Miscelanarama

Another piece written on the bus from Regensberg to Bamberg, arriving to the blog later than expected.

I’m bouncing around Munich (loved it, for very different reasons than I’d assumed I would), Regensburg and Bamberg, and it’s seeming likely that I won’t have a video/photo update slated until I get to Berlin, so in the meantime, here are some incoherent ramblings less about me than about the trip! (OK some of them are about me it’s my blog nobody’s paying me to be fun to read so deal with it.)

Regensburg is very pretty, fairly quaint, and under construction!

Uneducated generalizations after the jump!

Italy is spectacular at public water. It flows freely. Like, to a degree that’s actually sort of wasteful? Most of their public fountains just run constantly, and unless they’ve really perfected recycling the water that spills into the gutter… Well, in any case, particularly when you pair it with Rome’s legislation requiring that cafes permit non-customers to use their restrooms, it’s the best country in the world in which to remain hydrated. WOOT!

I realized my third night in Germany that it was the first time in a month that I’d heard somebody watching movies or TV while wandering the streets of my small town (Regensburg). Obviously that’s not to say Italians don’t watch TV or movies… but whereas a stroll down my street in Boston or Chicago would typically lead past numerous flickering screens/audio spilling out the windows, that was not the case in Italy. Not sure why.

I had a full conversation in a foreign language! A 30-minute lunch chat with an older German man and his wife… well, mostly the man, as she seemed a little nonplussed by his decision to chat up the clumsy, half-stupid foreigner. But it was great! My half consisted mostly of smiling and nodding and desperately trying to decode on the fly as he told me about (I think) his career as a test driver for Mercedes busses, his work taking him to Scandinavia, where he found Finland verypeaceful even if others found it boring, about his son who works (worked?) in America, about his wife teaching German in New York for a brief period of time, and… probably many other things that I tried to keep up with but didn’t quite piece together. These chats are always kind of delightful and kind of stressful – you can feel, in the moment that you fail to understand what somebody’s saying, their anxiety over being clear even when it’s clearly your fault for not understanding. But this chap was a delight, always bounced back when I got confused, and was clearly pleased to give me a chance to stammer clumsily about my summer and where I’m from and what I do. (OH! He also talked about how, being from Stuttgart, he and the people in Bamberg basically don’t speak the same language. Regional variances are tricky, man.)

The trip, I’m realizing, is turning into a great control-grouped case study on national diets. I can feel my body responding very differently to German food (well, and American food in Munich – following the locals, I indulged in some burgers and burritos) than it did to Italian. This is kind of cool; here’s hoping I can take lessons back home with me and construct… THE PERFECT DIET???

It is also turning into a great sampler of amazing local drinks. I have been head over heels for the unbelievably fresh, clean, refreshing lagers (and complex rauchbiers) in Bavaria. My favorite wines in Italy were in the € 1-2 range. It’s been pretty cool, and I’m also getting a sense of how I respond differently to different drinks - what seems to hit me harder, what bums me out, what makes me silly… whether that’s psychological or physiological who knows, but there you have it.

 OK. Come Berlin, hopefully some Bavarian (and Thuringen!) photos and a video of some sort. That video thing has been interesting and fun... it's mostly become a sort of moving journal of my travels to revisit down the road, because something about seeing a place in motion really brings things back to me? AND the music is almost always something that's rattling around my head in the various places I've been. So in theory I'm creating little nostalgia machines for myself, plus they have the benefit of being (hopefully) slightly less boring than Obligatory Vacation Slideshows, giving me an easier way to catch friends up on stuff without making them hate a death march of Photos Of Churches! Yayyyyy videos ok goodnight.