of german hospitality

As I fell asleep plugged into a saxy, airplane-supplied Branford Marsalis CD, I woke up courtesy of the captain’s PA come morning. The yogurt drink was all I dared try of the breakfast to-go offered by the flight crew. Besides, I was still working on the bag of pastries generously sent with me by my friend Nikola at Iggy’s bread.

Arrived in Frankfurt, we had a whole day to spend exploring. First stop: hot shower. It took us thirty minutes to find the well-hidden arrivals lounge, but it was a welcome place to put down our carry-drag-ons, clean up, and relax. The food was simple and welcome: perfectly-boiled eggs, olives, and soft cheeses, among others. A nearby baggage storage facility took our bags for the day as we went into town.

Note to the uninitiated: if two or more of you are going into the city for a day trip, splurge the extra euro on the Frankfurt Pass. It wasn’t even presented as an option to us, but would have saved us money later on our museum visit. We went first to the Staedel Museum and then onward to feed our grumbling stomachs. We walked down a long stretch of storefronts looking for the right place, occasionally asking the brusque locals for suggestions. We ate first at a chain-like though redeeming-looking currywurst joint, armed with an array of sausage-saucing squeeze bottles ranked from 1-10 based on the underlying chiles’ hotness. There was no redemption to the bratwurst we shared: it just wasn’t very great. Onward to greener pastures.

Wagner was our next (and final—I just can’t eat the way I used to in my youth) stop, where I started with my first taste of appelwine. Great beverage! Everything apple cider should be (and sadly usually isn’t), but without bubbles: funky, dry, acidic, appley. The meal that followed was, as a whole, good but not great. I did really enjoy the sauerkraut that came with the sausages.

Back to the airport, where we waited only a short while as we learned of our fate in Beirut and I helped myself to some bubbly.

In parting, another note to the uninitiated: if you

see a couple of sweaty folks lugging enough bags for four travelers when going through airport security, avoid that queue no matter how short it may seem. They’re going to take (and I quote from The Sandlot) for-ev-er.

a bum in munich

Most of my time in Munich was spent wandering around, opting again to live the local unemployed life rather than the usual guidebook recommendations. Outfitted with Andy’s bike (too big even for him, a few inches taller than me), I made use of the city’s myriad bicycle lanes. I must have been a sight, peddling furiously and coasting in thirty-second intervals, unable to peddle while seated. In fact, coming to a stop meant either finding a lamppost to lean on or hopping off the seat while maneuvering the bike to an angle so that I didn’t damage that fun area where my legs come together. Still, it beat walking.

The English Garden (a park bigger than New York’s Central Park) was great: full of sunbathers even on a weekday afternoon, dotted with biergartens where, besides a pint of hefeweizen, the smallest pour you could get is a liter (the 17 year-olds at an adjacent table were outdrinking me with theirs). There’s even a section of river running where with an artificial wave for surfing practice. Then there are all of the community gardens throughout Germany—I love them. Not only are they much larger than the dinky plots I’m familiar with on the east coast of the US, but most are accessorized with glorified shacks, a grill, and beers kept cold in a fridge. In case you opt out of the fridge option, there’s usually a biergarten within a few hundred meters. My favorite more-or-less natural beauty site, though, was that of the Nymphenburg castle (more of a palace, really). The surrounding hundreds of acres of gardens were nothing short of enchanting. I was only able to peer through the locked fence of the botanical garden; actually visiting it may have made me cry. As if mocking our highly urbanized way of life in the big cities back home, there were a few apartments just beside the botanical garden—of course they had their personal ‘secret’ garden plots hidden behind a wooden fence. I strolled about the area, cursing to myself in awe, asking out loud whom I’d have to kill to live out here.

Beer and food were obvious priorities—Andy and I went through lots of pints at his place (I didn’t take notes, but it was hard to go wrong with anything). I made it a point to cook at least a couple of times. Germans love white asparagus (spargel), and it’s reflected in their spring markets. One night we just grilled (salad on the side, thank you), and another night I went a little further, with four different salads, a roasted organic chicken (€10/kg!?!), and fresh hollandaise to accompany a pile of white asparagus I prepared. All in Yanni and _GermanAndi’s beautiful house, in a great kitchen, on the patio of their fragrant garden.

