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.