The Return of the Native

The River Wey, Godalming

No one really writes about the return, do they? The intrepid explorer goes out, has his or her hero’s journey and the story culminates with some major event: either the battle is won or the couple is wed. Sometimes the only concession as to what happens next is a token “happily ever after.” Not many stories go on to really describe what happens after the climax, how the hero comes home after the battle/wedding (sometimes one and the same thing) and then has to unpack and do several rounds of laundry.

Such is the case with travel writing.

Looking back on the “Munich Discovered” blog I realise that these 30 entries actually form a deconstructed travel journal. Over the year I wrote about events and trips in a foreign land, cataloging my experiences, some of which would seem commonplace if I were writing about them in my homeland. For example, visiting a library as I did in “The Pyramid of Distractions” (13/01/19) is ordinary enough when it is the one in your hometown that you visit every time you’re on your way to the supermarket to pick up bread and bin bags. What makes visiting a library in Munich worthy of a travel blog entry is its exoticism, its novelty and the fact that books can contain words as long as “siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig” (the number 777 777 spelt out, which, by the way, is my new favorite number).

What does anyone care of the reality that confronts the return of the native? Does anybody really want to know of the horror of opening five months worth of letters, seeing the warnings creep up from 1st, 2nd to FINAL in ever more threatening combinations of font formatting? Probably not, but then because so much of my writing is me talking to myself and seeing as my website provider continues to charge me a monthly fee, I may as well continue the saga and relay what happened after I moved back.

It didn’t register initially. After an extended period abroad I relished home comforts, exulting in ready access to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and conversations in the shops and on TV that I could understand without issue. Of course, such conversations often focused on the omnishambles that is British politics right now but hey, you win some, you lose some. Like many repatriates I had a period of downtime between jobs and while initially allowing me to catch up on my sleep and laundry, it also gave me time to ruminate.

What struck me most was how much I missed Munich, places and people. The Cadbury’s sugar rush receded only to be replaced by first wave nostalgia, my memories crystallising over with a rose gold tint. I missed beer and brezn and the city. I missed my usual jog along the Isar and the familiar bridges, the sights as breathtaking on the last run as they were on the first. But most of all, I missed my friends and newly forged fiancee with such a weird, profound resonance that my writing skills are unable to accurately convey the sensation.

Needless to say there were an incalculable number of things that I missed. I’ll spare you the lengthy detail.

Compounding the sense of loss and longing were the practical problems of settling back in my homeland. As mentioned, there was the backdated mail to catch up on and the accounts that had to be reestablished along with numerous other practicalities of daily life that were routine but onerous. Unhelpfully, all things that would have sweetened the transition (fiancee, friends, my favorite chocolate croissant from the Rischart bakery) seemed to be stuck in Bavaria.

So what happens next? What do you do when you find yourself in the anticlimax of a most remarkable year abroad?

You start again.

Slowly, at times painfully, you collate your task list and then when you feel able enough or the deadline is approaching, whichever comes first (in my case it is invariably the latter), you make yourself a cup of tea and face it down. You call the number on the FINAL warning letter and plead your case and are surprised when the lovely Anna, understands the situation and reverses the action. You visit 11 flats in the hottest recorded weather of British summertime and eventually agree on a let. You are repeatedly thwarted in your attempt to schedule a last minute visit to the continent to see your partner but eventually secure a flight that gets you there.

And you start again.

You find new things to enjoy. You read the latest bestseller from Ian McEwan and catch up on the genius that is Fleabag on BBC iPlayer. You also fall back on the familiar, taking joy in English strawberries and an old jogging route along the River Wey. These pleasures predate brezn and the Isar run but are no less gratifying. And finally you share the transition, the good, the bad and the hard bits, with loved ones both home and abroad. A call, a Facetime, a text, all to let you know that you are not alone in facing this new start, this old ground and that you are missed just as you miss them.

And without realising it, you find you have already started.

To Munich, with love

Circumstances change and things that seemed incontrovertible turn out to be more malleable than first thought. For instance, I thought that summer in Munich started in May. One drizzly, single-digit degree month later and I was found still waiting for sunshine. Another key belief was that I would be in Munich for at least a while longer. It turns out that this was an assumption rather than a given. England calls me back and as such the great Munich adventure, my life here and my blog will all have to end.

And then just as these decisions were made the sun decided to come out.

As I pack up my things Munich has erupted into summertime glory. Blue skies wake me up every morning and the 30 degree heat makes the midday environment extreme and the early evenings sublime. It has never looked better, more enticing, more worthy of occupying a slot on the countless Best-World-Cities-to-Live-In lists. And I have to leave this place in a few weeks. It seems almost unjust.

But there is something to be said for a deadline (as I find out every fortnight, when I race against the clock to submit this blog) and thus, I have a bucket list of things to do in and around Munich. Some are definitely achievable, for instance sneaking a God’s eye view of the city from Olympiaturm on a low demand weekday should be easy enough to tick off, however, some other things remain highly improbable e.g. fitting in a nifty weekend to every major city in Europe seems unlikely. Meanwhile as I redirect my mail and prepare myself for another caged mouse routine at the KVR, I intend to fill the rest of my time with making the most of Munich.

And to top it all off I have a few friends visiting. The deadline exists as much for them as it does for me as soon there will be no Munich sofa for them to kip on after I leave the country. Thus, I have a number of visits in the last few weeks of my time here and as such need a list of activities and restaurants to showcase the best of the Munich experience within the space of a weekend. Here is my finalised list:

How to make people fall in love with Munich in 6 Easy Steps

1. Although beautiful buildings may impress a tourist I believe love begins in the belly. If a city wants to win over a visitor a scrumptious meal earns brownie points more quickly than walking through the pretty. Thus, I begin most tours of Munich at the Viktualienmarkt. No matter the dietary requirements of the visitor there is something to be had from the myriad stalls filled with cheese, fruit and honey. Not only are the wares of superior quality but the whole marketplace is delightful to look at, populated as it is with almost as many flower stalls as produce. Even the raw slabs of meat in the parade of butchers’ shops are aesthetic, their appearance as intense as that of a Van Gogh painting in fifty shades of blood red.

2. After tanking up on herby sausages and fresh strawberries the natural next step is to walk the 100m past the facing churches of the Holy Ghost and “Old Peter,” curve round past the statue of Shakespeare’s Juliet, with her overfondled “lucky” golden breast and through the gate of the Toy Museum masquerading as a fairy castle. This visual overload is nothing in comparison to the ensuing view.

First the ornate facade of the Neues Rathaus comes into view with hundreds of awe-struck tourists gawping from the square in front of it. As you get subsumed into the crowd on Marienplatz, the two viridian pepperpot towers of Frauenkirche appear in the background. It is an arresting vision and European Old Town architecture at its very best. Every visitor I have shown round this city does a double take at this sight, as I still do every time I walk this route.

3. This is the point when most people are won over by Munich. From then on it is just a question of how far you will fall in your love for this city. I certainly feel for every hundred metres of avenue up from Marienplatz to Odeonsplatz I become more and more enamoured of the city, such that by the time I am in the manicured gardens of the Residenz I feel the need to call up my mother and squeal at her “it’s so beautiful! Munich is so unbelievably beautiful!”

And it is not just beauty on offer. Continuing walking past the Hofgarten through the affluent streets of Lehel and you will see museums, outdoor cafes and even a surf spot. The eternal wave of the Eisbachwelle marks the entrance to the English Garten with a line of wetsuit clad surfers, who jump into the churning green waters one after another to practise and impress. This city has everything except the sea and even then, it will go to extraordinary ends to make sure Münchners don’t miss out.

4. And then you are in the English Garten proper. Mile after mile of green space rolls out before your pacing feet or bicycle wheels. It goes on and on with lakes and beer gardens scattered amongst the landscape to provide respite and variation from the ongoing green. Accompanying the pathways is the river Isar, which snakes through the greenery, carrying its ice blue waters all the way from the Alps to the airport. The English Garten does not feel so much like a haven from the city but a separate world entirely.

It feels hard to leave the tranquility of the English Garten but the blow is softened by the buzz of Schwabing and the neighbouring districts. Cross east to west and you can traverse the quirky Olympiapark complex, taking time to glimpse the mountains from Olympiaberg, one of the tallest hills in Munich.

5. Take the appropriate pathways and you will find yourself at Schloss Nymphenberg, another extraordinary place in Munich’s ever-expanding list. Suddenly in the midst of a crush of streets the vista opens out onto a Baroque Palace, almost as unexpected a sight as seeing an alien spaceship. There is city and then there is an Italianate Palazzo. The mind boggles.

6. With free entry you can saunter through the palace gardens and wind your way past the pagodas and swans to the essential end to the Munich experience. Welcome to the world’s largest beer garden, Hirschgarten. Sit on a bench and down your litre of beer and unctuous “halbes hendl” (half a chicken). While away the hours feasting on knuckles of pork and brushing thighs with a barrel-bellied Bavarian. That is yet another facet of Munich, as iconic as the towers of Frauenkirche or the serenity of the English Garten.

This itinerary seduced me to the charms of Munich, as it has done every visitor I have taken round. If you ever come to Munich might I suggest you try at least a few of the places above? I guarantee you will fall in love too.

Regensburg

I thought some things were universal. Just as everyone accepts that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, I thought that train tickets were predestined to be expensive. Having contended with the inevitable yearly English train fare price hike I was accustomed to seeing ever large chunks of my bank balance fall away at the train ticket office. Woe betide the one who does not book their ticket months in advance and is foolhardy enough to buy on the day of travel. They will be punished with prices that run into triple figures depending on the destination.

This explains some of my surprise that Deutsche Bahn, the company that runs the rail network in Germany, offers bargain deals for travel in and around Bavaria. Yes, the timetabled trains between different Bundesländer can be eye-wateringly expensive especially if booked late but there is at least one consistently affordable option at the ticket machine.

Behold the Bayernticket.

For €32 two people can travel for a whole day around the entirety of Bavaria on most forms of public transport. Bearing in mind that Bavaria is roughly half the land mass of the UK, that is equivalent to being able to travel to the Lake District from the center of London any day of the week on a good number of trains for only €16. This price goes down further if you travel as part of a larger group.

Of course, when I first learnt of the Bayernticket I did not believe in it. After years of suffering under English National Rail services such profligacy seemed implausible and I travelled with distinct unease. Every time the conductor approached I clutched the thin slip of paper with my name scribbled on it and thought that this would be the time I had crossed out of bounds and would have to be thrown off the moving locomotive a la Indiana Jones in the Zeppelin scene. However, every time the conductor stamped my ticket without issue. Continue your two hour train ride to the other side of Bavaria, her bored expression seemed to say. Nip across the border to Salzburg if you will, certain destinations in Austria are included too.

