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| German's continue their bleeding edge quest to find ever more inventive and diabolical means of torture. |
As you touch down in Munich airport and head to the ticket machine for a train ticket you have your first interaction with the Bavarian State. A ticket machine so complicated that even our German host was unsure of the best ticket to purchase. She made this clear in a pre-arrival briefing email. Happily the machine has an English option but this does not circumnavigate the real problem. I stood at the machine for so long that you feel the eyes of the person behind bore into you. I then looked left and right and found my fellow travellers including Bavarian locals, united in their total dismay. No-one had a fucking clue what to buy. The travel tickets divided into 4 zones for the inner district of Munich, then outer zones which are labelled 1-16. I have no idea if the inner zones are included in the wider map. Tickets can be bought in strips, or singles, or partner tickets. Partner tickets are for groups of people varying from 3-7 people depending on the phases of the fucking moon apparently. They are also valid for a varying number of zones in the city too, the combination of which is a random event. A third variable is added as they can be bought for multiple days. The strips of tickets you may think are one ticket for one journey. Wrong, some journeys use two such tickets. Children depending on a variety factors may travel free, be stowed in luggage or charged double. Buying tickets is the equivalent of the German fruit machine. The result is utterly random and there is an 5% payout rate of correct tickets. In all my time in Munich I never saw a ticket inspector, I reason this is because they don't understand the system either and cannot authoratively check any given ticket.
Have we got all that? Good, because if you fuck up its a 40 Euro fine, for which the authorities ask that you "spare them the hassle". I can best relate this system to Battle Royale where if your caught in the wrong sector at the wrong time, with the wrong amount of people, your fucked.
Having decided 10 Euro was a safe amount to spend on travel, we collected our ticket and boarded the train. Munich is flat, very flat. How efficient. The journey into town is featureless farmland, from there your then met by factories spewing gas into the sky and then finally the city itself. The overwhelming impression your left with is that of mild indifference. The buildings are nothing remarkable. There is a plethora of new builds that clash violently with the old structures, Nothing appears remarkably old and there is nothing that really marks itself as particularly unique to Germany. Theres a tram system, a subway all of which work ok. The subway however is fairly infrequent and could have you waiting 10 mins or more for your tube. Its also worth nothing Munich has a population of 1.3 million so its by no means enormous.
On arrival we had to kill some time and walked around looking at a number of drab grey streets. Its very clean, theres no street drinkers, everyone looks like they have a purpose and everyone seems calm and polite. Everyone drives consideratley and pedestrians ALWAYS wait till the green man appears. Its liking being on the set of Equilibrium. Its just so fucking dull. Day 1 was then written off. I'd been up at 3:20 to catch the plane so the rest of the evening was blown out. Went for a kip, got up and stumbled out for some grub at about 8pm.
The food is the next issue that needs to be raised. There is a widely held assumption that the Germans eat nothing but sausages and pretzels and drink beer. This is closer to the truth than you imagine. They do a solid line in sausages it has to be said and may be world leaders in this respect. However the range of grub is about as imaginitive as your local hotel carvery in Northern Ireland in the early 90's. (Vegetable Soup, melon fan and coulis, garlic mushrooms....you remember the drill right?) Anyway there are two meats essentially. Sausage or roast pork. Roast pork is then covered in a gravy created using the French technique known as Bisto. On one of the more adventurous nights out my roast pork bisto was tarted up with raisins and silverskin pickled onions tossed in at the last minute. Giving neither item a chance to incorporate into a whole. It tasted exactly as you imagine, confused, ill conceived. Its the kind of recipe a 5 year old would think of if left to their own devices. This wasn't some back alley greasy spoon. This was in a 5 star hotel. The meat of choice is then accompanied by either a boiled spud or dumpling. Spuds are as you expect, however the dumplings usually come in a variety of promising guises. Apparently laced with everything from cheese to spinach. All of them taste like an unseasoned ball of PVA glue. Stick to spuds, you can't go wrong. The humble potato rarely falters. Vegetables outside this range are as rare as rocking horse shit and do not trouble the menus. Now, this may seem a good deal to some and I concsider myself to have the constitution of an Ox. However, 3 days of this food played fucking havoc with my guts. From the outside it felt like someone was laying foundations for a skyscraper in there. I was a sort of gastric Dresden. The lack of fibre means the "food" churns into a substace that straddles the divide between quick drying cement, tear gas and Kevlar. A one-a-day man was turned into a 3-a-day walking nerve agent. This would have been less of an issue if our hosts flat were not a one bedroom flat with walls that are made candyfloss. The master bedroom being adjacent to the bathroom. The orchestral accompaniment to the bathroom visits were not dis-similar to the finale of Tchiakovskys 1812 Overture, particularly the part where the cannons kick in. Teenie preferred the comparison of the firecrackers that acccompany Chinese New Year. In the interests of public decency I left these visits till late at night once all had done their ablutions. Little did I know the stillness of the night only served to highlight the thunderous cacophony from within. A point I was later advised of by Teenie. On at least one occassion our host walked straight in No Mans Land after a particularly raucous session, into what firefighters would correctly describe as a backdraft. In this instance I will argue No Mans Land IS a proper noun.
