Tuesday, September 13

The train over the Alps passed orchards in the northern reaches of Italy that were espaliered like grape vines. I expect the robot fruit harvesters will be put to use first there.

Our train came in to Munich at 18:31. There were not a lot of obvious Oktoberfest celebrants around. This seemed like it should be a good thing, until we got on the U-bahn and discovered that a stadium at the other end of the line would soon start a match FC Bayern vs. Barcelona. We got on the train with our luggage and people packed in and packed in and we couldn’t move. And then the train sat there and didn’t go, like it was broken. If you read too much news and history, you start to develop expectations and prejudices concerning the way that soccer fans behave in crowds, to say nothing of the way Germans behave in crowds — let me throw in a quote from J.D. Salinger, no stranger to fear and anomie:

“There’s probably no limit to the extremes of infantile and Zoo-like behavior adults will take to, or revert to, if they’re in a group (which means any number of people in excess of two – and on some occasions two’s a mob, especially if there’s booze around), and if the organised shit-throwing is given the permissive, O.K. general heading of Fun & Games, or if it’s vaguely categorized as Letting Off a Little Steam Once in a While Never Hurt Anybody, Mac….Group enthusiasm, of any kind, either for cheering or lynching, makes me very uneasy…”

He wrote that in a letter to his son, who is now trying to pull together all of Salinger’s post-1965 writings for publication. Has the world passed him by, or could the Glasses be Kardashians?

Most everyone on the U-Bahn was dressed for the football game. And they started singing. And here we were with our stupid backpacks, and foreigners (but at least obviously not Catalunyan).

Eventually the train started again but it seemed a long time.

It hadn’t been easy to find a place to stay in Munich, because Oktoberfest was to begin on the next Saturday. Dennis had sensed our difficulty and offered us his living room for two nights, which is why he always gets five stars. They have a slightly too clever foldout couch (all foldout couches are slightly too clever) and we slept in the living room at great inconvenience to Dennis and Paulina and Lukas. The couch was quite comfortable.

We went with Dennis to his local Afghan restaurant for takeout dinner. It’s good to have a local Afghan restaurant.

Wednesday, September 14

The major destination of the day was to visit the Alte Pinakothek, where the major activity planned was to Ritually View the wallpaper in the movie “The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant”. The image, Nicolas Poussin’s painting “Midas and Bacchus”, is considerably larger in the movie than it is in real life. The painting is just a meter by a meter and a half. This is what happens when you visit heroes. Dennis never disappoints, though. We went to an Italian restaurant near his house that night. I never get tired of Italian food. Nobody does.

Thursday, September 15

We went for breakfast at Occam Deli. We have been there on previous trips to Munich. I haven’t been able to figure out the joke. It’s not like they favor sandwiches with the fewest possible ingredients, or refrain from needlessly multiplying condiments. Another friend joined us, whose birthday it was.

Dave left Occam’s to go pick up a rental car, in which we departed to drive to Leipzig. Leipzig is the home of our friend Adam and his family, and also Leipziger Lerche, a kind of hot cross bun that used to be made of Larks but they ran out of larks in the 19th century and switched to jam and marzipan. Eventually you have to respond to environmental degradation.

We stayed at a third floor guesthouse in Leipzig whose WiFi didn’t work. The horror. We had dinner at a Nepalese place with our friends. The lady at the restaurant was very nice and the food was good.

Friday, September 16

In the morning, we met our friends again (without their kids) for Leipziger Lerche. The restaurant had a lot of posters and free advertising post cards but for their own advertising post cards, they charged a euro. Ae we all chumps for paying other people for the opportunity to advertise their product?

On the way to Berlin, we stopped at a roadside World Heritage Site I had never heard of. It was a tiny castle, a miniature version of Sans Souci, built for one of the wives or cousins or mistresses. Apparently there are a bunch of them scattered around Dessau, and little parks, too, and a whole other World Heritage site that we didn’t even have time to go to, dedicated to Bauhaus, which was indirectly responsible for more ugly imitation buildings in the twentieth century than the white supremacist William Levitt.

It was also starting to get cold, and we took the opportunity to go to the Mall and buy a hoodie, since we hadn’t brought much in the way of warm clothes on the trip.

We drove the rest of the way to Berlin, arriving around rush hour.