Now that I have tried and tested the Bayernticket I sit back in my seat and enjoy the ride instead. My main preoccupation is where I should go at the weekends, which is how I have been able to enjoy snowy Saturdays skiing in the winter and sunny Sundays hiking in the spring. To mix things up this week I traveled to Regensburg, a town northeast of Munich, reported to be beautiful and well conserved. With the jackpot credential of being a UNESCO World Heritage Site it was little wonder that it was at the top of my Germany wish list.

Which is why I was so worried when the visit started umimpressively. As I walked from Regensburg’s train station through the outskirts of town blocky 60s facades seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of Croydon. I began to fear my €16 ill-spent. Spoilt by the prodigious size and beauty of Munich I wondered whether my expectations were just too high and no place, even UNESCO World Heritage Sites, could compare. However, it turned out my main issue was impatience as within a few hundred metres the brutalist architecture gave way to the attractive medieval buildings of Regensburg’s Old Town.

Almost completely spared of damage in the war the core of Regensburg remains as it did in the preceding centuries. As I wandered through the warren of streets my eyes were drawn to numerous brown shields detailing the history and date of construction of the buildings they were affixed to. It was almost impossible to believe that the quaint edifices dated back to the 13th century, such is the legacy of Germany’s past that one expects historic looking buildings to have been at least partially rebuilt.

In my mind anything historical takes on a sepia or monochrome tone with my visions of ancient monuments undeveloped beyond the grey granite or yellow sandstone they are uncovered as. Just as it is hard to picture the walls of the ancient Egyptian tombs in riotous colour, such is it hard to picture a medieval town with bright facades and bustle. Regensburg is the antidote to that. This town is authentic to its past and the buildings are as jumbled and colourful as they must have been back in the day.

Crossing the town I passed lines of picturesque buildings, which intersect with other fronts in a series of enticing alleyways. It was a pleasure to walk through the streets and pretend I was in another era but then I began to notice something. For all its historic nature Regensburg had undoubtedly been touched by the present day. Despite being well maintained the ground floor shops invariably targeted tourists, although the souvenirs they sold were more attractive than the usual. Outside these shops the numerous rotating stands still sold cards albeit upmarket greeting cards rather than the normal dog-eared postcards. Regensburg had tilted its focus from its own city with its own focus to one of promoting tourism. Sure enough as I made my way to the riverside I saw gaggles of visitors alighting a Danube river cruise, their sunburnt forms desperate to get into the town centre for shade, alcohol and ice cream.

And I too was one of these daytrippers.

Uncomfortable with the realisation that I was affecting the nature of the town I crossed over the iron bridge to the suburban north bank, where fewer tourists circulated. If they had made it over they would have been rewarded with the best panorama photos of the Old Town, which were only to be had from the north bank. Regensburg was stunning.

As I sat back in my seat on the train ride to Munich I looked at my Germany wish list and regarded Regensburg, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, written at the top. I can see now how this award can be both a blessing and a curse as the inevitable flock of tourists, desperate to see just one more incredible thing before they die, undoubtedly has an impact on a town.

It was with an unexpected uneasy feeling that I ticked Regensburg off my list.

The panorama from the north bank of the Danube

A Weekend in Frankfurt

It was long overdue but the time had finally come. I had to break out of Bayern.

When I first came to Germany I had gap year visions of touring round the land and visiting as many cities, castles and UNESCO World Heritage sites as possible. The realities of living and working abroad, however, made this tricky. Cramming in weekend getaways had a debilitating knock-on effect to the working weeks either side of the trip and contending with the tiredness was enough to limit such travels. But now with a potential deadline to my stay in Germany it was time to explore.

It was 5:50 a.m. and I was waiting for the train. The obscenely early start was my fault and the result of a confluence of unfortunate traits of mine. Firstly I had left the planning of the trip far too late and thus by the time I looked at the Deutsche Bahn website, all the train fares were heart-stoppingly expensive. In a panic I opened up another tab and loaded trusty Flixbus but at a journey time of 5 hours most of the weekend would be spent travelling on a bus in disturbing proximity to an abused toilet and possible drug traffickers. It would have to be the train.

The only option that was relatively affordable was the early train from Munich to Frankfurt, which of course meant waking up at stupid o’ clock. I boarded the train feeling like a reanimated corpse complete with pallid skin, a rumbling stomach and grumbling headache. My condition was so far gone not even the usual resuscitation methods of coffee and a croissant could fix it. I consoled myself that the incipient migraine was worth it for a few saved euros and three more hours in Frankfurt and then I knocked back all the painkillers I could and tried to get in the holiday spirit.

As the train slipped north towards Frankfurt the scenery of Bayern rolled before the windows like a running cinema reel. Gentle fields gave way to pine forests whilst the sky converted from mackerel scales to a duvet of grey. By the time I reached Frankfurt it was raining.

The first sight of Frankfurt was reminiscent of the southern approach to London’s Victoria station. There too a train pulls past a motley selection of industrial and residential buildings with an expansive set of silver tracks separating the city from the railway. As the train curved in its approach I caught a glimpse of Frankfurt’s famed skyscrapers glinting ahead, steel grey and nickel blue under the overcast sky. Unlike Munich this was a city in the modern sense of the word, having shrugged off its past low-rise monuments in favour of the big and the new.

I wonder what my impression of Frankfurt would have been had it not been raining the weekend I visited. I wonder whether a bright blue sky and birds trilling in the Taunusanlage on the way to the opera house would have lightened the mood in the city. As it stood the incoming rain made exploring impossible and I found myself seeking shelter in the mall off the main shopping street. This was familiar territory - international brands neighboured each other in the bright confines of the Skyline Plaza Shopping Centre. The shops were carbon copies of those in Munich and Croydon and I found myself simultaneously comforted and depressed by the familiarity of such things in what should have been a completely foreign context.

Eventually the rain eased such that it became possible to perform a quick dash around the sights mentioned in the guidebook. I hurried through the streets towards the lauded Römerberg, the heart of old Frankfurt, desperate to see the famed facades and snap a few pictures before the rainclouds came back. The square was a Grimm’s Fairy Tale delight with 360 degrees of half-timbered houses pivoting around a statue of Lady Justice in the centre. But even with the obscuring groups of tourists and the dull light the Römerberg was not as it initially appeared i.e. the authentic article. There was a newness to it that was in the same vein as the skyscrapers that crowded the central business district. Further perusal of the guidebook revealed that in actual fact the Römerberg was a replica of the old town, which burnt down during a World War Two air raid. The buildings may have been identical but there it was, a perceptible difference.

The raindrops began to reappear. I hurried away from the (new) historic plaza through more seemingly old streets, which had that same present-day gloss on them. Things were not as they appeared. In between the beautiful timber frame buildings there were definite touches of modern architecture. Opposite a picture-perfect medieval-style house posed the glass expanse of the Schirn Kunsthalle with a giant silver sculpture slumped over the side of a neighbouring building. Two eras collided.

A rainy weekend in Frankfurt is certainly not enough to do the city justice, however, first impressions have an unmistakeable impact. Until my next visit Frankfurt will continue to be a city of contrasts for me, a seeming juxtaposition of the old(ish) with the new, but everything heavy under a leaden sky. Yes, there has been some attempt to recapture the past but it has also taken on a modern identity with skyscrapers, art and chain stores proudly on display as part of the city’s new image. Compared to the preserved street layouts and imposing stone grandeur of Munich’s buildings Frankfurt seems a world, not two-hours’ train ride away.

It may not have been my home away from home but it certainly proved a point. There was a lot more of Germany that I still needed to explore.

Easter

Easter Sunday dawned on Germany, exactly as bright and promising as such a metaphor for Christ’s resurrection should be. The same had happened around four hours earlier in Sri Lanka. Separated by a difference of mere hours, people in these two countries prepared for the Pascha in both similar and different ways. Eyes blinked open, teeth were brushed and for those Christians amongst the populace I imagine there was the donning of the Sunday Best, pressed shirts and special occasion shoes brought out as the first ritual on this holiest of holy days.

This was where Sri Lanka and Germany started to differ. Traffic in Sri Lanka remained as unruly as ever and the citizens navigated their way through the dust and the fumes in sandals. In Munich, where I was waking up to the prospect of finally unwrapping my chocolate bunny, Easter was a quiet affair, the streets more empty than normal for a Sunday. Two countries, three and a half hours apart, similar but different, with little to bring either to the attention of the other.

And then Sri Lanka was connected to every other country in the world in the worst possible way.

“Bomb blasts reported at Sri Lankan churches and hotels,” flashed the news bulletin. It was a one line snippet, a cursory summary of the overnight news, something that usually revolved around non-developments in Brexit and was anodyne enough to wake up to. This, however, was different. This news story came from the country of my parents’ birth, the country where I spent my summers and where my grandmother and aunts, uncles and cousins still lived. Suddenly Sri Lanka was transmitting distress signals to every country in the world after a series of terrorist attacks.

Frantic calls ensued. Yes, everyone we knew was fine. No, no one knew if there were more bombs. Yes, everyone would stay at home. And then after I hung up what was there left but to click refresh on the news? Pictures of bloodied buildings and broken windows were familiar from reports of Middle Eastern conflicts but how many times had I scrolled past these with a mere shake of the head? And now the pictures were of familiar road junctions, places I had been to lunch and worst of all, wailing women, who looked terribly liked loved ones. The lead horror story on the news was my own personalised cross to bear.

I sat with my phone in my hand feeling utterly powerless. What could I do from Munich of all places? After the 2004 tsunami, another awful occasion when Sri Lanka made world headlines, I remember heading to the local temple to help with packaging goods for the relief effort. Natural disasters lend themselves to boy scout-like manouveres and bake sales to boost aid funds. Terrorism, however, casts a different shadow on the aftermath. Carnage caused by human hand is doubly superfluous. There is no physical or meteorological inevitability to it, just pure malice. So what was I to do with an excess of emotion and no real outlet for it? I did what thousands of Sri Lankans had done a few hours earlier - I went to church.

This is how I, a British-Sri Lankan Buddhist, found myself walking beneath the pepperpot towers of Munich’s emblematic church, Frauenkirche, in order to attend the Easter service. On the outside it would seem utterly unremarkable to see a slightly nervous, brown-skinned woman walking into the Frauenkirche but for me it was my own personal fuck you to the terrorists that had sought to deter Sri Lankans from attending religious services.

