Munchin

Like any place, Munich is hard to leave but even harder to stay while you watch someone else leave. That’s the beauty of how it feels to be there, and anything less than the full compliment of your friends and you feel as if something is missing. After the wedding a few didn’t make it back to Munich at all, went back to their ports of call, but luckily a few had some extra days in Bayern, unthreading the ball of string a little longer, until I left to back to work, and then the ball didn’t exist anymore, perhaps becoming a partially drunken beer. An open bottle of Bavarian beer keeps for a day, you can still drink it later, but if you refrigerate and re-cap it, you can swig that baby a week or more later. Been there.

I’m on a train back to my day job from Munich, starting the last round trip I’ll have to make this summer. Munich is a pleasure palace to return to, because its red city trains you begin to see as soon as you get about 5 kilometers from the city. It means you are home, you could get on one of them, forget everything and be in the middle of the city, needing only to write a sign saying “Hauptbahnhof” and hold it while falling asleep and someone will wake you when you are there. I haven’t done this, yet. Once in the city you take the varied colored underground train lines to shoot through and around the city, and above ground you can take the blue colored electric trams or Mercedes buses to link you to within a ½ kilometer of every possible destination you could desire, and not desire. Add to these the trains’ comfortability, cheapness, and timeliness factors and you have a public transportation system that rocks not only your casbah but the original Casbah itself.

Alone on a train with a bag full of your necessary unmentionables is the essential European adventure. Being on this one now floods my memory banks with the varied and sundry train experiences of the past: midnight train from Milan, sleeping in the luggage hold with Ben, hiding from the polizi; tired feet stinking but relaxing on the seat across after a hike in the Alps; watching my family and their heads wobble comfortably on our way to Denmark for the first time. It’s so easy to sit here and be taken somewhere, my seat low on the train so my butt rides just above the tracks below, four seats to myself and this laptop and a few jelly-filled donuts with a cappuccino. The sun rising on the opposite side of the train, occasional trees saluting from within a field of corn, cars stopped on a Saturday morning waiting for me to pass before they drive over to the next village’s bakery.

For 18 Euro there is a train ticket - called the Bayern Ticket of course - with which one can spend the entire day on the trains of Bavaria, moving across the entire region through countless villages, stopping to explore that church or eat at the gasthaus or check out the beer selection in that gas station, and when you get back to Munich you ride all public transportation that day for free. 18 bucks. Baby. This is why teaching and summer vacations are so lovely. And if you don’t teach and only have your weekends off, you can use the Happy Weekend ticket, which does the same thing for 25 Euro but for two days and with parts of Austria included. Can’t lose.

My point? Yeah, I have none. Just that this city, if there was a competition or a brawl or a Survivor show that pitted city against city, is a place that I just might be forced to fight for.

Am I drunk? Of course not. I just get intoxicated by simple things here. Then, you drink beer and you realize that you must not keep writing in your blog unless you explain to those not savvy that beer is a very large part of the culture here, that it is similar to smoothies or soda fountains or McDonald's. All of them give you a high of some kind, that's why we go there - to feel good - and beer in Bavaria has been around for more than four times as long as America has existed. It feels good, just like my blog.

Me and my Cornfields

What I’ve come to learn from nearly 50 days in east southern Germany I can relate in terms of the greatest natural resource here. It’s all about corn. I’ve realized that the depth of a cornfield and its growth are deceiving, I respect the orderly nature of its planting, and the fact that they stand up to numerous peltings of rain and mud. Taken as a whole, cornfields are beautiful, slightly ubiquitous, and you should not allow yourself get too caught up in one, lest you get a wee lost.

I want to remind myself, for the last time please, that every unknown situation will become known in time. All that is foreign will become familiar. It changes. It can’t help it. While the remote strangeness of the rolling hills and small villages no longer makes me wince, the daily confusion of work has passed into grudging acquiescence of a helpless situation, so now I am proficient in waiting and able to use small amounts of time for good use. Then of course there are still the times when I sit and have no idea what I am doing teaching in the middle of a forest.

The trees are some tall naked variety, platinum stalks shooting for the same thing from different angles, and all of the rest of us playing beneath their lowest foliage. Some guy told me yesterday we were Ewoks, and we are everywhere just like the wind and rain storming around and through them. More lightening and thunder in one summer than in an entire lifetime of Midwest Illinois farmland summers.

Perhaps it’s the corn. If only the movie people looked up a little more often out here. Unfortunately, the mud everywhere forces you to look down most of the time. The heat during the first two weeks of shooting was unbearable, but now ice packs have given way to hand warmers, sunscreen off and parkas on, and the shorts have been shipped or packed away for weeks. Food continues to be plentiful, and the drink truck is full, the food truck re-filling daily, and the kitchen trailer is our hearth with warm soupy smells. The camera truck has a crate of beer in it, the sound truck too. But the construction and lighting trucks are both dry. The costume and makeup trailers are always filled with cigarette smoke, and the trailers that house the kids and their distractions are filled with heaters roaring unnecessarily at full blast, making children and their smells a little steamier. So I have a classroom, it’s a tent with a table and a couch in it, and when I am here alone I turn off the gas heater, and when I leave and come back someone has put it on full blast again. The kids like to hang out and listen to Johnny Depp on my iTunes, just not be in the steamy trailer with the dozen other smelly kids. I leave one flap open for ventilation and quick escape into the woods behind, where I like to pee. I don’t go number 2 on the job, it seems to have turned off until the evening when I am back in my hotel room with a couch and balcony, over at the Wellness Center and Health Spa that I have called home for something like a month now.

In the evenings here I leave my nook and walk down the road 200 meters and to the triumphant Disneyland of Spas, where two restaurants and a massive buffet are open till 11pm, with a crappy nightclub, a large rurally decorated hall adjoining to a smaller hall, and a very civilized dining room for all the guests, those who are staying in the 1200 person spa and health center. Germans are healthy people, they go to places like this to sauna, relax, swim, get massages, do absolutely nothing, and then go eat tons of food and drink great beer and dance till they get sweaty in the evening, then go to sleep and do it all over again. Of course, in the middle of this sprawling healthopolis lay the spark plug of the wellness engine - a fairly large biergarten with padded benches and live accordion music every night, played to the background of a Korg keyboard and its pre-programmed Deutsche Volkslieder. Here you can find many people of the older persuasion in tight-fitting hot pants or sweaters tied around their necks, whooping it up to the sounds of slightly flat singers. And naturally, everyone is smoking. It’s pretty sweet to have this only 200 meters from the quiet and gentrified place I am calling home. A walk past (or through) yet another cornfield and you are there, which makes the rollicking rolling return walk all too easy. Oh, and all the food and beer is cheap, far cheaper than anyone of you can imagine coming out of a place which I just called a Disneyland. A biergarten in a wellness center. Me in a wellness center. Both very funny.