Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

 

So after London it was with much wanderlust that I stepped foot in Germany. The rest is history (Mia is buried in a dumpster).

When I got to Munich (alone) it was the eve of Oktoberfest. This is a huge beer fuelled fairground full of grand drinking parlours, rides and German girls wearing traditional Bavarian outfits. Suffice to say I didn’t go to Oktoberfest because I was indulging myself at the thermal baths.

For a reserved Englishman like myself, the baths came as something of a bolt from the blue…movie. But once I got used to it I throughly enjoyed it. Lounging about with girls in the sunshine is simply better naked. Our euro-pervs have got the right attitude…admire it while you can as soon you will be dead.

Life is too short for clothes in the sauna, in the swimming pool, at the bar in the swimming pool, in the mixed showers, in the mixed relaxation pools, in the jacuzzi and in the massage room. On the last day of my jaunt, in Cologne an attractive 19 year old German girl named Katrina tipped toed into the sauna to lay down next to me. She kept looking over at me. I was nakedly draped over the bench sweating like a dog in a kabab shop. I left to go to the cooling pool and she followed. She elegantly delicate footed it down the steps into the pool in full view of me and slunk up to my side, her naked bodying shimmering in the cool blue water. The rest of the day we spent chatting and frolicking about nude. She was into the Foo Fighters and had been to a music festival the previous month…about the only thing she was still wearing was her arm band.

Where England gets it so tragically wrong, Germany gets it right. The people behave and although they like their beer and wine they don’t turn into complete pricks after a few and start brawling. Life on the whole is cleaner and healthier, their infrastructure and facilities outwit England’s like a young Einstein at school with a ’special child’. Witness the 200kmph ICE train versus the shitcan express from Manchester to Buxton. Even their small regional services are sometimes double-decker…if we tried that in this country half the passengers would be decapitated by low bridges.

Germany is not hamstrung by it’s past like England is - to be honest though this is because we bombed most of it.

Typically the holiday was not all good. It was sweet and sour, like gobstoppers.

Mia was the devil’s own travelling companion. I never want another of her friend’s to experience going on holiday. Before leaving she’ll research the country until there is no mystery left to discover. Produce a 5000 item check-list of streets she wants to visit and a travel itinerary consisting of a 4 hour train journey every 10 minutes. If you’re lucky you might get to spend longer than an hour somewhere but this is usually a traipse round an empty street at night time when you’re hungry. Sympathy or compromise? These are concepts Mia doesn’t know the meaning of. Companionship and joint-exploration? Empathy and emotion? I’m sorry the Taiwanese don’t seem to be capable of any of this. So strong-headed and cold she was, I had no choice but to leave her in the cold and go it alone like a lone-rider galloping off after torching a village. (Just as well she’d taken so many photos of it first).

I really don’t understand the Japanese and Taiwanese tourists whom Mia was a kind. They flit through other countries like a bat out of hell, snapping away with their cameras like the world is about to end. Yet they come away not knowing anything at all about where they’ve been or what they’ve photographed. It pissed me off.

Its not that I don’t enjoy movement and train rides, its just that there has to be something to experience properly at the end of it. I loved riding on the trains listening to New Young Pony Club and Paul McCartney’s new album…not a care in the world apart from about what I was free to do next.

I experienced life in Munich for a full week and I’m glad of that. I partly have Mark to thank for his great hospitality and for inviting me to a party he and his wife Katrina went to - this involved playing quirky German board games…I remember them so clearly. Hopefully they’ll have them on eBay. Mark, his wife and his friends are brilliant people…hope to see them again before too long.

The hostels are much better than I expected. Its like living in a hotel where everyone is free and single, doing what they enjoy. Seeing the sights. One day in the room at first was a laid back ozzy lad who had just come from a tour of Egypt. Suddenly, the two French girls entered the room and I held the door open for them because French girls like to be catered for. First impressions were that they were a bit up themselves. As I began to let the door close after they’d entered, they muttered ‘theres one more’ so I held the door open again, like some kind of doorman. The Brazilian lad trailed in, and immediately we got on. He was a spitting image of Tom Hanks, and pretty much is personality from Big. We bounded up to the English garden, got a bite to eat at a restaurant.