Of course, the practicalities of attending a foreign-language church service conducted in an echoing hall proved challenging. Straight off I made a rookie mistake by hurrying to the pews without collecting a hymn book. This meant I stayed silent for all the songs, something my school music teacher would have found intolerably rude. Unaware of quite what was going on or what the priest was saying meant that I spent most of the service anxiously looking at the elderly couple next to me for cues as to when I should stand or sit or sing. Both appeared to be suffering from osteoarthritis though and thus, stayed sitting for the majority of the mass. Unwittingly following their lead, I too stayed seated, when I could have easily knelt or stood. Again I fear to think how insolent it looked like from a devotee’s point of view. I only pray God didn’t take it personally. In the end I gave up on trying to copy cat the congregation and closed my eyes, concentrating on my thoughts.

As I sat there a male voice called out lines of prayer in a disconcertingly high-pitched alto. These lines were followed by a rumbling “amen” from the audience, a call and response interlude that brought wandering minds back to the present. As I refocused on the content I heard the priest sing out a prayer for the people of Sri Lanka, Christians and non-Christians alike. Suddenly two very different parts of my personal history were connected, united through heinous circumstances but the concluding message being that of love.

I imagine Sri Lanka featured in quite a few Easter sermons across the world that day. I wonder if the terrorists could have anticipated that? Their will to destruct people and their faith had in actual fact sparked solidarity in so many different countries and across different religions. Small skeins of support and messages of love had been cast to Sri Lanka from places as far removed as Bavaria. What a repudiation to those who sought to destroy. The world is more connected and supportive than ever.

Amen.

A Tale of Two Days

Weekends are precious. For most of us they form 28% of the week but in my experience they always feel too short. Two out of seven days seems ample enough time to destress, recuperate and reenergise after the rigors of work but somehow by the time Sunday night sets in, I find myself feverishly trying to cram all the activities I was meant to do over the course of the two days into the 15 minutes before bedtime.

This cannot go on. I need to bring weekends back.

It was meant to start this week. With April 1st falling on a Monday I felt a peculiar satisfaction that this would be the start of my new orderly life. As if this were new year I made quasi-resolutions to adhere more to the traditional healthy lifestyle traits e.g. drinking more water, getting the 5-a-day, going to bed early etc. Of course, that lasted until Wednesday lunch, when after enjoying a Kinder Bueno, I fell off the healthy wagon hard.

But the weekend could and would be different. Here, without the demands of work, I had more chance to regulate myself and my time. In fact, I had 64 hours with which to do with as I pleased and my aspirations were high, my to-do list was bountiful. The weather forecast looked good, Munich was waiting and I was ready to go, go, go.

I started with a handicap though. It was my own doing but by way of celebration of the end of the working week and the about-to-be-a-success weekend, I indulged in a bit too much red wine with dinner on Friday night. I staggered into bed at a time that would make Cinderella blush and as such woke up bleary-eyed and bushy haired much later than I had expected on Saturday. My weekend had begun on the back foot.

Munich was not forgiving. As I stumbled into the glare of the Old Town in full spring mode I realised that my city had changed. There were people everywhere. Suddenly streets which had been deserted since Christmas were bustling with people, who had been out for hours already. Viktualienmarkt, which had been my own personal farmer’s market for most of the winter, was now heaving with crowds. With a hangover still depriving me of a few gross motor skills, it was inevitable that I would bump into people and walk through tourist photos in the crush. Had I only made it out a little earlier I would have been able to enjoy my weisswurst in relative peace and already be far down on my to-do list.

As it stood, I was losing in the competition for shop cash registers to Munich’s many weekenders, tourists and visiting Borussia Dortmund fans. There was no space to browse, my pleasure purchases of new running shoes and a frying pan became fraught affairs as I fought other customers for the attention of the sales’ assistants.

“Come back on a week day if you want more help,” I was told by an apologetic employee in the athletics store. “It’s just so busy at the moment!” he said before disappearing under a crowd of steel-thighed ultramarathon runners, whose need and budget for trainers were obviously much greater than mine.

I came back home disappointed at how little of my to do list had got done and moreover, how little pleasure I had that whole day. And with the sun setting, half my weekend had evaporated and its potential had not been realised. I felt fractious and tired. By the time I met Philippe for an evening drink I was already beginning to fret about the next day, calculating that if we were to stay out late this would delay Sunday’s planned mountain hike and leave me sleep-deprived. The thoughts snowballed as I started simulating the upcoming week in my mind and how cumulatively awful it would be, all the result of an unsuccessful weekend. I sat in silence at the bar and worried.

“Are you feeling ill?” asked Philippe, the disappearance of my usual chatterbox tendency more startling than if I had suddenly started to projectile vomit.

I shook my head.

“Then what’s the matter?”

I eventually explained the situation to him, stating how the weekend was not turning out how I had expected and how tomorrow’s plans were likely to be compromised as a result of today’s inefficiency.

“Well, why don’t we just take some things off the list and do something less demanding but equally as nice?” said Philippe, the eternal voice of reason.

Thus followed eight glorious uninterrupted hours of sleep, a lazy Sunday brunch and then a train ride to one of the lakes closer to Munich. Sunday afternoon unfolded with us sitting on the shores of Ammersee, reading our books whilst eating scoops of straciatella in the sun. Then we walked for an hour around the silver blue water, stepping stone-ing our way over the small streams which emptied into the lake. We talked and talked and talked. It was not the soaring heights of a hike in the Alps but it was an equally exceptional experience.

As I came back home with the sun still acceptably high in the sky I found there were still a few hours to cook, clean and even write the weekly blog. I started to run through the to do list, seeing what things I could cram into the remaining time, only to stop myself. Expecting too much from a weekend was exactly the reason why I had not enjoyed Saturday and it was only after I gave up these expectations that I really made the most of things.

That damn list can stay in the bin.

From a Distance

When asked to think of notable European lakes, there are some obvious contenders. One may first be inclined to picture the serene blue waters of Lake Geneva or movie star-central Lake Como. Indeed the old boys: Italy, Switzerland and France all jostle for the title of “Country with the Best Still Bodies of Water,” but they face competition from increasingly popular destinations like Croatia and Slovenia. As it stands Germany hardly gets a look in.

Such is the general disregard for Germany as a countryside holiday destination that many people are unaware of the countless pristine lakes and rivers it has. I count myself among these unenlightened souls. Before I came to Munich I had thought of Germany’s highlights in simple terms: Berlin, Oktoberfest and fast cars on fast motorways. The fact that Germany boasted rolling vineyards, fairy-tale towns and oh yes, a part of that insignificant mountain range called the Alps, completely passed me by. It was only once I moved here that I discovered that Germany has so much to offer and that many highlights are within a one hour train ride from my front door.

During excursions to skiing destinations over the winter months I often passed German lakes, however, under a thick layer of snow they were indistinguishable from the whitened landscape. It is hard to gain an impression of a lake or even its relative size, when it chameleons itself into a flat field due to a top sheet of ice. The rolling countryside is beautiful no doubt, but under such conditions the lake is not a feature.

Come the spring thaw, the situation changes. As the skiing season turns over into hiking season and the snow finally melts, the lakes emerge in their blue-green glory. Google Images does not lie when it shows Germany’s lakes in jewel shades of emerald, sapphire and peridot. Those Caribbean colours really can be found in the valleys of Bavaria, as I found out last weekend.

It was the first hike of the season. A perfect confluence of warm weather, weekend and Daylight Savings Time meant that spring was here and so was Munich. With 10 minutes to go a dense crowd had already formed on Platform 34 of Munich’s main train station, all awaiting the six-carriage train heading to the Alpine Valleys. Later in the journey the train would trisect into three mere two-car locomotives, which meant hikers, bikers and bog-standard daytrippers were packed cheek by jowl in an attempt to get to their respective Bavarian countryside idyll. Woe betide anyone who came too close to departure time. They had to face opening the doors onto sardined passengers, and trying their luck by squeezing into the crush. And thus commenced my one hour journey to Tegernsee.

From my squished position the lake appeared in flashes of blue between shoulders and backpacks. After the calm green of the fields just outside Munich the lake’s colour was audacious, a sparkling, brilliant tract that was the best reward after a journey in gloom of traveller traffic.

But I had not come to see the lake, at least not from this position. My way lay above the town and the lakeside, up a walking trail to the vista point of Riederstein, which lay a sporting 1207m above sea level. Having little experience of walking in the mountains, I have no concept of what this means, but as the tiny chapel, which marked the destination came into view seemingly miles above my head, the path seemed impossible. Certainly as I began the initial leg, which was steeper than I had expected, my aspirations seemed foolish. This was not for walkers, this was for certified hikers, maybe even full-on trekkers accompanied by a Sherpa.

I chugged up the incline, stopping whenever anyone overtook me. At such points I would take photos and stop to “enjoy” the view, even if the surroundings were dense woodland.

“Ah!” I would wheeze in between puffs of my inhalers. “The wonder of nature!”

I am not sure if this pretense fooled anyone apart from my own vanity. Certainly the athletic pensioners, power-walking past with their hiking sticks, did not look convinced. Although I never caught up with the über-grannies, I did eventually trace their footsteps and followed the same path to the higher reaches. Gradually the dense pine forest thinned, the trees being confined to the steep slopes below, opening up to reveal snapshot images of Tegernsee below and the ravishing glittering blue of the lake. Now the breath-catching breaks were justified. Here was a view to be savoured.

Ever more dizzying views manifested as I walked yet further up the trail and to the first (and only) rest station at the 1060m Guesthouse at Galaun. There against the hillside a typical Bavaria chalet squatted, its beer benches and square wooden tables crammed with the same crowd from the train, who were obviously much fitter than I was. Undeterred by the heaviness of Bavarian cuisine they devoured steaming plates of Käsespätzle and giant German sausages. Unlike me these folk were used to barrelling up mountains and needed suitable fare. There was no chance of it weighing them down.

Trying to avoid the inevitable post-prandial coma that follows any Bavarian meal I eat, I avoided the restaurant and continued my walk. The last leg up to Riederstein complements the Christian chapel at its pinnacle and as such is dotted by pictoral reliefs of the Passion. In suitable pre-Easter prep, after every few metres of struggling ascent a picture reminded of Jesus’ suffering, which was probably a bit more than mine. As the story reached its climax in a disturbing 2D crucifixion scene, I reached the summit and walked out to the church perched on the ledge. I had made it and it was beautiful.

