Ok, so i shall pick up where i left off...
Upon arrival to the country famed for the BMW, beer and invading Poland **according to lonely planet....i would have thought bratwurst, lederhosen and punctuality really...i enjoyed a superfast train from Frankfurt to Bochum in the North ( where no one shops in op shops but are still wearing their electric blue shoulder padded blouses). My first experiences of this nation are bizarre. There is no rubbish on the streets. Anywhere. You need to pay to use a public toilet. And people take their dogs everywhere. Well, not everywhere, one butcher has put a kaibosh on it but you are still allowed to take your dog up an 1800m mountain via chairlift. (have to buy them a ticket or hundekarte ofcourse!!) The supermarkets are one of my favourite things so far. Desserts cost under a euro and half of the store is normally taken up by disgustingly cheap alcohol. Yes, my father did buy a one euro bottle of red when he was here but insists it was a decent drop. My top finds so far; 2 toothbrushes for 69cents and a pair of amazing grey and pink leggings for 50cents. High five!!
Post enjoying small city life i ventured south west through fields of little flowers and train stations which resembled the miniature ones you find in expensive toy stores where the ladies wear reading glasses on gold chains around their necks and give you the look of death if your child reaches for a toy, towards the border of the Netherlands to meet my sister's ass band's not-a-word-of-english speaking parents. I found out that i don't need to talk. I can just eat. A slice of pflaumen kuche was placed in front of me, a jar of cream, a coffee, a cream cake...i was set for anti-dicsussion mode for the better part of the afternoon. After ingesting as much cake as my amazing expanding belly can hold...which is a lot, really,..we waddled down to explore the little town of Xanten. I was dumbfounded, well...so to speak! If i could speak German i would have been exploding with all forms of typical tourist tyrade! But i didn't need to. I stood. mouth gaping up at the entrance to the old town beneath a castle wall gate where centuries ago short fat german guards would hae been standing sentry to warn the fair maiden and the priest of any oncoming danger...Hide the cheese!!! This slap in the face of people going about daily life amongst such relics was sobering. The sugar wore off and i found myself screaming in my head...`You are serving fries and bratwurst like its 1999 but your kitchen is over 500 yrs old and made of stone!!!`Must be time for more cake...
From Xanten, Germany could only get prettier. But before i launch into how spectacular European country side is i must first divert to the embarrassment that was Oktoberfest...
Arriving in München saw me haul my life-containing backpack up 4 flights of stairs to the pension before having a wander around the old town. Wow! Every twist and turn through cobblstoned lanes lead to a new visual delight. My senses were in overdrive. The marktplatz was buzzing with about 20 different sausage stands, more fruit, dairy and florist stands than i could ever imagine and hundreds of people wearing lederhosen and drinking beer in the square. And this was on an average Saturday! The hours of wandering around smelling amazing aromas but not daring to try my german to ask for some, left me starved and parched. Along comes my host and very dear friend Alex to save the day. This is where my demise into the pits of gastronomical hell starts. Craving some traditional German grub, we sat and downed some spätzle, sauerkraut, veal and, of course, a giant beer. Now it was time to drink proper! So we take the really very overly long way to Theresienvise where the Oktoberfest is held. Now, no words that i put here can ever truly explain what i encountered but i will give it a fair shot.
I was spewed out of the underground station into a world so fantastical; positively buzzing and completely overwhelming. People were streaming past. Hundreds of thousand of people as far as the eye could see. Most dressed in traditional lederhosen or dirndl and those who were't were either stripping off or Australian. I, however, left the traditional oceania pacific uniform of board shorts, thongs and a t shirt which screamed Auslander, at home. I couldn't move. I didn't know where to look. It was a beer festival city! Rows upon rows of stalls selling every kind of delicacy you could imagine paved the way between the tents. And when i say tents i mean hangars. They are filled by 9am with hundreds of those eager to reserve their place for the evening's shenanigans but are not willing to encounter disappointment when 3000 more people squash their way in to pour beer down eachother's fronts whilst trying to see up that girl's dirndl at 7pm. But back to the stalls for a moment. There were stalls selling thousands of traditional gingerbread hearts decorated with such heartfelt messages as 'hearty love' and 'Oktoberfest wishes fun' which all the lovely ladies wear around their neck. The one hanging from my oversized neck was inscribed with a message about being someone's forever...i bought it myself in the hope that every other girl who passed me would read it and sigh....awwwww he looooves her. Didn't happen. i should have known people are drunk, they don't read them, they just make a perfect excuse to stare at healthy european girls' chests while looking innocently at a cookie!
