Just as the true San Franciscan will tell you to forget the Golden Gate Bridge and go see the Wave Organ, the true Münchner will tell you that Oktoberfest is pretty wrecked with English and you should really see Starkbierfest.

It is like a small Oktoberfest, but attended by few tourists from beyond Bavaria. The beer is not bad. This is ironic, because the story of Starkbierfest, as told by Dennis (our host), is this:  the local monks petitioned the Pope, some centuries ago, for permission to serve a particular beer during Lent. The sample which they brought to Rome was improperly made and improperly stored, and transported a long way, and when it was finally presented at the Vatican, it was so wretched that its consumption was regarded as compatible with the spirit of abnegation which characterizes the Lenten fast. Therefore, it is allowed to have this “Strong Beer” between Ash Wednesday and Easter, and “Starkbierfest” celebrates this.

Other than the history, there is not much self-denial in evidence. There is much noise in evidence. Many knees dancing, between Lederhosen and Dirndl and tall socks. Many knees eaten, which they call Schweinshaxen. If anyone out there has a kneecap fetish, it will be well served by sitting on the benches and watching the people jumping around on the tables, to some combination of cover band and DJ.

The conquest of a people is complete when their kids don’t distinguish the culture of the conqueror from their own: All the songs but one are 80’s-90’s rock radio USA. The one surviving German riff is that which cues drinking.

The Münchners clink glasses on the bottom — how does that square with the theory that the gesture derives from tipping wine into the other’s glass to prove that it is not poisoned?

Thursday, a friend came from Konstanz to visit us. We met Duje in Lisbon not so long ago. He approached us in a cafe because he hadn’t seen people writing post cards before. We have kept in touch. On this occasion, we walked around in the drizzle after tea and went to the art gallery “Pinakothek” which had a bunch of modern stuff and no stage lit black bits unless you count some of Mark Rothko’s more Black Flag Logo-inspired works. It’s always nice to tour a gallery with someone who has training in art.

On Friday, we took the Flixbus to Ljubljana. If you order on line from Flixbus, use a throwaway email; they will write to you every day, as if riding buses was what you lived for.

Aer Lingus wouldn’t let me check in on line and they wouldn’t answer their phone.  St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. They couldn’t get us a window seat at the airport.  Their medium level boss at the counter in SFO said that on-line check-in is only available to people who book through Aer Lingus, not Expedia.  But, Expedia is the only place where I could buy the ticket with the 17 hour layover.  I wanted a long layover.  The best the Aer Lingus website would have done, would send us out at 6 AM on Tuesday.  Not going to do that after dinner and socializing.  At least they seated us together.

The airplane we got on to Dublin had presumably just arrived from there.  A video was still playing; it illustrated to the new tourists how to drive on the right and keep American policemen from shooting you.

Arriving in Dublin 2 days after St. Patrick’s Day is like all those people who are on arriving flights to eclipse spots when we are just leaving.  Life goes on, but they could have moved their visit up a day, right?

We stayed, during our 17 hour layover, at the Travelodge Airport South.  Same as the last time, or one of the previous times.  However:

In the elevator, a traveler chat:

“Just back from the weekend?” he said.
“Going to Munich tomorrow, where are you headed?” I said.
He said something Irish-like for, “I live here.  Temporary Accommodation.”

I am not sure what this portends in a civilized country.  In America, long term guests mean you are in a hotel that caters to people whose meth labs have burnt down. I avoid weekly rate hotels, unless they are clearly next to business parks and the residents look like George Clooney.  It may be that here in Ireland, SRO hotels are respectable because the people are respectable, or at least don’t have guns.

Anyway, nothing bad happened.  TripAdvisor would have told us.

There were green and orange balloon garlands still up everywhere.  The Irish flag is conciliatory in that respect, but in America St. Patrick is strictly green.

The main object of our visit, besides its being the cheapest available flight, was to see our friend Samuel, whom we met on the West Bank tour some years ago.  He has now finished school and been admitted to the bar.  I realized on the way to Munich, that I forgot to take any photos of him.  He hasn’t changed any.  Shorter hair, still a handsome devil.  Devilling is what they call his job, polishing up the handle of the big front door for a practicing attorney who is called his Master.  He speaks to judges about postponements and serving papers.  But, speaking.  He’s barrister-bound.  His debating years have paid off and will in future.