There is something quite special about birds’s-eye views, especially those reached via a combination of personal exertion and traversing through nature. The same feeling of wonder and disbelief may occur at the top of a skyscraper or from the window-seat of a plane, but the experience is somewhat diminished by the layer of glass and the relative safety and convenience of the situation. But to be on the top of a mountain, looking down at beauty, having put yourself there by the effort of your own two stocky legs, is something far more elevated.

Spread under my eyes lay the carpet of Bavaria, towns and spring-green fields intersected by roads and rivers and that sparkling blue lake. Blocking my view across the horizon were the Alps, as white and astonishing as ever. It was a feast and it was mine.

Recheck your list next time you think of the most beautiful destinations in Europe and make sure Germany is on it.

Nothing worse than other people's holiday snaps

I look down on my feast

The tiny chapel of Riederstein

Tegernsee from a distance

The accompanying Passion

How to Win Friends and Influence People

I suppose it was inevitable but I never thought I would be afflicted. Along with procrastination and dry skin, the other major flaw of mine is a predisposition to hubris. Sure, I moved to another country, where I knew no one save my partner but I was naive enough to believe that within a few months (weeks if I’m being truly honest) I would be tottering around Munich with a bunch of brand new, shiny, happy friends. Forget #squadgoals, this has been my own personal goal since moving to Germany.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not picturing myself as Taylor Swift fronting a clique of über-femmes here. I was more thinking of having a group of friends that I could call on to visit the exciting bars I walk past on my way back from the grocery shopping. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Forming adult friendships in Munich has been more difficult than I expected and despite being in a happy, healthy relationship I often feel socially isolated in my new life abroad.

The question is how do you make friends as an adult? How did that even work as a child? Looking back at my school and university years I see friendships were allowed to form under conditions of opportunity and repetition. After all, I saw the same group of people often for years on end. During this period there was enough time to meet up with people, see who clicked with whom and repeat this enough to form a positive shared history, ergo friendship. But how do you do this without the melting pot milieu of an educational establishment?

The obvious substitute here is the workplace. Spending the 40 hour working week with colleagues is probably the closest thing an adult has to sharing 5 days’ worth of lessons with schoolmates, however, the two settings are not equivalent. There is a different dynamic in the work sphere, which involve hierarchies and professional boundaries. Such power differentials are often not conducive to friendship. It’s hard to bitch about the pointless tasks you have been set to work colleagues, when you know it could get back to the person who set you the pointless task.

So work may not be the most fruitful place to finding foreign BFFs. What next? Where does a newly fledged Münchnerin find their kin? Well, like most things these days the next step is usually the Internet. Whilst there may be no Tinder specifically for friendships, the web is a good starting point for finding places where like-minded people might meet. As a result I have been trawling sites like Meetup and Expatica to find groups that offer hobbies that interest me and hopefully contain a soul sibling.

The only problem is with so many different activities in Munich, I spend more time looking through potential meetups as opposed to actually attending them. Suddenly all the activities I pined for during university are once again on offer and it is up to me to decide, which ones to attend. Didn’t I always want to be a swing dancer/poet/political activist? But with only so much free time outside of work such commitments have to be well considered. Friendships form with repeated exposure and if every week I am cycling through another meetup group, that leaves little chance to strengthen existing connections.

But before we even get to that stage such connections need to form in the first place and this initiation stage is off-putting enough. Most of the time it plays out like the prom scene of a John Hughes film. There I am, heart-racing under dim lighting, entering a room full of conversing people for the first time. I scour the crowd looking for someone with a friendly looking face, who I can approach and join. Potential best friend is a long way off, at this point I just want to stop looking like a social leper. To face this fear time and again as whilst trying out different groups requires a fair amount of perseverance. Remember the alternative is a night in at home with pjs and popcorn.

Forging a friendship is remarkably like dating in that respect. You have to keep putting yourself out there, presenting your best self in the hope that someone will like you and meet up with you more often. The whole process can be exhausting. However, like finding the perfect partner it can be wonderful when it finally pays off and you find a good friend.

For months now I have been going through iterations of this sequence, fluffing past the language barrier to thrust my phone number at anyone I think might be even a vague candidate for a friend. It may feel forward at times, however, fortune favours the desperate. As such, I now have a small but wonderful list of people I can text and meet not just for group activities hosted through social media but independently too. Now I find Munich is even more my oyster seeing as I can call on a variety of people to come and explore different things with me. Conversely I also learn from them, gaining insiders knowledge from people who have lived here for longer.

I thought I had it vaguely sorted in the first few months: Flat? Check. Funky city? Check. But now with the bonus of a social circle and more people to share my experiences with, I feel so much happier.

I didn’t think it was possible but living in Munich just keeps getting better.

Life imitating Art

I have an unfortunate habit of living a lot of my life in split screen. I may be boarding the bus but in actual fact I am elsewhere, sat at my head cinema, watching a movie about how my life should ideally be playing out. Forget the bus, which I’ve been waiting for three minutes in the blistering cold for, in my mind I am slipping into my own Himmobile in which the seat warmers are already on. This dimorphic visualisation is probably an unfortunate consequence of watching too many films in which this technique has been used.

Coming to Munich worsened this tendency as I had many expectations of living in continental Europe, again as a result of pop culture. I imagined I would be swirling around the city in A-line skirts à la Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. The only problem with this is that a) moving to a place means that it no longer qualifies as a holiday and b) I own no A-line skirts. Living as opposed to holidaying somewhere necessitates the mundane realities that make existence possible e.g. working, shopping and getting the damn bus.

More often than not grand plans to visit every cocktail bar in the Zagat Guide to Munich are quickly abandoned after a long day at work. The fatal step is to actually go home before going out as more often than not the lure of pyjamas and central heating kill any such aspirations. “I’ll do it next week,” has become my go to phrase, whenever Philippe suggests somewhere we could visit on a work night, his expression mirroring that of a puppy that has been denied a walk too long. The gap between my expectations and reality is entirely down to me, and that insight has allowed me to actively fight my bone idleness. Another motivating factor is the fact that I am cheap.

Once a month the Haus der Kunst, a giant contemporary art museum in the centre of Munich, opens its doors to the public for free. I know this because I have a book called 101 Free Things to do in Munich, which I bought when I first became aware of just how costly Germany’s most expensive city was. For some time now something in my schedule has always clashed with the first Thursday of the month, when this open evening occurs and as such, I have not been able to visit the Haus der Kunst. Of course, I could go any other time for 14 € but for some reason making a visit on the evening of free entry has become a small obsession of mine.

Ignoring the tics in my mental health, last Thursday happened to be the first Thursday of the month and the stars finally aligned in that my calendar was completely blank. Finally I was free to visit the Haus der Kunst. There were obstacles to be overcome, however. 

I was tired.

It sounds pathetic but as the working week wears on I feel older. I may begin the week as a 30-something year old, but by Friday I am ready for a retirement home. My bones ache and my head is muzzy, most likely the result of cumulative sleep deprivation. Thursday is the worst day of the week to go out a-visiting, given that the next day is still a work day with no chance of a lie-in unlike Friday. 

“Shall we just do it next time?” I asked Philippe, paraphrasing the familiar excuse and literally dragging my feet.

Philippe looked at me incredulously and pushed me on.

The Haus der Kunst loomed ahead of us. There is nowhere in Munich quite like it. Residual from the Second World War, the Haus der Kunst was built by the Nazis as a place to display National Socialist approved-art. As such the building is in the style desired by the Nazis: imposing, symmetrical and stark. Columns dissect the entire length of the building, giving the appearance of a deterring grill over the museum. The style echoes the blocky dominance of the Reichsbank of Berlin and the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg, however, in this case the proportions seem off. Spanning almost the entire southern border of the Englischer Garten, the Haus der Kunst’s gargantuan length cannot be matched by its height. Truth be told, the building seems a bit squashed. 

Internally, however, the building undergoes a Mary Poppinseque transformation and opens into a giant exhibition space, seemingly bigger on the inside than on the outside. The original architectural designs have been cleverly reconfigured to create separate rooms and levels more akin to the thought-provoking layouts of modern art museums. This is undoubtedly in rebuttal to the original restrictive concept of the museum by the Nazis, a repudiation that is further emphasised in the contemporary art the Haus der Kunst now displays.

As I walked up the steps to the entrance of the museum my split screen existence converged into one vivid experience as reality caught up with expectation. Thronging the halls of the Haus der Kunst were a crowd of cliches: wealthy benefactors in sharp suits pressed past grungy arts students with nose piercings and heavy eyeliner. Everyone seemed to be keeping one eye on the art in front of them and the other on the characters in the room, sizing up the competition in terms of their money or the daring of their outfits, whichever was more important to the individual. If asked to envisage an art exhibition, this is exactly what I would picture.

The reason for the heightened atmosphere? Unbeknownst to us, a new exhibit of Ghanaian sculptor, El Anatsui, was about to debut. Being cheap had paid off and we found ourselves at the opening night along with the great and the good of the Munich arts scene in the colossal rooms of the Haus der Kunst, which were incidentally the perfect place to display El Anatsui’s work. These sculptures are actually made from repurposed metal, often myriad bottle tops, which have been strung together to form large swathes with the appearance of cloth. Making full use of the height of the halls, the sculptures cascade from the walls in warped revolutions or hang suspended from the ceiling, such as in El Anatsui’s centrepiece “Logoligi Logarithm,” a series of net-like structures made from bottle rings, that one can walk through.

As with any effective exhibition a combination of the art and the atmosphere piqued the senses. It was one of those very rare instances when life, art and imagination coalesced into one with no need for imitation. It was an extraordinary event that I could have easily missed out on, had I let the laziness of the quotidian win. It turns out my teachers were wrong. Sometimes it pays to go out on a school night.

Himmi learns to Ski

Living in Munich, on a good day I can see the Alps from any place of even modest elevation. There they stretch in fifty shades of ice white across the southern horizon with that peculiar trompe-l’oeil quality of distant mountains. Not too distant, however, as from the summit of Olympiaberg in Munich’s Olympic Park the mountains seem touchable. On a sunny day I feel as though I could stretch out my hands and crumble the chalky masses between my fingertips. The mountains are beautiful and they beckon.

But I have little experience of mountains.

I grew up in the relative flatlands of the south of England. Yes, there were hills and rolling countryside but there was nothing comparable to the Alps. Philippe on the other hand, grew up near the quintessential peaks of the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. Mountains are to him as concrete is to me, these being the typical offerings of our respective hometowns. With a lifelong knowledge of the Alps, as well as having a handy ski instructor qualification, he was the perfect person to conduct my first European skiing lesson.