Other food stalls sell food only europeans could claim to be festival food. Where back home one pays $8 for a bottle of water and a sweet bun of cottonwool stuffed with something that looks like a pink stick and dubbed a hotdog at festivals, in Germany one can eat fresh fish sandwiches made in those rolls you see on Inspector Rex, drink Schnapps in public, gorge on chocolate covered fruit, yes fruit, inhale every type of sausage you could dream up, and eat fresh pastries. Not even at festival prices. I love this place. After 4 failed attempts to get into the beer tents we decided we had the rest if the weekend to explore Oktoberfest so decided to head back into town an drink at another watering hole. We drank beer out of glasses that gave me a bruise for being so heavy and i realised i had paid about 4 euro in toilet fees for all the peeing i was doing. We had broken hand/english/german/italian conversations with fellow travellers before hitting a super fantastiche german night club for some super fantastiche german pop musik!
I need to pee now so i will finish this at a later date...hold this thought....ok back from pee
Day 2 saw us far more prepared as we headed to the beer drinking paradise that is at a riduculous hour...let's just say we had been out dancing until a few hours prior. We coulnd't get into the most popular tent as that was already full...perhaps some smarter than we had never returned home. We eventually did make it into a tent and didn't move unless we were standing to sing Ein Prost, for a good 8hrs at which point we were told that our paticular table had been reserved for the afternoon and we had to move. It was imposible to find anywhere else to sit inside the tent. Every table was filled with old women eating ribs sitting shoulder to shoulder with their ancients lederhosen wearing husband's who were busy looking up the kiwi girl who flashed to much's skirt; obscene australian cross dressers and 8yr old kids asleep out of sheer boredom of sitting still for that long. The european sun was still shining bright and so we ventured out the biergarten where more maßs were consumed and more pork, kraut, sausages and senf inhaled. After hours of listening to odd eastern european girls prattle on about the über couple comprising of Ukranian girls and German boys and that Hitler was right....(even i didn't mention the war!) i decided to escape the lunacy and head back inside. WRONG MOVE!!! A terrifying sight greetes my weakly adjusting to the light eyes. Once rustic floorboards were now polished with a sea of beer. No table was clear for people were crammed dancing atop them. And then the bout of national guilt. Australians. Clothes and hair dripping with beer. Attempting to skull beer but instead vomiting it back into the glass and then feeling 'awesome cool' and when the maß was empty the floor became a great place for stomach toboganing, what with all the beer and vomit seeming like adequate lubrication! I started telling people i was English.
It was time to go home.
Day 3 at Oktoberfest was, by far, the most enjoyable. After a day of pretending to be cultured at the Deutches Museum (I merely ran around all day pressing all the buttons that made things move noisily enough to wake the dead and played with wooden mind puzzles that i couldn't understand and felt angered by the knowledge that generations of German kinder had acomplished what i couldn't by tesselating the diamons in a certain pattern) i decided to go back and experience the night time family festivities in the Familien Platz. It was like Seoul on steroids. So many flashing lights, kilometres of allyways of rides and a food stall squeezed in every gap! I ate and ate to my porky little heart couldn't handle anymore richness. I even couldn't stomach a 0.5m bratwurst as i was too full!! But i did almost pee myself when i found out that i could get a
rollmops from a food stall :) Full, fat and farting a lot it was time to leave the beautiful town of München and explore the south.
It is here i say fare thee well and i hope u have managed to stick with my ridiculous crepp!!!
The Dom cathedral in Köln. I love this city!
I struggled to finish this. Sour cherry strudel.
And a giant Maß.
The fresh fish in a roll stall
This place is 400yrs old. The food was not. But it was awesome. i didn't even get a photo of it as it was gone before i could think to do it
