The Transhuman Comedy

• If you take a Deutsche Bahn night train, go ahead and spend some money on a couchette or a private sleeping cabin. You'll sleep better. Also, if you board it at the earliest station, you can board 30 minutes before departure time, and sleep more.
• Muenchen struck me as being very touristified. Maybe because it was a weekend? We saw half a dozen bachelor/ette parties wandering around the Altstadt. At 8p on a Saturday, the only Germans in the Hofbraeuhaus were the oompah band, the waiters, and the security staff. If you hate the idea of seeing American fratboys posing for each other's photos while holding 1-liter beer mugs, pick another time.
• I thought I was the first tourist to get my photo taken at the European Patent Office, but my boss beat me to that brilliant idea back in '87.
• The Deutsches Museum was well worth the trip, especially for the aerospace levels. Sigmund Jaehn's Soyuz capsule sits near a cross section of a 747 fuselage and a WWI Fokker triplane. But a lot of the electricity and physics hands-on exhibits didn't work, and those that did seemed antiquated, pieces churned out on an assembly line by Prussian elementary school graduates-cum-Verdun survivors in the golden age of bulk-materials-bashing.
• Berliners heard me speak German and switched to English; Muenchners heard me speak German, "corrected" my German to Bayerische Plattdeutsch, and then switched to English.
• Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin was more impressive than Schloss Nymphenburg in Muenchen, though the latter had a more pleasant walk leading to it (along a canal and around ponds full of ducks and geese) and Ludwig I's Gallery of Beauties.
• Lola Montez was the oil-paint-equivalent of photogenic (see the picture in the Wikipedia article), but not enough to justify Ludwig's infatuation with her. Presumably her exotic dancing or other, um, qualities sealed the deal.
• From Muenchen, we spent the last three days with relatives in my dad's hometown in the Spessart Mountains between Wuerzburg and Gelnhausen.
• Altes Weinkellnerchen, in Unter den Markt in Gelnhausen, had the best food of the trip. Filet with garlic, roasted potatoes, and peppercorns, paired with the house red. It was also one of the few German meals we had.
• Wir haben echtes deutsche Essen gegessen--doener! ("We've eaten authentic German food--gyros!") My uncle didn't catch the joke at first. Even small towns have Turkish restaurants.
• Q: Why do Europeans drive tiny cars? A: Because gasoline is $8 a gallon.

Labels: Germany, travel