If you somehow survive the gastric onslaught of lunch and dinner you can always rely on breakfast to tip the balance. PRETZELS. In their own right a great thing, and far to superior to the poor imitations you may have tasted in the UK. Ideal at any time of day for mopping up beer or breakfast. They come studded with enough salt to paralyse a small mammal but are tasty as fuck, till you get halfway through. Then they get too much really. Whats left of your intestine will be dissolved by this and the strong coffee they all seem to drink. Not a decent drop of tea in sight. Our host at one point indicated the best German cuisine comes out of Austria. This is like saying you rob tramps for a source of evening wear. I feel you are now equipped to navigate the trauma of German food so I'll move on.
During down time in the flat I took it upon myself to educate myself in the ways of German TV. I didn't know what to expect frankly. There is a pleothoroa of familiar horse shit on there. Come Dine with me, reailty TV containing mechnically reclaimed acting, Baywatch, property shows, das x factor. Its all there, the poor bastards suffer the same indignity as the rest of us. The A Team gets a top billing on a Sunday night however and this has to be applauded. This is the slot we usually reserve for such as Heartbeat, or Martin Clunes' latest affront to decency. I struggled through Come Dine with Me twice understanding everything that took place without a word of German to my name. This included a particularly painful subplot in the celebrity episode where a boyband member went to great lengths to show how gay he was not. He was in fact a flaming homosexual in my opinion. Definitive proof that the show is aimed at the mentally feeble.
During the stay we visited a number of sights but none that warrant an honourable mention. I have a distant picture of the Allianz Arena. Our host did all the talking and she being from some backwater in Bavaria experienced great difficulty in communicating with the city folk. It must have been the equivalent of being lead round by a Clanger or Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Their instant and overwhelming annoyance transcended the language barrier. This distinct lack of grace was repeated several times at various locations and suddenly I could see them all in their great coats with fixed bayonets again. They were forcing my pre-conceived notions back into view. What hope did a foreigner have in this hostile environment when natives were sneered at? Beneath the calm exterior lay the beating hearts of maniacs. One such food stall bloke was nearly apopleptic when asked to place the pork burger he had served in a roll as per convention.
As a parting gift to our host I decided to put the bedding in the washing machine. A high minded gesture to show thanks for her hospitality. The machine was a top loader with the drum being orientated as per a normal front loader. Thus the drum had a metal panel that opened to allow access to the load. Not fully grasping the concept I bucked all in, added soap powder and closed the lid, hit go and left the rest to German engineering. What I had failed to do was close the access panel on the drum, merely closed the lid. About ten minutes in the washing machine started to sound like a German Gabba Techno remix of Nine Inch Nails. I had in fact fucked the washing machine in spectacular fashion, destroying the drum and entombing the bedding in a soapy grave. What Bomber Harris had started I was determined to finish. A mistake that will now cost me 300 quid to repair international relations.
After this there was nothing left to do but attempt one final epic shit and get on the train to the airport. The train in keeping with the rest of the day was 20 mins late. We arrived home last night and Teenie to her credit knocked up Rump Steak with a whisky/mushroom sauce, spuds and lots of greens. It was better than anything I ate, saw or even sniffed in Germany. Today I had a prodigous shit, it was like Spocks fucking funeral. A load has truely been lifted from me.
In conclusion, Munchen is up there with Brisbane as far as Shit City Top Trumps are concerned.
The End.
