cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Munich So we went to Europe and it was excellent. I can't decide whether I should even bother trying to describe the whole thing, so I'll just start typing and see what happens. When I'm going on a trip somewhere by plane, I end up spending more time anticipating the plane rides than the actual time spent in the place where I am going. Odd, eh? I rather enjoyed our ride to Munich, except that I couldn't manage to fall asleep on the flight across the Atlantic, which made for my being utterly exhausted on our first day in Europe. The experience of getting off of the plane and walking into the Munich airport was magical. It was as if there was a door somewhere that I hadn't known about, and you can just walk through this door and suddenly be in a completely different country. All of the signs were in German and the people were speaking German and the little things were all different. It was a magnificent airport, architecturally speaking. I instantly loved everything about what I was in. Customs was amazingly easy. They stamped my passport and I walked through. Then I used a German public bathroom. It was extremely clean, as was every other public toilet I encountered in Germany. I closed the door and stood there in the stall (with walls and a door that went all the way to the floor) and said to myself "I am in Germany and this is a German bathroom." Again, the airport in Munich is a thing of beauty. We walked around until we figured out where to go for the bus into the center of the city. Waiting for the bus, it could have been anywhere in America except for the license plates on the few parked cars and the Deutscher language on the signs. The bus trip was neat. I spent Euros for the first time in my life. We drove, naturally on the Autobahn and the bus was going something over 100 mph. We went past the airport sprawl and the industrial areas and through the suburbs and all of it was thoughtful, interesting architecture. The cars were BMWs, Mercedes and a lot of makes and models I'd been aware of but had rarely or never actually seen. Opels, Renaults and such. A Porsche GT roared past us at what must have been over 170 mph. In this area, the Germans put care and thought into buildings that would have been pure utility in America. Warehouses and factories were interesting to look at and would have been worth photographing. After the bus dropped us off at the main train station, we started making our way to our hotel. I love walking around in a new city. And EVERYONE WAS SPEAKING GERMAN. I know that this seems pretty obvious and not worth pointing out, but at the time it seemed hilarious and wonderful to me. I loved our hotel. I love the neighborhood it is in. Being early, we dropped our bags off at the desk and went to walk around the city and kill time. We walked down Landwherstrass towards St. Paul's and went into a little traditional-looking cafe right by the cathedral. We were the only ones there. We were beckoned in by what later turned out to be the cook. We hadn't mastered many German phrases yet and he didn't speak much English (one of the very, very few such people we encountered). He brought out a bowl with a few white sausages in it to see if we wanted those, and we nodded and said 'yes' and he brought them back into the kitchen to prepare them. Frankly, neither Trish nor myself much cared what he cooked for us so long as it was German. We drank tall half liters of good Munich lager and ate these sausages slathered with a sweet, spicy mustard, following them with soft pretzels covered with the same mustard. And then we had another beer each, and the waitress finally showed up and we talked to her for a while. When we left we had, as Jack London would put it, a pleasant jingle going on. We wandered back down a parallel street through a neighborhood that looked an awful lot like the hometown we had left for this trip and by the time we got back to our hotel's block it was time to check it. The room was just lovely and comfortable and different and great. We each showered and fell asleep for a few hours. For the next few days we mostly wandered around to wherever we felt like on that particular day. We almost always walked rather than take buses or trams, on account of wanting to see every detail and step into any shop or side street that caught our eye. Once we walked about 3 miles to visit Trish's friend from school and I counted literally only 3 pieces of litter the entire way. Munich appears to be a perfectly managed city. I am amazed. Every detail seems absolutely perfect. I have never seen a people so uniformly polite, well-behaved and responsible. I would move there in a heartbeat. Trish and I were talking over beer in a cafe on the second day when it occurred to us that we'd been wrong in our former impression that the country (other than Canada) that is most like America is not in fact England. It is Germany. Now it was been a long time since I was in England, but I really think that this might be true. The whole feel of the place was like being in an ideal version of America. And we felt somehow like we belonged there. On our last full day in Munich we went to the Englisher Garden by rickshaw. Which was a very touristy way of getting around, but our feet were horribly sore from days of constant walking and we'd never have made it to any of the beer gardens without getting that ride. We ended up at the Japanese pavilion, which was packed full of locals out enjoying the day and eating and drinking. Relatively few tourists to be seen. I ate an extremely good beef goulash and drank a lof of beer and we talked to other people there and just had a ball all around. The weather was perfect. Trish daringly stole a liter sized glass stein, which we don't feel too bad about because when you get a stein of beer there is a deposit of a euro or 2 for the stein which one normally gets back when one brings the stein back to the window. Naturally we left that deposit so we essentially paid for it. We happened to find the same bicycle rickshaw driver when we were ready to leave and he took us back up to the Marienplatz, where we had yet another round of beer and soft pretzels with mustard at a cafe and then walked the dozen or so blocks back to our hotel. A perfect day all around. I was sad to leave Munich. Even to leave our hotel room. I still miss the city and am already plotting how to get back there as soon as possible. Paris was fun, too, but in different ways. I'll write a separate entry about Paris later on. My only problem in Munich was that Trish was on the rag starting the second day and this lasted for the entire remainder of our time in Europe. I still fucked her up the ass a few times, but spontenaity was limited as well as our options for jointly having sex with anyone else. 10:40 a.m. - 2009-05-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||