We started our journey early on Saturday morning but then it seemed, so did the rest of Bavaria, as everyone tried trying to make the most of the rare occurence of clear skies coinciding with the weekend. These were seemingly perfect conditions for skiing, Philippe informed me, so it was little wonder that by the time we alighted the train at the Alpine town of Lenggries the slopes were crowded. From the foot of the pistes I could see what appeared to be a series of brightly coloured tally marks zig-zagging down the mountain. As they came nearer to the bottom these slashes differentiated into people, skiers in jackets of purple and green and black, for the most part upright and agile.

Before I could join them though, I needed gear. What followed was an uncomfortable half hour as I tried to put on what can only be described as a combination between armour and a spacesuit. Feeling very much like Cinderella’s Ugly Sister, I tried to cram my foot into the ski boot, wincing as my wide arches refused to squeeze past the plastic. In the end it fell to Philippe to apply his 80+kg of Swiss muscle onto my unyielding trotter to force it into the boot. After repeating this debacle for my other foot in front of the crowd in the hire shop, I was desperate to find the nearest avalanche to bury me and my fat feet entirely.

The embarrassment had its use though as flaming cheeks combated the blast of cold air that hit me as I walked out of the shop. I reached automatically for my asthma inhaler but then adjusted to the conditions. It was cold but it was also brilliant. Under blue skies and unadulterated sunshine the snow dazzled, inconceivably white. Every waddling step I took shifted my vision such that the snow glittered with miniscule, rainbow-coloured specks. My naive self could only compare it to the shifting twinkles of diamonds but how insufficient those small rocks seemed in comparison to the immensity of snow sparkling in the sunshine.

The wonder lasted only as long as it took me to reach the top of the slope. Suddenly there was no poetry in the piste, only terror.

Philippe zoomed a metre downslope, murmuring instructions in the same soothing tones one uses when encountering a scared animal. I was that scared animal. Despite standing stock still in the cold air, I was sweating and panicking under my thermal layers, my brain anxiously trying to find a way down that did not involve using the two strips of waxed plastic strapped to my feet. In my panic I shifted my weight backwards and then began to slide down the mountain gaining terrifying momentum.

“Do the V! Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!” Philippe shouted as I went careering past.

I angled my legs towards each other as Philippe had demonstrated, suddenly aware of just how many muscles in my legs I had never strained before. Now they were all in full use, clenching and ripping in an effort to save the whole being, Himmi, who without their sacrifice would have to be scraped off the side of a mountain. I began to brake.

Heart pumping, legs shaking, I repeated this for the next few hours. I was beyond achy, my body having progressed long past the point of muscle memory to muscle PTSD. I still became hysterical during steep sections, when I felt control of my movements starting to quite literally slip and I was envious of the children that zoomed past me with instinctive ease.

“Let’s take the gondola up to the top,” said Philippe, seeing my enthusiasm starting to flag. “We don’t have to ski down,” he said, upon seeing my petrified expression.

Detaching myself from the cursed skis, I bundled into the small, swinging cabin, suspicious as to whether a puny looking metal cable could really withstand the weight of me in my ski boots. With a jolting bump we became airborne, our metal cocoon then looping up the mountain side in a series of gentle curves as we were pulled from post to post. The ground fell away and soon we were above the tops of the pines looking down on the slope I had skied down for most of the day. It was not a short slope.

“I skied down that?” I asked Philippe, incredulous.

He nodded.

And then we crested the mountain and suddenly we were in the mountains. There they stretched, as wondrous and unreal as from Olympiaberg only this this time they were touchable, we were in the Alps. Tiny figures zipped down the steep pistes, this incredible environment their playground and backdrop. So this was why people skied. To be able to traverse this landscape was surely worth the pain and terror of learning to ski in the first place.

As we boarded the gondola to return to the bottom, I pulled on Philippe’s sleeve.

“So we’re coming again next weekend?” I asked.

A take on Vivaldi: 2/4 Seasons

The year progresses. Munich has already rolled into the second month and after a series of colds, infections and the ongoing problem of the foot I have decided that enough is enough, and I will no longer succumb to the mid-winter blues. Armed with a new pair of hiking boots, which function more like a plaster cast, I have begun to venture back out into Bavaria. It has come as somewhat of a shock. Whilst a month of being cooped up in the flat, parodying the Lady of Shallot has caused me to put on a few pounds, Munich has been undergoing its own metamorphosis.

The skies had been threatening snow for a while and when it finally came, it was a relief. Living under the heavy grey clouds had felt like being under the oppressive belly of an extraterrestrial spaceship, they had hung that low. Finally with the white flakes falling as thick as goose down, the claustrophobia had been justified. Munich was transformed. One day grey, both in stone and sky, the next day it was white with that peculiar reflective brightness of thick snow. Objects were blanketed, even the most severe perpendicular edifice was softened by a two inch thick duvet of white and more freeform structures, trees or statuary, were shrouded in snow if not subsumed completely.

And it was not just the city that had been transformed. Starting the 2019 series of weekend walks, Philippe and I boarded a train to take us out of Munich and as the scuzzy outskirts of the inner city gave way to suburbia and then to the countryside proper, the depth of snow increased. Within twenty minutes we were zipping past pristine white fields, the contours only occasionally disturbed by animal tracks. Semi-seriously we tried to play ranger and match the tracks to the animal but this game stopped rather quickly when we found our knowledge of Bavarian wildlife was limited to rabbit, squirrel and deer.

These serene conditions were present for the first few walks but as January went on, top ups of snow became less frequent and the cover of white rotted away. More and more of the earth appeared through the discolouring slush. Most disconcerting were the knobbly tree stumps, which poked through the white and brown with the startling appearance of uncovered remains. With so many like-minded people trying to defy the conditions and continue their outdoor activities, the walking trails had becoming slippery with footfall. The snow had been churned away into a watery mud but below that lay something altogether more treacherous.

I slipped, my arms jerking out in a reflex contortion whilst my injured foot protested acutely.

“What the fu-?!” I yelped.

“It’s ice,” Philippe said, stating the obvious with the confidence of the outdoorsy scientist that he is.

But it wasn’t just ice. It was strata of ice, multitude layers formed as each mush froze during the sub-zero temperatures. Echoing the Arctic ice pack here lay different vintages of ice, multiple sheets all underneath my unstable feet. It made for very slow and at times painful walking.

But that meant a more protracted and submersive experience. Yes, Google Maps severely overestimated my walking speed and half my cognitive processing was focused on the next metre of earth in front of me, but I found myself liking the almost meditative concentration of it. I had greater time to take in my surroundings and enjoy the quiet of stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Plus, it gave me even more excuse to hold Philippe’s hand.

As we have returned to Munich after the first few excursions I have noticed that the transition between snow, slush and naked tarmac occurs after shorter and shorter distances. I wonder whether that is to do with the availability of snow-clearing mechanisms or the heated thoroughfare of the city. Mucky piles of snowy sludge still remain in a few places in the centre and sometimes the remnants of a snowman catches me out, a decomposing reminder of when there were more of his kind on the streets than mine. It is startling to remember how it looked a mere fortnight earlier.

A few days ago, however, something strange happened. I woke up, got dressed and started my journey to work as usual, walking to the underground network in a darkness not dissimilar to those of the tube tunnels I was about to travel in. But as I emerged from the U-Bahn station at the end of my journey instead of the usual pre-dawn darkness, the sky was light blue and the clouds were blush pink. Sunrise. At such a time.

There is a lot to be said for snow, but my word, I cannot wait until spring.

Snowy scenes from the Isarrauen

A mystic look across Starnberger See

Starnberger See

A few inches of snow can transform a car into a Trump Toupee Wannabee

The Pyramid of Distractions

In my period of enforced convalescence I have had to find ways to amuse myself. Unable to get out and explore Munich I have had to revert back to the familiar methods of entertainment, strategies of preoccupation that harken back to school sick days. At the basal layer of this is the ultimate time-passer of them all: sleep. Maybe it is because of the anabolism in my right foot or perhaps it is the winter hibernation effect but I have passed a good part of my week cocooned in both my duvet and dreams. I suspect I am also terminally lazy.

The next layer of Himmi’s Pyramid of Distractions are passive pursuits such as watching TV or listening to podcasts. I say podcasts, by which I mean streaming vignettes off YouTube. In the lonely daylight hours, when I should be occupied at work, I keep the computer on to ensure a companionable babble surrounds me. This is essential to prevent overwhelming feelings of self-pity, which if not checked, can lead to a ridiculous episode of weeping whilst singing the Beatles’ “Yesterday” in a long nightie.

At the more active ends of the entertainment spectrum are reading and then at the pinnacle, writing. I say active although I know from observing someone reading, snug in an armchair with a cup of tea and a cat on their lap, it can seem anything but. However, if you compare it to the seamless input of information from a radio or TV screen, reading involves a lot more computational effort on the reader’s part. First, there are words, which must be read and decoded in terms of grammar and sentence structure. Then one must conjure up images or interpretations of the sentences, which depending on the subject matter can take rather a long time (I, for instance, have been struggling with the expansive sentences in one of Heinrich Böll’s books for six months now). Finally one must keep the overall plot of the book in one’s mind in order to add new read information to it.

If reading is active, writing feels even more effortful (with the possible exception of reading Böll that is). Not only must one deliver the above listed three part-process in an clear manner to the reader, but one must also be interesting, clever and if appropriate, funny. The act of creating a piece of writing is often a struggle, which is why followers of my blog will often see entries dashed out on a Sunday night. Needless to say, in my period of recuperation I have been shying away from the most active end of the spectrum and happily focusing on Netflix.

Philippe, however, worrying that I was developing a martyr/couch potato complex from my compulsive sofa-side singing of “Yesterday,” suggested a trip to the library. Fresh air, books, you know, human interaction, were his recommendations instead of my preferred combination of painkillers and self-absorption.

“But my foot!” I protested.

“It’s not broken,” came his unimpressed reply.

“Well, we don’t know that.,” I said, grumbling under my breath as I struggled on my supportive boot. “There was no x-ray.”

He was right though. Limping into the Schwabing public library, I breathed the musty air of borrowed books and it was the tonic I needed. During my time in Munich I have only ventured into the imposing halls of the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), an uncuddly place with severe lines and surfaces meant to deter distraction. Schwabing Library was the antithesis of this and much more akin to the local libraries of the UK. Between examples of reject office furniture, a hodgepodge of books jostled on the shelves, their different sizes a welcome nonconformity when compared to the imposing rows in the Staatsbibliothek.