His girlfriend lives in London.  The same day we flew in, Samuel flew in from London where he had seen the rugby game Ireland/England with her.  Ireland won.  That outcome had been noticed by decorators of the shop windows downtown.

Samuel suggested that Dave and I go to the National Art Gallery on the following day, while waiting for our afternoon flight onward.  We did that.  The highlight for me was seeing The Gleaners.  I suppose that must have been in one of my parents’ picture books, because I have known that painting for longer than I can remember, and its social significance and all, but, I never actually thought of it as being a real painting.  It was a page in a children’s book that you finger through.  Seeing it unexpectedly on the wall was like seeing your elementary school teacher in the supermarket.

Samuel had pointed out that there was a Caravaggio there, by way of encouraging our attendance.  It’s true, they have “The Taking Of Christ”.  It has affected their minds, because the other paintings they have from artists of that period — especially the ones with stage lighting and black backgrounds — are compared on their captions with Caravaggio.

It is interesting to reflect on the kind of world it was, when the police would be trying to arrest someone who was in truth a public figure, and they had so little idea what the man looked like that they had to pay somebody 30 euros to kiss him.  It’s like, Javascript and Load Images were always off.

The faux Caravaggios were more interesting, for example their Guercino.  The Getty has recently restored this painting, so the Internet is teeming with a lot of news.  The associated museum label exemplifies Church of Rome revisionism and denial.  The official explanation is that Jacob is blessing somebody’s sons, with the symbolism of the right hand positioning and on and on,  but what we see is an old dude who has been surprised in flagrante by dad.  The expression of the son in front is that of one trying to decide whether to spit or swallow; we’ve all seen that enough to know, right?

But the story had to be recast for a family museum.

After that we went to the airport.

Long ago, in a country far, far, away, there was a pod at a high school in Sebastopol who engaged in mildly criminal activities of the sort which are tolerated among white people, and one of them went to a summer camp and met a counselor of the fun loving randy sort who would be pilloried in the press in our more enlightened times; and when this counselor got a little older, he went to work for the music software company “Opcode”, and his band would have parties at the house of the company owner and the camp people, now suitably 18-ish, would come, and bring girls whom they had met on the primitive social network they had established with no money provided by Russians or Elon Musk or anybody, which is now physically impossible even though the Flat Earth no longer is, and that is the received aition explaining how this group of 16 people stopped at the Dutch Flat Hotel on a snowy evening two decades later.

Doug, from the Opcode side, has meanwhile married Hind, who is a mad cook. Hind cooks large. It would take a flock of chickens even to eat the vegetable peels when she prepares a feast. I suppose that back home in Lebanon, there was such a flock. Those chickens would have been busy for a few days, just to lay the eggs to make the butterscotch pudding when she took over the hotel kitchen. Justin likes custard and it was his birthday. Well, a month after his birthday.

Caramelizing sugar is quite an art. You really have to have everything be ready at just the exact right moment, and there were a lot of distractions with 16 people wandering in and out of an unfamiliar kitchen. The caramel turned into a brown blob reminiscent of the Elephant’s Foot formation at Chernobyl, but it was eventually broken up and persuaded to go back into solution with the egg yolks and milk. You can’t go wrong with milk, eggs, sugar, and half a box of cornstarch.

Other people brought bits and pieces, but I told Justin that the new rules of pot luck are:

Rule 1. If you ask Hind to bring food, don’t ask anyone else to bring food, and
Rule 2. If you ask Tollef to bring his bar, don’t ask anyone else to bring alcohol.

The snow outlined the branches like a Currier and Ives. Or, I guess in this century you would say Thomas Kinkade. Well, last century. Who paints pictures of horse-drawn sleighs in snow banks in 2018?

On St. Patrick’s Day, we went for a walk through the snow to one of the town’s many cemeteries. Dutch Flat now has only a few hundred retirees and remote workers in these post-Kinkade, pre-war years, but in Currier and Ives days, when the railroad was being put over the Sierras and gold flushed out of the hills with giant hoses, there were several thousand. Mostly Chinese, says Wikipedia, but I didn’t see their graves.

That was the start of our vacation. On Sunday, Dave and I drove down to San Francisco and got on a plane.