As the postings here at Woolgatherer have been lagging significantly behind schedule (I’ve actually been in India for over a month now), what follows is a condensed version of the rest of my time in Europe and Turkey.

Back in Istanbul with ten days to kill before my flight to Munich, and feeling maybe a little sick of the streets of the Sultanahmet tourist area (sadly, a very unavoidable place), I decided to slip into Bulgaria for a little while. I took the first overnight train to Sofia, the capital, sharing a room with a 19-year-old Australian kid who’d spent the last year traveling Russia, the Baltics, and the Balkans. I don’t need to tell you how old this made me feel. He was on his “gap year”, which is something many Aussies and Brits take before entering university.

The kids today. In Austria I’d met a 19-year-old Brit girl with model looks and a stunning maturity who’d spent half a year in Laos and Cambodia. I can’t imagine not only having the money to travel the world at 19, but having the interest, or even the idea to do it. Not to mention the courage. When I was 19 I was still getting over being allowed to buy beer without having to cross the Quebec border, and beaming with pride whenever I’d get IDed.

Travel often brings about feelings of inadequacy. You feel that you’re doing the same ol’ thing as everyone else, experiencing the same things, following a predetermined path set out by the gods of Lonely Planet, and so on. And you meet people half your age doing the same things and having identical reactions to their surroundings. Or people twice your age. Travel is sort of ageless that way. The 19-year-olds are indistinguishable from the 45-year-olds. All your life experiences and wisdom, all those years of paying your dues in the real world, don’t seem to matter very much.

Anyway, Bulgaria. It’s lovely. Probably my favourite place on the trip so far. It could be that in contrast to loud, aggressive, messy Turkey, Bulgaria appeared to me as a calm sunset after a long day of pounding heat. The city of Sofia is a gentle place. The trains run on time, the pedestrians don’t spontaneously break into wrestling matches, nobody yells at you or offers you a tour of their handicrafts shop.

You can get a pizza slice the size of a football for about a dollar, and the Bulgarians go ahead and put ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise on the thing. As a devout condimentophile and sauce-ist, I approve of this conduct. They also have these strange convenience stores (or dépanneurs, if you prefer) in the basements of buildings, visible to the public only by a tiny knee-high window opening out of the sidewalk. You’re supposed to squat down and tell the clerk what you want (in Bulgaria, usually cigarettes), and they reach up and hand it to you. It is like sticking a tin cup into a hole in the wall with five bucks inside, ringing the bell, and pulling it back out full of whiskey. Why can’t we have nice things?

I made a half-hearted attempt to day-trip to the top of the mountain just outside Sofia. The gondolas up to the summit weren’t running that day, and I was instead chased by two enormous dogs and one bearded woman. But I still love Sofia.

Even better than Sofia was the hillside town of Veliko Tarnovo in Central Bulgaria. I have a fondness for places where you’re always walking either uphill or downhill no matter where you’re going. Veliko offers a most vertical experience of small-town life.

I stayed for almost a week, in the Hostel Mostel, one of the best hostels I’ve seen. Only two others guests were there (low season), a funny Dutch guy and an enormous, bear-like Englishman, and we spent the week dining on pig knuckle and mashed potatoes, having a beer, playing chess, cavorting about with the Bulgarians, and generally doing not much of anything. It was like a vacation from my vacation.

I returned to Istanbul to catch a flight to Munich via the distant galactic outpost known as Sabiha Gökçen International Airport. Now, in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, around the end of September and into the start of October there is some kind of “beer fest” happening. I hear it’s a pretty big deal. So I arrived in downtown Munich via the express train from the airport, stuffed my bag into a storage locker, and made my way to the fairgrounds of this supposedly popular festival to meet my pal Steve.

The week or so that followed was an enormous black hole. I think of the periods of “de-tox” taken by serious drinkers (a “corporate restructuring” as called by J. Tesauro and P. Mollod in The Modern Gentleman), and can only conclude that Oktoberfest is something like a yearly “re-tox”—a flushing-out of all the body’s health, a severe tax on the immune and nervous systems, and a prolonged period of self-afflicted morning malaise. It is like taking a nourishing retreat from human dignity.

I wanted to write a sprawling epic of drunken mayhem here, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, but I am no Good Doctor, and am in fact, badly in need of an appointment with same.

Without a doubt, the very greatest thing about Oktoberfest is an antiquated contraption known as the Teufelsrad (Devil’s Wheel).

The Teufelsrad is nothing more than a flat, spinning wheel on the floor, surrounded by thin protective padding and a crowd of screaming, leiderhosen-clad Germans. Contestants pile onto the wheel and find their grip, while the sweet sounds of Bavarian drinking music fill the air. The wheel spins faster and faster. The contestants try to hang on for dear life, the devilish wheel trying to throw them all off. Then, slowly, a large padded “wrecking ball” descends from the ceiling, controlled by one of the “hired goons”, whose sole duty is to knock you off that wheel with it. If you somehow survive that, the goons try to hog-tie you with ropes.

The wrecking ball knows no mercy. Whether you’re a man or a boy or a little old lady, the wrecking ball swings the same cruel path. In the spirit of German schadenfreude, I couldn’t help but laugh cruelly at the sight of glassy-eyed teenaged girls and small children getting cold-cocked in the face by this thing, necks snapping back violently, their screams muffled by the crowd noise. The degree to which the Teufelsrad would not be allowed in Canada is immediately evident; after all, not only is it vicious, sadistic, and dangerous… it’s also fun.

And if that weren’t enough, every so often they have a “boxing round”, where the contestants are given boxing gloves and instructed to beat the hell out of each other in the midst of all this. The whole spectacle of the Teufelsrad is augmented by the fact that nearly everyone involved—participants, crowd, staff—is drunk. It is almost the Platonic form of human debasement. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Next stop, India.

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.

I’m off to the airport. The mood is tense. My parents and I are getting nervous. Our voices are starting to crack a little as we discuss passports, bills, and train timetables. My mother sniffles as she hands me a pair of sandals. There is nothing wrong. We’ve discussed every possible scenario. None of us are worried, just nervous that it’s finally here. My first destination is Munich on an overnight Air Canada flight, arriving at just after the morning rush hour. I’m to figure out the intricacies of German phone dialing, acquire a SIM card for my phone, and call my host, Steve, who is at work and will hop on the subway to meet me. There is no feeling in my body. My legs are motionless, my eyes fixed straight ahead. I’m getting on that plane and I’ll land in Germany and that’s all I can bear to think about.