As I hobbled along the aisles, my head quirked sideways whilst reading the spines, I felt a familiar excitement start to rise. Here be treasure. In one corner were cookery books, another philosophy and in the middle there were aisle upon aisle of brightly covered, designed-to-entice novels. Here were hundreds of different worlds and ideas to dip into and they could all be mine. I could borrow as many things as I wanted without having to worry about anything other than how Philippe was going to carry them home. It was the same benevolent, exhilarating experience as the library system in the U.K., only this time it was in German. I came home with a bevy of books, as light and entertaining as I needed (some had pictures in them) to entice me away from the TV and up to the second tier.

So here I currently sit atop the Pyramid, foot diligently elevated, having bashed out a blog and thus done my most strenuous “activity” for the week. It is with great pleasure that I hop down a level to my waiting books and tuck in. Every cloud has a silver library it seems.

Einen guten Rutsch

Happy New Year! Or as the Germans would say it “einen guten Rutsch!”

The phrase meaning “a good slide” took on new meaning when after a foolhardy attempt to achieve the perennial “do more exercise” New Year’s Resolution, I went for a run and injured my foot navigating the muddy terrain. From the outset it was evident that I was heading for a fall both figuratively and literally.

With Philippe, the athletic Übermensch, pressing ahead, I trotted behind on the first jog of the year, enjoying not so much the changing scenery but more a generous sense of self-satisfaction. Jogging! A few days into the new year! What a noble and dedicated being I was. This was going to be my year - I was achieving my goals and pretty soon, I too would be in the ranks of the flourishing elite.

Cut to a few hours later…

Something was off. The runner’s high had long since faded, I was back at home and ready to eat my weight in carbohydrates, but my right foot was not right. I took off my trainer and put my foot on the floor. The pain was excruciating. All of a sudden a movement I had done with unconscious ease since I was 13 months old was unbearable and very much at the front of my thoughts. What a crazy thing it now seemed that one’s whole weight should be borne by those two funny-looking appendages, the feet. I was suddenly feeling every pound of flesh (and shortbread) that consisted my post-Christmas frame being transmitted through the damaged structures of my right foot.

I began to limp.

“Philippe,” I said, possibly with a touch of melodrama. “I think I need to see a doctor.”

I was at a loss as to what to do. In the U.K. I would have been in my element, rocking up to the nearest Minor Injuries Unit with a potted history and even a provisional diagnosis (it had to be a stress fracture right? Over-confident, unfit asian does too much exercise too soon? If it’s not a heart attack (wrong age range) it has to be a stress fracture. If this were a multiple choice question on a medical exam that would definitely be the correct response). But I was not in the U.K. and I had no idea where to go when seeking medical care in an out-of-hours, non-emergency situation.

I asked Philippe but being an Übermensch, he had never had to seek medical care for any injuries. In the end we ended up asking the next most informed source. First we googled “what to do when you hurt your foot in Germany?” and then when the messaging boards suggested an emergency walk-in clinic we googled clinics in the area. Which is how I ended up waiting with a cross-section of Munich’s population in the walk-in emergency clinic on the first Saturday of the new year. To my right a sniffly baby snuffled and to my left a bruised granny stared into the middle distance. It was a scene familiar from my days in the NHS but this time I was part of the morose mass in the waiting room. The only difference being that this waiting room was beautifully lit and kitted out in sparkling white tile. Oh, and everything was in German.

The only thing I truly understood was my name, which was mangled by flustered pronunciation and a heavy Bavarian accent. Even for a language that is compound noun friendly, my name has a lot of syllables in it and the nurse stumbled over the letters in the same way teachers, examiners and bureaucrats have been doing since time immemorial.

As I attempted to tell my story in broken German, not knowing the word for “4th metatarsal” or “unable to weight bear,” I felt my confidence slip. If only this were the U.K I would know exactly what to do. But here I was (forgive the pun, with the pain it’s the only pleasure I get) wrong-footed. Spotting my origins, the Orthopaedic surgeon attempted to explain his diagnosis in equally broken English and what followed was an impasse of understanding as he now substituted words for “4th metatarsal” and “unable to weight bear.” Supposedly I had a tear in the tendon and needed an x-ray.

The doubt about the veracity of the diagnosis and management comes from the fact that the nurse, who subsequently bandaged up my foot, bustled me out with a few painkillers and a pat on the back. No x-ray. I had definitely lost something in translation and it was worrying. Confused and dejected I limped back home, feeling not only that I had not handled my first German medical interaction all that well, but that I had potentially missed important advice as to how to get better.

It is a humbling thing to not only be on the other side of the doctor-patient relationship but to be in such a relationship in a country different to your own. I think now of the numerous patients I have seen for whom English was not their first language, patients who looked wide-eyed from their hospital beds as family members translated far more grievous diagnoses than a duff foot. How bewildering and worrying it must be to not understand any of the words spoken, especially when they pertain to your body and your well-being.

Despite the annoyance and the pain, I am glad for this new year misstep (sorry, I’ll stop the puns soon). It seems only right to start the new year not with complacency but with compassion. I may have been stopped in my tracks (last one, I promise) in achieving my exercise goal but maybe it was worth it for a glimpse through the waiting room looking glass.

The Year in Review

We’re down to the wire here. One more cross in the calendar and then comes that glorious reset, where 365 days worth of work, sleep and procrastination spirals back to 1.1. That longed for phenomenon - the new year.

Although I am still looking forward to fresh start, it is not with the same desperation of previous years. Suprisingly I do not yearn for the unblemished pages of a new diary nor crave the psychological boost that comes from a bevy of resolutions and a momentary conviction that this time I can keep them all. I have no real wish for a new year because the year that is ending, 2018, has been one of the most extraordinary of my life thus far. Yes, in three decades I have yet to accomplish any Guinness World Record-worthy feats and my personal champagne moments only soar as high as winning Bronze in the school Maths Olympiad but even an average existence has its peaks. 2018, with all its momentous events has certainly broken the mould.

Any year that begins and ends in the arms of a loved one automatically qualifies as a good year. I can think of no better way to bookmark the yearly cycle than by indulging in the triad of champagne, fireworks and kisses. Such did this year begin, such, I hope, that it ends.

Following that auspicious start may I suggest that if you are going to endure the brutal winter, Brighton is the place to do it? Yes, the weather hits a bit harder down on the south coast but there is no better place to wait for the return of spring. I speak from personal experience having spent the first half of the year camped out by my sitting room bay window, observing the moods of the sea, which often reflected my own.

In the first few bitter months of 2018 the sea churned grey and green, whilst I metaphorically mirrored the turbulence indoors. For things weren’t going to plan and my dreams weren’t coming true. Philippe, the proprietor of those coveted new year’s eve kisses, was living in Bern and the practicalities of traveling 500 miles to “fall down at his door” were proving to be less fun than the song professed. Tired of the long-distance during one rushed weekend’s reunion I uttered the potent Beach Boy words “Wouldn’t it be Nice…”

Wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere in mainland Europe and have a different life for a while? Wouldn’t it be nice to practise another language and explore another culture? Maybe try some new foods and adopt some new traditions? And most of all, wouldn’t it be nice to be closer to Philippe? Yes, it would be so nice.

But highly improbable.

Undaunted or perhaps the more appropriate word here is “ignorant” of the impediments to this vision, Philippe and I began the laborious process of filling out applications for jobs in European cities. Whilst the weather outside became wet, wetter and more wet still, we churned out cover letters soaked in enthusiasm and desperation with the subtext reading as “please give me a job. I may be under-qualified but I will work for little money and a visa. I just want to be closer to my partner and authentic bratwurst.”

It was an uncertain time but buoyed by hope and cheap Easyjet flights, we remained convinced that our pipe dream could become a reality. And somehow, it did. Fortune favours the brave? I don’t know about that but our respective German employers were not too put off by our obvious neediness and by May we both had contracts in Munich. Not everything was as we imagined it but in terms of fulfilling the basic tenets of the dream, we were set.

Which is how I found myself on a one-way ticket to Munich in July and starting a new chapter of my life (as well as a new blog). Settling in to a new existence in a new country proved to have its own issues as regular readers will be aware, however, in the intervening months I have faced some of those challenges and learnt to embrace my life here. Munich is a beautiful, complex city with culture, politics and history running undercurrent to its elegance. It has afforded me some incredible moments from the bird’s eye view at the top of Alter Peter to my first taste of Brez’n. Perhaps due to the novelty, living in a completely different country has made me seek new experiences with a compulsion I did not have in the UK. As such I have gone to pop-up concerts given by German rappers, donned dirndl to the one true Oktoberfest and spent more money than respectable at restaurants, museums and even the supermarket.

In the last few months the issue of FOMO has increasingly surfaced (most often when I look at my bank statement and see the purchases), which has provoked self-analysis. Did I really need to do/spend all that? Was it necessary to attend that many Christmas markets in one weekend? And why do I still feel as though I haven’t visited enough? It is a difficult one to deconstruct but maybe it is because, like most good dreams, I fear it will end soon. This year has been extraordinary from start to finish and while the going is good, I want to make the most of it.

I know I’m a little late for Santa but I’ll trade a handful of New Year’s Resolutions for one belated Christmas wish. I don’t need a fresh start tomorrow, for 2019 can I just have more of the same please?

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Munich is made for Christmas.

During my August jogs through the Englischer Garten I thought that summer had to be Munich’s finest season, after all what could possibly beat the prolific green admired from a bench in a biergarten? However, autumn then came with a transformative blaze of colour and of course, there were the boozy, brez’n delights of Oktoberfest to enthrall but I have to say Christmastime may well be Munich at its best.

Munich is sparkling. Whilst I have been snug in my apartment, denying the slip into winter, brave denizens have been scaling the historic buildings and working some Frozen-magic on the city. Last week I emerged from my denial to find the streets decked in warm glow light bulbs, thousands hung from shop fronts in braided cascades. Unlike the rainbow multitudes of Brighton, these Christmas lights are all of the same variety. The numerous bulbs all emit a similar yellowish lustre, which like the posh shops they adorn, make for a rarefied, if somewhat monotonous effect.

And it is not just the shop frontage, which has changed. The streets and courtyards of Munich have sprouted colonies of small, chalet-style huts, the minaturised winter equivalent of the Oktoberfest tents.

The Christmas markets have come.

It is a sight and a smell to behold. Just to walk through the crush of crowds and stalls is to get slightly heady from the aroma of Glühwein and roasted chestnuts. Everything can (and should) be mulled it seems, for example, I saw one board offering a mulled Aperol Spritz amongst other things. To each their own.

I have stuck firmly to cup after cup of mulled red wine, served in kitsch, little mugs detailing the arrival of Christ and the particular Christmas market it is being toasted at. Tooth-achingly sweet and steamy, the claret-coloured potion is decanted from huge silver canisters, which in any other context would be holding tea or coffee. The Germans, however, have their priorities. If a container is large, it should obviously be holding alcohol.

