to the conclusion I wasn't doing it properly. Asked Angie to do and within a few hours noticed it was better but still not what it should be. And I do need to check the bees again and queen searching will be a nightmare

So off to the GP in the morning and got the timing just right being shown directly into the docs room. She took a look and thought a stronger version was needed which included antibiotics. i was out again in two minutes.

Not sure if it's still the same in the UK but back in the 80's our GP's surgery had a large stock of prescription medication for most of the common medicines. Here all prescription medicines have to be got from a chemist. Until the new EU data protection laws came into effect this month, I could send a photo of the prescription via WhatsApp to my regular chemist and got a reply back in seconds as to whether it was on stock or at what time it would be available. Chemists here are all individual businesses - no chains such as Boots in the UK - but they get deliveries from central distribution stores several times a day, I think three or possibly four times.

Now with the EU laws, WhatsApp is banned for such data transfer and it has to go through a central chemists App (Used by all chemists nationally and it's very detailed. It works well but takes 5 minutes instead of the 20 seconds on WhatsApp. A few minutes later got the message that it would be available in the afternoon and Angie kindly arranged a dog walk with Luna in Ottobeuren to collect it.

While at the GPs, I popped into the local small supermarket chain V-Markt one of the last two traditional family-run small chains left in southern Bavaria. It has less than 40 outlets in Bavaria mainly in our are and stretching to Munich. It doesn't compete with the discounters but tries to offer a very large range of branded products at good prices and often has a large range of choice of each product. It is rather nice to shop there from a product point of view even if it all seems a bit oldfashioned.

The chain is an important local employer (around 3,000 employees) who offers several hundred apprentice training places in all aspects of a modern medium sized business whether in logistics, accounts, personnel, marketing or as a general retail salesperson and even in any of the various specialised food sections. Here in Germany one can become qualified as a specialist meat salesperson.

The chain also often has a petrol station attached which is not very common here and the price is often much lower than regular petrol stations. Added to the advertised price, V_Markt has turned theirs into fully automated card only pumps and give a 2 cent per litre voucher with the receipt. And as I had filled up on Sunday and had a 1 Euro voucher, I thought I would redeem it for a late breakfast bread roll or two.

The in-house bakery is actually only one of those operations with a bank of ovens and they heat up the pre-prepared chilled dough of certain smaller items or have deliveries from the central distribution unit. However as can be seen from the photo, not a bad selection. And this was only the bread selection and not the sweet pastry and cakes part.

I actually photographed it as I had had a discussion with my daughter in Ireland last night about bread as she is trying to cut down on wheat-based flour. Despite what is on offer here, it is still difficult to get away from wheat. I did later in the day read that coconut flour is very good for making bread although it seems the variety of types is very limited ... to about one!