Leaving Munich by train

I had only a single full day in Munich when I went to Europe in September 2007, and I tried to see as much as I could, but unfortunately, there were glaring omissions. I didn’t see the Isar at all, nor the Englischer Garten, and I missed the Deutsches Museum and the Pinakotheks. I did, however, familiarize myself with the city, including the oldest part of the altstadt. My trip to Dachau was memorable but sad, and occupied most of that day.

Communal eating

The evening before I left, I walked to the city centre. It was pleasant and mild, and the streets seemed crowded with Müncheners. I’d been looking for something. I can’t remember what, or if I’d found it, but on the way back, I needed to get something to eat. Seeing a brightly lit shop with food in the window, I went in.

It was a kind of deli, and there were no tourists inside. People were grocery shopping, or eating at a few long, high communal tables near the entrance. It was nice to get away from the tourists and their haunts, and the kitschy atmosphere of some of the shops, although these are refreshingly few in Munich if you know where to go.

I walked to the back of the store, and watched people pile food on plates from a serving table, to be taken and weighed by a cashier. There were take-out trays and dinner plates. Grabbing a tray, I went over the offerings, and invented a meal of various pastas and vegetables. I went to the tables at the front and enjoyed it while listening to a family of three, with a girl about ten or eleven, talking about the minutiae of their day. They seemed to be discussing the girl’s school, and things for her to do in the evening. She looked at me every once in a while from over her plate of sausage, probably wondering why I was eating inside from a take-out tray instead of a ceramic plate.

They soon finished and left, and others came and went, alone or in pairs, talking, or eating quickly and silently, and it was one of the most enjoyable meals and experiences I remember from my entire trip. You can eat a lot of beautiful goulash in Austria, or innumerable varieties of pasta or fish in Italy, but sharing a rough meal in common with the local population of a city you have a special fondness for makes for a lovely memory.

Professor of Annoyance

I was to meet up with my family in Vienna in two days, and I’d reserved a seat on the train for the next morning for the four hour trip from Munich. I boarded about mid-morning; I seemed to be the only one on the entire car. Seats were arranged in banks of threes facing each other, and contained in compartments with sliding doors. It was cozy and modern, and impeccably clean. I settled in my seat by the window and dozed, waiting for the train to depart.

After a bit, the door slid open, and in bustled a large man in his sixties. He looked at me over his glasses and rumbled an obligatory “Guten Tag,” then took quite some time to settle in. He was expansive, in his width and his movements. He pulled out a newspaper, a binder, and other items, and took up most of the tiny table under the window as a kind of desk, while we waited for the train to leave the station.

He was kind of amusing, kind of curt. His voice was deep and gravelly. He had a thick grey beard, and wore an old herringbone jacket (complete with patches on the elbows) over a tattered cable-knit sweater that looked particularly scratchy. His glasses were half-rims, so it was easy for him to glance over the top of them at whatever might have been annoying him at the moment. And he did seem to be in a state of perpetual annoyance.

I suddenly noticed an overturned paper coffee cup with a lid on it in the middle of the floor, very slowly leaking hot coffee into the carpet. Unless I’m half-blind, or stupid (or maybe a little of both), that cup was not on the floor when I entered the spotless compartment. I politely interrupted the gentleman to ask if he had dropped it, pointing to it as my voice trailed off in the face of his stony-eyed stare. “Not at all,” he said, “do you suppose it has been sitting there all this time?”

My German isn’t perfect, and my comprehension of spoken German — particularly German spoken by an irascible and perpetually annoyed man in his sixties who would probably be difficult to understand in the most cordial of circumstances — is even worse. But that was the unusual gist of what he said to me. “I – I’m not sure,” I said, a little confused by his disowning of this item. “Hum,” he puffed, “strange.” And he went back to his paper.

Okay. I stood, picked the cup up, being careful not to dump the remainder of its contents on the floor, and left the train to throw it out.

When we finally departed, it began to rain. It was very grey and misty out, and unfortunately the landscape was invisible. I looked at my companion. He was reading not a German newspaper, but perhaps a Czech one, or Slovak. After some time, he turned to his binder and began to make pencil notes in the margins of what appeared to be a typewritten Czech manuscript, before going back to the newspaper. A Slavic writer of some kind? I hadn’t noticed anything but a perfectly German accent. He certainly fit the description of a sixty-ish middle European novelist, elbow patches and brusqueness and all. I was reminded of Yuri Testikov, the growling Russian writer on a Seinfeld episode.

After an hour or so, two young Japanese girls, quite obviously tourists, came into our compartment and sat opposite one another, chatting quietly. This did not impress my companion, who used both his half-rims and the top of his paper from which to shoot darts at these young women. When they began to unpack a lunch of noodles and biscuits, it was barely tolerable for him. Since they didn’t have access to the table, their little picnic was spread out on the seats beside them; meaning beside myself as well as my companion.

I have never heard anyone actually snort. One may read this in fiction occasionally — “He snorted his contempt,” for example — but I think one very rarely has the luck to actually hear someone snort contemptuously in real life. When the odour of the noodles reached him after a few seconds, his paper snapped in rapid succession three or four times, and he huffed and snorted — yes, very contemptuously — making his deep displeasure known to us all. Except that for reasons unknown, perhaps cultural ones, this passed high over the heads of the young women, who happily chattered and ate, and drank from bottles of brightly coloured liquid while he stared at them sidelong, barely able, it seemed to me, to contain his revulsion.

It was difficult to feel sorry for anyone. Yuri was master of his own displeasure, and the girls had no idea they were unsettling him so grandiosely. He glanced at me once or twice, maybe looking for a comrade in disgust, but I did my best to ignore the whole situation. In fact, I had to make sure that I wasn’t smiling too much in order not to insult him.

Luckily, the girls left the train shortly afterward, and he could go back to his newspaper and manuscript. He also slept for a while, stretching his legs on the seat beside him, bohemian style. I read, listened to music, or watched the rain streaking along the window. The landscape was a misty rush beyond it.

Finally, hours later, we entered the Viennese environs. My companion gathered up his belongings and his luggage a few stops before Westbahnhof, which was my destination. As he left the compartment, he turned to me and offered a very polite and dignified goodbye. Entertaining though his demeanor might have been, he was still quite classically the gentleman, and I was glad to have made the trip in his company.

My stay in Vienna was short, and over the course of the next two weeks, I’d met my family, and we’d traveled throughout Austria and Italy before arriving back at Vienna. From there, I would take the reverse trip back to Munich.