Other stalls hold precious hand-crafted baubles and wooden figurines for nativity scenes. I paw at exquisitely carved farmyard animals, knowing that I have no need for a thumb sized donkey, but wanting one nonetheless.

The Christmas market has become the obvious place to meet, which has meant a drastic increase in the amount of red wine consumed in the week. Although Glühwein is predominantly sugar syrup, there is enough proof to counteract the chill conditions it is enjoyed in and certainly enough to evoke a fuggy, headachey sensation the next day. That in combination with a rapid increase in socialising in the run-up to the Christmas holidays, has made December into a feat of endurance. I attempt to work off the malaise during the day and sneak in naps whenever I can. Gradually as the day wears on, I shrug off the tired ogre face woke up with and by the time the evening comes I can greet another grilled sausage and mug of Glühwein with joy.

“You look tired,” comes the universal statement from people when they see me. No matter how much foundation I lather on, the cumulative effect of indulgence accumulates in my skin. I have turned into a seasonal Dorian Gray but despite this I feel the pressure to continue making the most of this special German tradition. Each time I walk through the winter wonderland of stalls I want to be participating in it. Even four Sundays of Advent are not enough to visit all the key Christmas markets in the area. It is FOMO at its very worst.

And there really is no need for it. As they say, Christmas comes but once a year but it does come each year. Marienplatz will sprout the same stalls next December and I have no doubt there will be more Glühwein. Even if I no longer live in Munich, globalisation and blessed/cursed Easyjet will no doubt offer me means to visit the city for a Weihnachstmarket. There is no reason for me to push through the season, desperate to make the most of things as I have all the Christmases to come to visit Nuremberg and Rothenburg and the other places on Lonely Planet’s List of Top 10 German Weihnachtsmarkets. Maybe I should sit back and reflect on the true meaning of the holiday instead?

Maybe after one last glass of Glühwein…

When a door closes, a bottle of Glühwein opens...

I couldn’t spend yet another Saturday night in.

The apartment has become just a little bit too comfortable since the plunge into winter. After a week of rainy November nights, Munich has seen its first snow and I now quite willingly barricade myself in the apartment whenever possible, staring out at the frozen landscape with suspicion. The energy bill is still awaited, thus I have freely indulged in keeping radiators on and fire the antiquated ceramic stove in the sitting room ad lib. I cannot tell whether my rosy cheeks are from the unremitting heat or a distinct possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning, but I feel so toasty and warm, either way it’s worth it.

But this cannot go on.

For one thing the heating bill will land in the post-Christmas deficit of January and I know from previous experience the shock and pain of this. The Ghosts of Christmas Past and Future are both warning me to literally get out whilst I can and save myself the hardship (and the polar bears). Furthermore, Munich is looking wonderful right now. As I scurry through the streets, eager to get home as soon as possible, I pass Christmassified displays in shop windows and know that they deserve more than a cursory glance.

But I didn’t want to wait until December to explore Munich on ice. Now that I was liberated from the snug confines of the flat and my isolationist tendencies I wanted to head out on a Friday night and go dancing and drinking and generally emulate scenes from that cringe-worthy but in my case sadly formative movie, Serendipity. The question was where?

I asked around my German friends, however, my questions were generally met with a confused look and the statement, “I haven’t seen the movie Serendipity.” Evidently my friends are more high-brow than I am. Undaunted, I asked for general recommendations as to bars or places to visit on a weekend night. Where was the latest “happening” place, etc? Of course, my use of the word “happening” probably meant I was not the kind of person desired at such places but my friends kindly mentioned a few names, which I jotted down with anorak’s eagerness.

This lead to me yesterday donning a slinky dress, discordant with the arctic weather conditions and dragging a rather more weather-appropriately attired Philippe along for a night out on the town.

“This is the bar,” I promised. “This is the most happening place in Munich.”

His expression never wavered, but no doubt Philippe internally winced at my terminology.

Tottering out of the subway, we followed the GPS directions to the bar, which was situated within a posh shopping arcade. However, our entry to the mall was blocked by a burly bouncer, dressed in a suit which in Sound of Music-style, appeared to be made out of curtain fabric.

“Are you on the guest list?” he asked. “If not there’s an entry fee.”

Maybe it was this unexpected barrier or maybe it was the dazzling jacquard of the bouncer’s outfit but dumbfoundedly I handed over the extortionate cover charge and we were allowed past the velvet rope. We walked down the short stretch of shops to where the mall opened out into a courtyard, which like Marienplatz, was filled with a number of wooden Christmas markets huts and a crowd of people. This was a very different demographic to the families and tourists of the centre of Munich though. Here young adults in puffa jackets smoked roll-ups and knocked back glühwein. Stricken, I pushed past them to the bar.

“Closed for a private function,” blared the words printed on a piece of A4 stuck to the door.

I fumed before turning on my uncomfortable heels to go and give the bouncer a piece of my mind. Deliberate misinformation! We had just paid for the privilege of being stuck out in the cold, outside the bar we wanted to go to. Philippe held me back.

“Why don’t we have a drink to warm up first?” he suggested.

Ten minutes and a sugary, steaming mug of Glühwein later, all was fuzzy and alright by me. With the alcohol thawing both my frozen fingers and my attitude to the situation, I began to appreciate the warmth of the crowd around me and the unexpected opportunity I was presented with. I had never really spent nights out during winter, the focus in the UK being more on cosy nights at the pub. Being outdoors and equipped to enjoy it (ahem, having a glass of mulled wine in my hand) was a new and wonderful experience, and something I wouldn’t normally have considered doing. Meanwhile obnoxious music throbbed from behind the bar’s closed doors and it looked quite unappealing from the crisp calmness of the outside. I was suddenly glad for the private function.

This is one of the pitfalls of moving to a new place, I realised. The recommendations of friends' may not be to taste and the process of exploring new things may not always be successful. In the end it is a numbers game and the only way to find your own version of “happening” is to keep trying out places. Despite the potential for overrated, overpriced failures, however, occasionally there is a concomitant surprise, in this case it turned out to be sharing a mug of Glühwein under a snowy sky in the arms of a loved one.

That, is what I believe is called serendipity.

Juggling

Time is passing here in Munich.

Within the last week there has been a drastic drop in the temperature, something that caught me out one morning when beguiled by bright sunshine, I went out wearing summer flats and almost lost a toe to the cold. The counterpoint to this is a final flare of autumn colours with Munich’s many green spaces now glowing in ochre, umber and scarlet instead. It is a heady experience going for a walk through the Maximiliansanlage as the leaves almost fluoresce at sunset. Of course, such walks are strictly a weekend feature seeing as another offshoot of the descent into winter is that the sun now sets during working hours.

Similar seasonal cycling is happening in the UK too, judging from the stunning shots my father sends me of the garden back home. Seeing the familiar photos provokes a pang of longing for the niceties of home, which is then sobered by follow-up pictures of bills and scary “PLEASE RESPOND URGENTLY” letters, which have been redirected to my parents’ address now that I am living abroad.

That is a key issue I have been contending with during my time here in Germany. Despite emigrating a few months ago, of course I did not wholly quit my life back in the UK. England is where my family and friends still live and where I fledged my medical career. There is no question of me completely abandoning that. This makes for a rather tricky situation, whereby I am trying to maintain two lives in two different countries separated by the English Channel.

And this is where the superheroes come in.

I am incredibly lucky to have a number of extraordinary friends and mentors in the UK, who have the grace and generosity to help me even though I am 740 miles away. On many an occasion I have roped them into the fiendish process of handling some sort of bureaucratic process on my behalf with nothing but the promise of good karma. Administrative chains can be cumbersome enough to deal with when it is your own albatross but to try and solve them for someone else, who is living abroad and whose mother’s maiden name isn’t to hand, takes a great deal of time, energy and good will.

Similarly friends and family are there for pep talks, career counselling and general catch-ups via all the digital mediums available these days. As such, although I am living in Munich, I could quite easily plot a firework-like network map of all the personal connections that keep my mood, my career and my life afloat in both the UK and Germany.

At the same time, however, I am aware that I must also do my part in propping up a full time job in Germany, my responsibilities back in the UK and importantly, maintaining those relationships spanning the two countries. Needless to say, striking the balance is hard. It was only after waiting three months to buy stamps to send a stack of postcards written in August, that I realised I was going to have to up my time management skills. I have now advanced to full control freak levels by making a weekly planner of all my free time, scheduling everything from dinners with friends to calling my mother. I think I am going to go the whole hog and ask for a Filofax for Christmas.

Despite all my attempts to juggle the many parts of my life, I often find myself caught out and calling on a much forsaken friend or colleague to help me out in time of need. It may have been months or even years since I last talked to them but they invariably come through. It makes it so much easier knowing that there are many pairs of kind hands all over the globe to catch my spinning plates as they fall.

As I said, I am incredibly lucky.

Dedicated to Dr Acevedo, Dr de Belder and Dr Thillainathan

Bratwurst vs Bangers

I have come to the somewhat embarrassing realisation that grocery stores are my happy place. There are no sophisticated Holly Golightly pretensions here, I’m afraid. When I need a pick me up I don’t go to Tiffany’s, I go to Tesco’s. And so it has been in Munich too. On a tough day I get out at a different subway entrance to the usual and make my way to the bigger Rewe supermarket near my flat. There I will quite happily spend upwards of an half hour simply staring at the aisles of foreign produce, carefully deciding what new and curious type of German cheese to try.

Like many other people, food is a love of mine. There is a certain comfort in knowing that you can go to any city in the UK and providing there is a supermarket there, you can get products that make you feel warm, nourished and have many positive memories attached to them. Every time I buy a tin of Baxter’s Cock-a-Leekie I remember a particularly brutal winter term in University when I survived almost exclusively off the tinned soup. Even now that taste somehow makes me feel sheltered and cared for.

There is no Cock-a-Leekie soup in Munich.

This was an unexpectedly major revelation when I first came here. Of course, logically I knew that moving to Germany would mean encountering German products in the supermarket but I didn’t anticipate the challenge of starting a new Julie Andrews catalogue of favourite things. Suddenly a trip to the supermarket required more careful consideration of what I should buy. There was no second-nature selection of items that had been tried and tested - I had to start anew.

It proved to be both a pleasure and a pain. Many goods are the same wherever you go, for instance, they may vary in size and colouring but an egg is an egg no matter what country you’re in. However, when it comes to certain products, preserves or cheeses for example, the varieties can differ grossly from those of home.

