Europe 2022 — A Traveling Blog
Jim and Jay’s Excellent… Days 1+2, Wednesday into Thursday, Travel and Jet Lag, reconnection with Friends (who are Cousins): Left MSP on Wednesday afternoon, heading for Europe. Condor Air.
Not a bad flight — and they served both dinner and a cheesy pastry breakfast, which made our pre-flight footlong subs superfluous.
Landed in Frankfurt — a massive and busy airport.
Took a bus to a terminal, to a walk to a gate, to make the second flight to Munich. (Should I call it Munchen from here? How much of my faux native language do we need?).
The airport is far from the city — it’s like Denver, where you take a train in to town, then we took a U-Bahn,(U=underground, like a subway, S-Bahn are surface trains) from Marienplatz to Giselastrasse, where Christine Weeks’ cousin Matthias Nitschke lives.
Matthias is loaning us his awesome place for this first leg of our trip — it’s sweet digs, with all mod cons tightly packed into 62sq meters of space — everything you need, nothing you don’t. Plus, an excellent collection of classic jazz and soul on vinyl. Mattias and his brother Michael are our guides, and quite excellent, with great travel advice, local expertise, generous hearts and souls. They are family, and friends, and we learned that when Michael first visited us in America around 2005, and again every time we’ve been together.
By this point, Jameson and I had been mostly awake for a long time — both mediocre sleepers on the plane over, our bodies messed up by the 7 hour time difference, we showered and headed out for lunch, to a Vietnamese place called Koriander, around the corner from Mat’s apt. Jameson has had 5 years of German now — from 6th thru 10th grade, and the staff there didn’t really speak English, but he pulled off ordering for us and a little basic banter with the server. It was awesome. He also legally ordered a beer with lunch, and why not? Food was delicious, we were delirious, so let’s keep going!
We walked about a mile to the English Garden in Munchen, which is a large park, and home to big Octoberfest celebrations in the fall. When you see typical photos of Munchen, it’s usually the Chinese Pavilion in the Garden, tables crammed with happy people sharing gigantic beers and pretzels. Not so crowded on a random Thursday 4pm, but with warm weather, the park was filling up, people on bikes, walking dogs, playing frisbees, and, uh, surfing? Yes — there are a couple places in the EG where the River Isar and it’s tributaries create waves upon which surfers drop in and do tricks.
From the park we returned to the city, bought gelatos and wandered around. Whenever you go somewhere new and different, you run into places and words and signs that seem very bizarre. What’s with Al Pacino Pizza? Suckfull? That one’s a hardware store.
Eventually we made it back to Matthias’ apt and crashed for a few minutes, before he came home from work and gave us the proper tour of his place and hood, and we opted for Wintergarten, a relatively simple (but perfectly awesome) outdoor place around the corner, with sausages, sauerkraut, fries, and many pints.
Eventually Michael joined us, and it was great to converse on the world and hear their take on our politics (as usual, most Europeans know as much or more than an average American — especially if you reversed it, quick, name one member of the German parliament, let alone the new Chancellor!). Too many pints later, we headed home to properly crash, try to overcome the jet lag, and get ready for… a day on the river?