 

On returning both a bit knackered from our long distance jaunt we returned to a nice quiet room full of French girls. Suffice to say the door opened very quickly in anticipation of getting to know what colour knickers they were wearing, but not as quickly as when second ozzy guy entered the room a few minutes later. Unlike the first ozzy guy, this was your more typical breed. Loud, friendly, drunk, extrovert and what some would consider a bit of a light hearted prick. He whipped room 205 into a frenzy, encouraging the 5 of us to all go for a drink in the bar as it was happy hour. My Brazilian mate took a lot of encouraging, as he had gone to bed. Suffice to say we were all in the bar 10 minutes later. Chatting up the French girls while this alpha-ozzy was about? No chance. He was in there like a lion mauling a fresh carcass. By the end of the evening, I was talking politics and snowboarding with the other ozzy guy, business with the Brazilian guy and absolutely nothing to the French girls who were being mauled. They looked like puppy’s stuck in the headlights of a Juggernaut.

I am planning to go back to Germany soon for long weekends. A lone rider doing what he wants, when he wants…

London is a full city. If they let one more person in, the whole place will simply explode in a big flash of light. The cues are so long the people who wish to join it have to eat the person in front of them.

So on a sunny Friday we rode back and forth on the underground, mainly because Wenny had misread the map. Wenny also had a map to the hostel and we finally arrived after about 2 hours. However her map was of the wrong hostel – which is why the Korean man on reception couldn’t find our booking. He did however kindly go to great efforts to point us in the right direction…by writing down the building number on the back of a beer mat.

When we did finally find the right hostel, it was in a really convenient location – next to Hammersmith tube station. We popped our luggage in the safe compartment – behind the bar on the ground floor and went off to explore London. I took Wenny to the Thames, saw Big Ben, the London Eye and an impromptu performance art piece involving musicians hoisted up on a rotating mobile hung from a crane. Then we went to China town…it was a lot better than Manchester. We didn’t even get shot at. But at this point I was sick of foreigners already…heartbreaker Wenny, the Korean idiot at the hostel reception, the sheer number of criminals in London.

Then we went back to our room at the hostel for the first time…at 12.30am. The other people asleep in the room were really pleased to see us. I felt like I’d just walked into somebody’s house by accident and tripped over their bed. The girl in the green knickers slept with the sheets off and her arse pointed at me which prevented me from being able to sleep.

By this point the three main things that occupied my mind were catching my flight the next day, seeing Wenny for the last time in my life, and the girl’s arse.

Well this is how it ended. I walked under a banner saying Gatwick Express and Wenny stood there watching me go off into the distance. I have finally been released from one selfish Taiwanese girl into the path of another.

However I was jolly happy on the plane to Cologne in Germany. I was also on a bit of a high when I arrived at Cologne airport – an incredible feat of engineering and cleanliness.

Swooshing down south from Cologne to Heidelberg on the ICE train at 200kph was sublime. I was really pleased with myself. It was all going far too well. Cue the bit where I was to meet Mia at the station.

She was nowhere to be seen. I suppose it didn’t really help that I’d got off at completely the wrong station. After about 10 minutes of wondering around I realised my mistake…4 minutes away from Heidelberg no less. I texted Mia to tell her I’d be 30 minutes late because of the mishap. Yesterday whilst I was on London she’d told me to text her when I approached Heidelberg so she could meet me to guide me to the hotel she’d booked.

Low and beyond, when I got to Heidelberg she was nowhere to be seen either. This was a whole lot worrying than the previous stop on the line, because this really was Heidelberg. It even said so on the signs. So I decided to ring her…but her phone was off. I had no hotel room number, just the street address of the hotel. She’d previously told me it was really close to the station so I decided to look for it on foot. 1 hour later and I still couldn’t find it so I copped out and got a taxi. At reception, they had a note from Mia for me…it simply stated my room number.