Firstly, there is the question of language. Doing the grocery shop in another country means being exposed to a wide and unusual variety of new vocab. When I first moved here I would have never have thought it essential to know and watch out for the German word, Pferdemetzgerei, which means horse meat butcher. In my efforts to select what I want, I often find myself resorting to kindergarten-level decryptions i.e. I look at the pictures on the jars of jam and then select the one that most resembles a raspberry.

There is then the act of compromise. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am unlikely to find a tea that will ever match a good mug of builder’s brew from back home. Haunting the back of my kitchen cupboards there are boxes full of abandoned German tea, which I have bought in the unfulfilled hope that they can emulate a cup of Tetley. Loathe as I am to waste things, the day is fast approaching when Philippe will stage an intervention and throw either the tea or myself out of the flat.

The offshoot of all this is discovery. Despite the failures when it comes to tea my ventures into German cuisine have revealed real gems, foodstuffs that I would never have encountered in the UK. Forays in the cereal aisle have unearthed a delicious brand of crispy muesli, which I spend unhealthy amounts of time thinking about and I have adopted the habit of sprinkling Aromat, a salty, surely-not-good-for-you seasoning, on to every vegetable I eat.

And then there is Bavarian cuisine itself. I have had to transition from the beautifully fried fish and chips of Brighton to the heavy, meaty fare of Munich. This is no hardship particularly as winter draws in and buttery roast chicken or a melting pork joint seems to be the ultimate go-to in cold weather.

Although I miss the creature comforts stacked on the shelves of supermarkets back home, as a result of this move to Munich, what I have now is all the more richer. I have two culinary traditions to enjoy, two (food)banks of associations and two types of sausage to choose from on a November night. There is no competition between them, only a feast.

Munich is my Oyster

I have always loved airport departure boards. For me the teletext-scripts of flight destinations are an essential part of the travel experience. Written one after another, the cities on the display echo a travel magazine list of top 100 places to visit before you die: Paris, Berlin, Dubrovnik etc. The lines go on over a number of repeating pages, chronicling the airport’s daily traffic and all the potential adventures on offer. It makes me thrill.

Coming from the U.K., a country that is immensely proud of its island status, my exposure to international departure boards was limited to the airport. Of course, the UK has plenty of boats crossing the Channel but apart from an unfortunate, seasicky schooltrip to Calais an eon ago, I have had little other experience of ferry rides. This is why my move to Munich has been a treat in terms of travel.

Hackerbrücke is located just three tube stops from my flat and there, at Munich’s main bus terminal, is an international departure board displayed for anyone to see. There is no need to pack liquids into 100ml containers or take your shoes off for a security check in order to see this board. You can casually find out the next bus to Vienna before walking back to town to do your Christmas shopping. Or if you have the time or inclination, you could pay a few euros and take a bus to Austria and finish your shop there instead. The ease and accessibility of international travel is astounding.

For Philippe, having grown up in a mainland European city, this is par for the course. He is used to “nipping over to France” or taking a day trip to Milan. The English equivalent? An overpriced super off-peak ticket to Bognor. As such, I intend to make full use of these new traveling opportunities and have spent my weekends scouring outbound bus and train timetables from Munich and booking my holidays.

Last weekend, for example, I fufiled a childhood desire of mine and visited Salzburg, the city of Mozart’s birth and of more personal significance, where the Sound of Music was filmed. With only two hours travel, Philippe and I found ourselves whizzing past the stunning Bavarian Alps to arrive amongst the spires and hills of the beautiful city. Salzburg was marvellous, yes, but perhaps more incredible was the fact that it was so close it could quite easily have been a day trip.

This is a strange and exciting phenomenon for me. Visiting European cities has always been a major event for a British resident. As explained it usually involves a flight (often at an ungodly hour if traveling with Easyjet) and the whole rigmarole of passport control. Even a long weekend city break seems to be a big deal. But in Munich, which is already an extraordinary place to find myself situated in, I can visit the places from my departure board fantasies by booking a suspiciously cheap bus or train ticket. It is so convenient as to potentially become mundane.

That is a long way off for me though. My diary is full of arrows, orange lines squished between the working weeks as I cram in weekend travels to Berlin, Prague and Basel, these cities all less than five hours away from my home. It may be unrealistic or inadvisable to schedule so many trips in the space of a few months but it is a challenge I relish. It is also far more achievable from my current location in Munich as compared to Brighton, even considering Brighton’s proximity to Gatwick.

As I zigzag across the continent absorbing the sights and foods of cities I have long lusted over in the travel section of Waterstones, I think of Britain and the Brexit vote. In my reverie I picture a shift of the tectonic plates bringing England smack bang onto the side of mainland Europe, connecting it in a way physically similar to many of the other EU countries. I wonder whether that proximity and the ease of visiting neighbouring European countries would have any impact on the Brexit outlook and whether the people who voted leave would reconsider their decision when they see that France or Spain are actually no further than Bognor Regis and offer much better wines.

These are just musings on my part and of little use, I know. Regardless of what happens with Brexit, I am aware of the amazing opportunity that I currently have, living in Germany and being able to visit so many different, wonderful places by just hopping on a bus. There is no risk of this becoming mundane any time soon.

The Long Night of the Museums

It was 1.38 a.m. and I was in a horror movie.

I tried to find my way out of the museum exhibit but my turns kept finishing in dead ends. I had no other choice but to go further in. All the while the puppets gurned back at me, thousands of caricatured faces made sinister by Hollywood, leered as I tried to find the exit. Fairground music played as I became more frantic. The puppets, by then the size of human toddlers, were no longer separated by a barrier of glass casing. I was amongst them now.

Six hours earlier, as I was beginning my quest, this is not how I thought my “Long Night at the Museum” would end.

The posters advertising the event had been scattered around Munich for weeks beforehand. From bus stops and subway walls the Jesus-like face of Albrecht Dürer’s Self Portrait with Fur Collar commanded the observer to look at its A1, pop-coloured presence and then read the fine print below. For one night only all the main museums in Munich would be open from early evening until 2 a.m. the next day for entry with a €15 catch-all ticket. With its October witching hour setting, Munich’s “Long Night of the Museums” was a museophile’s Halloween dream.

True to its premise, the event began atmospherically at nightfall. By the time the museums opened their doors at the contrary hour of 7 p.m. the sun had already been down an hour, ensuring any confounding daylight had leached away. Like many of my fellow museum seekers I found myself spilling out of a packed shuttlebus next to Munich’s main cultural hotspot, Königsplatz, to find the outlines of the neoclassical buildings autumnal crisp against the dark sky and spotlit by a gibbous moon.

I had my own wishlist of museums that I wanted to visit, knowing that my whistle-stop tour was reconnaissance for more extensive tours later on in the year. I saw it as a try-before-you-buy type deal, a chance to scout out whether a guidebook lauded museum was to my taste and worth the full price entry fee of a normal Saturday afternoon. With this in mind my list included two of Munich’s most famous art galleries, Lenbachhaus and the Alte Pinakothek, as well as the Museum of Egyptian Art, or as I thought of it, mummies.

I started at Lenbachhaus, my presence being registered by the click of a tally counter held by museum officials at the entrance. As I pushed past the crowds on the stairwells I realised that the count was a necessary measure as there was a distinct risk of overcrowding. I had never seen a museum so full. Compared to the empty halls of a weekday, the place was crammed, begging the question of what made it so popular that night? Was it the “free” entry or the novelty of the event? If there were this many people interested in art on a random Saturday night, shouldn’t more be done to encourage such interest on an average day as well?

Such thoughts came to mind as I waited my turn behind the crowds to catch sight of the paintings on the wall. Craning my neck over beanie covered heads, I spotted the sketched nightmares of Alfred Kubin, which formed the temporary exhibition on the ground floor. Against the clock and knowing I had the cheat of the Internet at home, I flitted past the original drawings, noting down titles to look up later in the comfort of bed and PJs. Such is the reproducible, inferior experience of art these days.

Arriving on the upper floors, I looked at the paintings with a similarly naive eye, thinking to myself “ooh, that’s pretty,” only to realise I was viewing a Kandinsky. As I went through room after room of artwork, viewing astonishing creations from Klee through to Warhol, my judgement was no more sophisticated than deciding whether a painting would look good on my sitting room wall. Along with the thousands of other things on my to-do list I added “learn how to judge art critically.”

Taking a break from the art gallery sandwich on my itinerary, I decided to heighten the dramatic tension of visiting the Museum of Egyptian Art by going at 12 a.m. Mummies at midnight had a ring to it. But instead of finding myself alone with the ancient dead in a dusty museum at night, I was denied the horror movie experience by finding myself part of yet more crowds in a sleek, beautiful building that seemed more BMW showroom, than state museum.

Despite entering the penultimate hour of the event, the Alte Pinakothek was as busy as Lenbachhaus, with tired but committed aesthetes clumping around the more famous paintings. Hiding behind selfie sticks and an unremitting throng, Albrecht Dürer’s Self Portrait, the poster boy for this year’s “Long Night of the Museums,” stared back at the gawkers, its gaze even more arresting in the small, dark painting. Chirping alongside, a perennial tour guide explained the history of the picture to a rotating collection of fans. I too joined them for ten minutes of education and my own paltry photograph of the famous face.

By this point I was extremely tired. Lacking the stamina to make it to the very end I started making my way back as the clocks struck 1 a.m. As I walked the route home I saw Dürer’s familiar face beckoning me from a poster by a doorway. Münchner Stadtmuseum, the letters spelt out, spidery shadows doubling the words as a consequence of underlighting. A museum dedicated to my current hometown. It was a sign - I had to end my long night there.

There were no crowds here, rather a few lost couples wandering around a hodge-podge of displays. Lacking a chronological order, I bummed through the exhibits, taking the lift up instead of the stairs. Severely disappointed by an exhibition that had sounded promising, I got off at the third floor and decided to walk my way down in a cursory attempt to absorb that very last bit of museum.

Which is how I ended up alone at 1.38 a.m. in the Puppet Theatre of the Münchner Stadtmuseum. With 20 minutes until closing time, I hurried through 20 000 square feet worth of puppets, thinking that the exhibition would end by circling back to the place it started. It did not. Instead after an increasingly hysterical circuit, I found myself doubling back through masses of papier mache faces, confronted by blind endings, which may seem funny by day but are terrifying at night.

Somehow I made it back to the elevator and with barely ten minutes to spare, I burst out of the museum into the cold air, grateful for the release. The “Long Night of the Museums” had been a memorable event and had more than delivered on my wish for gothic horror.

It’s just a shame that now I have puppet-induced PTSD.