Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In the evening I went looking for a restaurant. This is often a problem in Germany. For one thing, there's
a good chance that there will be three guys in lederhosen playing polka music, so you have to look carefully
through the windows and question the proprietor closely to make sure that Willi and the Bavarian Boys won't
suddenly bound onto a little stage at half-past eight, because there is nothing worse than being just about to
tuck into your dinner, a good book propped in front of you, and finding yourself surrounded by ruddy-faced
Germans waving beer steins and singing the 'Horst Wessel Lied' for all they're worth. It should have been
written into the armistice treaty at the end of the war that the Germans would be required to lay down their
accordions along with their arms.
I went up to six or eight places and studied the menus by the door but they were all full of foods with
ominous Germanic names - Schweinensnout mit Spittle und Grit, Ramsintestines und Oder Grosser Stuff,
that sort of thing. I expect that if ordered they would turn out to be reasonably digestible, and possibly even
delicious, but I can never get over this nagging fear that I will order at random and the waiter will turn up with
a steaming plate of tripe and eyeballs. Once in Bavaria Katz and I recklessly ordered Kalbsbrann from an
indecipherable menu and a minute later the proprietor appeared at our table, looking hesitant and
embarrassed, wringing his hands on a slaughterhouse apron.
'Excuse me so much, gentlemens,' he said, 'but are you knowing what Kalbsbrann
is
?'
We looked at each other and allowed that we did not.
'It is, how you say, what ze little cow thinks wiz,' he said.
Katz swooned. I thanked the man profusely for his thoughtfulness in drawing this to our attention, though
I dare say it was a self-interested desire not to have two young Americans projectile-vomiting across his
dining-room that brought him to our table, and asked him to provide us something that would pass for food
in middle America. We then spent the intervening period remarking on what a close shave that had been,
shaking our heads in wonder like two people who have stepped unscathed from a car wreck, and
discussing what curious people the Europeans are. It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way
across a continent on which people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs' legs, intestines,
sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.
Eventually, after walking some distance, I found an Italian restaurant called Capriccio just around the
corner from my hotel on Theaterstrasse. The food was Italian, but the staff were all German. (I could tell from
the jackboots - only joking!) My waitress spoke no English at all and I had the most extraordinary difficulty
getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance.
'Wass? Tier?'
'Nein, beer,' I said, and her puzzlement grew.
'Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?'
'Nein, nein,
beer
.' I pointed at the menu.
'Ah,
beer
', she said, with a private tut, as if I had been intentionally misleading her. I felt abashed for not
speaking German, but comforted myself with the thought that if I did understand the language I would know
what the pompous man at the next table was boasting about to his wife (or possibly mistress) and then I
would be as bored as she clearly was. She was smoking heavily from a packet of Lord's and looking with
undisguised interest at all the men in the room, except of course me. (I am invisible to everyone but dogs
and Jehovah's Witnesses.) Her companion didn't notice this. He was too busy telling her how he had just
sold a truckload of hula hoops and Leo Sayer albums to the East Germans, and basking in his cunning.
When he laughed, he looked uncannily like Arvis Dreck, my junior high school woodwork teacher, which
was an unsettling coincidence since Mr Dreck was the very man who had taught me what little German I
knew.
I had only signed up for German because it was taught by a walking wet dream named Miss Webster,
who had the most magnificent breasts ever and buttocks that adhered to her skirt like melons in shrink
wrap. Whenever Miss Webster stretched to write on the blackboard, eighteen adolescent boys would
breathe hard and let their hands slip below the table. But two weeks after the school year started Miss
Webster departed in mysterious circumstances - mysterious to us anyway - and Mr Dreck was drafted in to
take over until a replacement could be appointed.
This was a catastrophe. Mr Dreck knew slightly less than bugger-all about German. The closest he had