It was 11.30pm by this point and I’d just started to relax on the bed after my stressful arrival…a rude awakening followed by another rude awakening as Mia strolled in from the health spa and revealed that her mobile had been out of battery all day and she’d not brought her charger from the UK. She said she didn’t deem it important enough to have a mobile. And there posed a significant problem.

To be honest I was livid but I hid it well. I just wanted to get on with the holiday and enjoy it. The hotel was beautiful – 4 star and friendly. I didn’t see much of it apart from my bed…I had checked in at 11.30pm…stressed and tired because of Mia’s non communication when I arrived. Then we decided to get a bite to eat…she proceeded to walk for 1 hour searching for restaurants serving food at midnight despite my constant statements that such things did not exist at 12.15am in Heidelberg. I eventually had to settle for a MacDonalds at 12.30am then to bed. We checked out in the morning…a complete waste of a good hotel.

By this point I had the warning signs alerting me to the fact that Mia was not going to be a very fun travelling companion.

Sure enough, the next day she was off again…walking and travelling aimlessly around, photographing boring villages and generally not engaging in any interesting chat or banter. I watched the grand prix in a sports bar, but it was so dull I walked out half way through to meet Mia at the designated time – no mobile remember – what a fucking pain. Did we relax by the river? Did we get a bite to eat? Did we take photos together and generally enjoy each other’s company? Did we fuck. Cue yet another train journey on to Strasbourg. We arrived here at about 6pm. Suffice to say, when we’d climbed the hill to the hostel it was dark. The hostel was fantastic, if a little under-used…maybe because half the guests had perished on the walk up.

And here started the beginning of the end. We’d agreed to go to a restaurant. Bare in mind this is at 9pm on Sunday evening after traipsing round from 10am in the morning, achieving very little apart from movement from one similar place to another. We caught the bus into Strasbourg city centre…but Mia insisted on walking around the empty high streets, past one closed shop after another in an effort to explore the streets. She had suddenly declared she wasn’t hungry so the restaurant would have to wait. But I’d had enough…I was tired, hungry and my legs had packed up. We passed one of the only places which was open – an Internet café and I told Mia I was going to sit down and surf the net while she explores, but I wanted her to meet me back her when she’d finished so we could finally eat – together.

This, apparently was an unreasonable demand. She at first refused to give me a meeting time, saying she was exploring indefinitely. I told her this was selfish, but she insisted it was a legitimately independent thing to do and if I didn’t like it I could go back to the hostel.

Well to cut a long story short, I told her to stuff it and got the bus back to the hostel. A barrel of laughs that night was. The hostel was virtually empty. My only room mate was an Irish bloke starting a job designing cars at the Audi factory. However he’d gone out for a drink on the town. I had literally no choice but to go to bed.

Mia was behaving like it was her own private little adventure travelling alone. There were plenty of things we’d agreed we’d both enjoy…but there was absolutely no compromise when it came to her whims.

I was not going to trail around after her like a poodle, as she flits from one street to another like the archetypical Asian tourist, checking off this sight and that from her billion point precision holiday plan, taking photos of anything that takes her fancy (without getting to know it’s name). She’d move on constantly via her ridged plans, never pausing to take in the atmosphere or the people. I hated this.

So the next morning we walked to get the train to Fusson…a 5 hour journey, followed by yet more journeying to the hostel, from there to a castle, from the castle to yet another town. I told her I was going it alone. I dispatched of her on the platform as she shouted at me.

I didn’t want this to happen. It was horrible. But at least I did what I liked that day. I stayed in Strasbourg for a few hours, then hopped over to Munich. But to be honest…I am hating every minute of it. I need a travel companion to bounce ideas off and to talk about the things we’ve seen.

Germany looks like being a write off. Next stop France, reuniting with Mia to catch a flight.