There are two maps drawn in pen in my pocketbook. One leads to a store where I need to pick up my tickets for tonight’s concert and the other leads to the Georg Elser Halle, where the gig is being held. My spatial needs satisfied, I head out to find my tickets, some food and hopefully a new power adapter for the laptop.
Public transport in Munich is really rather excellent. There are trams, buses, underground and overground trains almost to superfluity. Nobody checks your tickets, and everything is clean and efficient, as you’d expect from our rigorous Teutonic friends. I walk to my first destination, though, since they’re so efficient that every station is no more than a short walk from the next. In fact, when I later try to travel from the Hauptbahnhof to Karlsplatz by train I accidentally walk, entirely underground, from one station to the other. It turns out, it’s barely over the road.
I take a train north towards the ticket shop. When I emerge from the underground, I am quite amazed to find that in the ten minutes I was underground, huge lumps of ice have been falling from the sky. These aren’t your tiny little hail things, they’re giant marble-sized lumps of ice. They’ve covered everything outside and bicyclists, taken by surprise, are now wobbling along, crunching ice under wheels and lucky to be remaining vertical. Within another 5 minutes the residual rain stops and the sky is a brilliant blue. How did England get the reputation for changeable weather? I crunch off round the corner, where I can see the ticket shop’s sign, topped by a little pile of ice.
I get my ticket with the help of a very helpful English speaking clerk and wander off in search of food. My choices are quite limited, since I am hopelessly inefficient with my language here and I don’t have skis. For food, it has to be something I can point to, without too many options to be confused by and preferably not involve me sitting alone in a restaurant: I hate that.
I find the motherlode in the form of the “Black Bean” coffee shop. It’s a nice clean modern coffee shop with comfy chairs and suitable pointy-at food in chillers. I go about ordering a salami und käse bagel in my best accent. He does a double-take and I repeat, whereupon he apparently understands. I also order a coffee au lait and collect it from the counter. I sit down and await my bagel, which curiously seems to be taking ages given there’s one in the counter right there. I theorise that he just ignored my bagel request because he couldn’t understand me. Oh well, I suppose I can survive on coffee alone in Munich, who needs food?
After about 10 minutes, the barista comes up to me and rattles off a huge long sentence in German. I was getting quite depressed at this point, pondering how hungry I’d be if nobody would understand my bagelly needs until I flew home. His sentence, wondrously, contained the word Bagel though. He’d understood at least! What was he saying though? Did he have one? Was he offering an alternative? I gave him automatic foreigner reply number 1: “OK!” He looked satisfied and walked off. I started to panic that, maybe, I’d agreed to have faeces spread on it by some monstrous bagel-frau out back. Some of the sex shops here were distinctly frightening and not to mention overwhelmingly common. Maybe there’s a thing here, maybe I missed a sign above the door. I sit for another age waiting and staring for any sign of movement from the kitchen, I ponder that bagel-frau can’t have needed to go.
In the end, of course, it arrives and is toasted, warm and delicious.
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