I managed to squeeze in a daytrip to Salzburg, where I finally let loose the tourist in me—visiting museums, riding funiculars, and even snapping a picture of baby Mozart in a cradle in his mummified house (it was too cheesy to skip). The views from the old fortress were amazing. Here, on a fortune based on salt (a basis, in turn, for the town’s name), an empire would withstand Roman conquest in large part due to its strategic perch on a steep hill overlooking town. I even managed to enjoy a great meal at an otherwise touristy-looking restaurant by the funicular. On my way back to the station, I bought a beer to drink on the train ride back to Munich (more for the novelty of it than anything else), but was really just too stuffed from lunch—so much for novelties.

My last act in Munich was to be a fancy meal out. I asked my newly acquired German friends, and after much deliberation, the conclusion was that I should head for Tantris. So I peddled coasted peddled coasted my way to the restaurant, anticipating my first truly fancy meal since I was in Morocco (at ten times the price, of course). I don’t even have to admit (those who know me probably know this regardless) that I was very afraid of a letdown. I ate a brilliant seven course lunch, forcing myself to think in dollars rather than euros so as not to jolt the food back out of my belly. I subsequently beached myself on a grassy patch amongst the hordes at the English Garden. There I pondered the meaning of life before heading home to pack and mentally prepare for the transition to speaking yet another (not so) foreign language.

München

I hit the ground running in Munich. First things first, Andy and I split a couple of sausages upon my arrival at the train station. With my eight hour meat-fast finally over, we went on to bigger and better things, tasting through several of Germany’s finest brews back at Andy’s flat. Not to underdo the evening, we met up later with a few of Andy’s friends and colleagues at a smoky, crowded bar, complete with attitude-ridden servers. _EnglishAndy showed up just in time for the second round and, living up to my English stereotypes, made it his mission to keep each of our pints optimistically half-full. It wouldn’t have been so bad had we called it a night at a reasonable hour, but of course we crawled from pub to pub, prioritizing morning headaches over good night’s sleeps.

We had a huge day ahead of us, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that we overslept, waking only as _GermanAndi was waiting at our door. It was the classic late-for-school moment, and we played the parts, fumbling in our respective hazes, packing painkillers for the excursion. We piled into Andi’s beautifully-restored 1971 Alfa Romeo coupe, and met with his girlfriend for a typical Bavarian breakfast, complete with spongy floating sausages and pretzels. Breakfast was good. The rest, however, was a picturesque dream of a day.

We took the Alfa to an old-timers’ rally and spent some time gawking at the remarkable rides—some weird, some cute, and some downright sexy. Andy and I ventured into the fairgrounds, taking a look at a rather typical Bavarian carnival—rides that make you puke, food that makes you balloon. We stepped into a mini-me version of the huge beer tents that line the grounds for Oktoberfest. Fish on a stick (not that processed thing we call a fish stick back home—a real trout grilled on a stick), ham hocks, and crispy pork roulades—the foodstuffs of Atkins dieters. And of course their antitheses: liter-sized mugs of beer. Still full from breakfast, I still had to try some of the local spaetzle-and-cheese (beats the Kraft version), and another version prepared with ham and kraut (needed a little more ‘stuff’ mixed in).

After finding Andi, we were on the road, doing a grand tour of Munich’s surroundings. He showed us some of his favorite (for their fun-to-drive windy country road feel) shortcuts that he’s been known to push to the limit (his dad works for BMW and he has a friend who tests their prototypes). Part of me is disappointed I didn’t take notes as to the names of the places we visited, but the rest of me does/didn’t feel it necessary in the least. Regardless, we motored by just-blooming trees and fields aglow with yellow rapeseed flowers (their harvested oil is used as a sustainable energy source). Everything about the day was wonderful, down to the perfect weather.

It was great to see some of the things you just don’t see anywhere else. On the lakeshore, by a grassy patch brimming with sunbathers, we visited a biergarten alive with clientele who obviously know how to relish a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Not to be taken as a culture of beer-drinking idiots, there are lots of popular alternatives to straight beer—you can drink a thirst-quenching mix of sparkling water and apple juice (any juice, really), or, if you still want a lighter bit of EtOH, that can be had as a sweet mix of hefeweizen (an unfiltered wheat beer) and lemonade.

As it was Sunday, Andi and Andy thought it would be nice to visit a beautiful old Monastery with a beautiful baroquely (my spell-checker says that’s a word) decked-out church. The main draw of this hilltop Monastery, at least on this afternoon, is its (drum roll) biergarten. We sampled the beers and gorged ourselves on cured meat and cheese products (stemming from another cultural tradition here that’s best translated as bread time). The monks also make schnapps, of which we sampled four, in the form of nips that Andy (Andi was driving) and I took turns emptying. Full and buzzing, we finally headed home.