There is no reason why we in Canada cannot have nice things. I’m talking of the great many nice things they have in Munich, such as clean streets, smiling women, and fat men in absurd, feathered hats. And most of all, a proper and comprehensive train network. The Munich trains are among the best I’ve seen. Their most striking feature is a complete lack of ticket inspectors. I’m told they exist, but I’ve yet to see a single one. My host, S., claims to have had his ticket checked a total of three times in as many years, and he rides daily. The inspectors are content to let the honour system work as intended, backed by the threat of a 40 EUR fine for those who get caught testing their luck. Another way of saying this is, a train pass costs 40 EUR per year, collected at a random time.

At the Deutches Museum, a woman approached me with her two daughters while waiting in the ticket line. She asked me if I wanted to pretend to be the fourth member of her “family”, the daddy, in order to get the “family” rate and save money. It is in this way that I got into the museum for 5 EUR instead of the usual 8.50. Not only are German women friendly, but frugal too. Naturally, I blew the extra 3.50 EUR on a train ticket I didn’t need.

Later that night, S. and I visited the Hofbräuhaus, a Bavarian beer hall and obvious tourist attraction about which I was warned “a local would never set foot there.” Imagine my surprise to find the place filled with people speaking the German language, and a wait staff that understood almost none of the English language. They knew “beer”, “food”, “wine”, “goulash” (which, as it turns out, is the same in German… much like “beer”, come to think of it), and the numbers one to ten. My meal was called something like “Fleischpfinzer”: two large meatballs sitting in a bed of creamy mashed potatoes. Around me on uncleared dishes were enormous ham bones, remnants of braised pig’s knuckles, and shot glasses once containing schnapps. The beer hall was an arrangement of picnic tables around a small stage where a brass band played the traditional drinking music of Bayern. The only song familiar to me was Ein Prosit, I admit, and I gave a heartfelt “Ziggyzoggy ziggyzoggy oi oi oi!” when the time came, proof that I learned something as an undergraduate.

All around, young people mixed freely with old, clanked glasses together, sang songs with the band and at their own tables, got drunk on this Wednesday night. My impression is that Munich is a very regular place, a city not putting on airs of sophistication, or trying to evince a kind of phony metropolitan worldliness. They just like to get drunk and eat boiled pig and sing songs, and it so happens that a lot of people like to visit Munich to do exactly that.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Germany.