First stop of the honeymoon trip,
from Shanghai to Doha to Munich’s city center.
Time Zone
Honestly speaking,
this is the first time I’ve experienced physical jet lag.
Before, I was always controlled by biological mental jet lag.
Munich is in UTC+1.
Now I’m closer to ED who’s in London,
I can more fully understand the feeling of ED and his wife playing Dota when I go online at midnight.
I fell asleep at ten-something at night,
woke up naturally at 5am the next morning,
and told Mia (who also woke up early):
“Hey, looks like jet lag really does affect biological clocks.”
Mia: “Oh, I usually wake up naturally at this time.”
Pandemic
After settling at the lodging on the first day,
we tried calling Qatar Airlines’ domestic customer service
to see if our return flight would be cancelled.
The call greeted us with: “Outside service hours.”
On Weibo many classmates said
they’re being discriminated against abroad because of the pandemic.
I felt it was actually fine.
Strangers on the streets don’t really interact with you anyway.
The verbal harm foreigners inflict on Chinese people
is probably less than the verbal harm fellow Chinese from other provinces inflict on Hubei compatriots.
Connected to the foreign internet,
Mia and I still scroll through China’s pandemic news.
Mia sighed: “I feel like we’ve escaped to a place where no one is in charge of us.”
I righteously replied: “Munich is not outside the law!”
Taxi
We took a taxi from the airport to the hotel.
The Turkish driver, with a heavy accent, told us:
“Don’t taxi. Take trains!”
The Turkish uncle said he’s lived in Germany for twenty or thirty years,
but recently all Germans have gone crazy.
We asked why.
He said masks at the supermarkets had all been swept up!
……
We passed many buildings with BMW logos along the way.
The driver said: Munich’s economy is the number one here,
partly because of the world-famous Oktoberfest,
and partly because there are lots of Fabric here.
Me: “Wow, great!”
Later Mia reminded me
that this Fabric was actually part of the driver’s German-English mixed accent.
Life
German always gives me a very hardcore feeling.
Even though I don’t really understand much German,
I just rely on two phrases Gutten Tag and Danke to get by.
We live next to Munich Central Station.
The city’s building distribution is very rigorously block-style,
horizontal and vertical, which pleases my OCD greatly.
When washing my hands at the lodging,
I felt the unusually fine water from the tap,
and exclaimed to Mia in surprise:
“This water looks so clean, I even have the illusion you could drink it!”
Mia: “You can drink it, but no need.”
Countryside
On the way to Neuschwanstein Castle,
Germany showed us its vast rural countryside.
Scattered across the broad fields are many pointed-roof red-tiled white-walled houses,
clustered together they look like the towns from 《Sid Meier’s Civilization》.
Most large fields aren’t planted with particular crops,
just flat grass and clean human-free air.
I discussed with Mia,
if this were in China,
what a waste of farmland,
they should grow some cabbage, carrots, grapes, tomatoes or something.
But even in the sparsely populated countryside towns,
Germans still keep their white walls very clean.
This feeling also showed up after we visited all sorts of bathrooms:
German cities really do pay attention to cleanliness.
This is good, worth learning from.
Food
After putting things down on the first day,
we tried pork knuckle and local beer.
The pork knuckle’s skin is made hard and crispy,
the whole big chunk of meat is greasy enough to be intoxicating,
so the plate also comes with a pile of sauerkraut and a big potato dumpling.
The local wheat beer smells nice,
beyond that I can’t give any comparison-group review.
The local food shops are all selling bread and coffee.
There’s many kinds of bread here:
one big category is purely hard dry bread,
to the point that shops have dedicated electric saws to cut the bread;
another big category is sandwich-like bread,
with fillings including cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, pickled pork, and every possible side ingredient.
In these few days I’ve been here,
I’ve eaten a lot of bread,
and haven’t touched a single grain of rice.
I have the illusion of no longer living in China.
Prices
As an outsider,
many things that locals might take for granted feel fresh to me.
For instance, prices here are proportioned differently.
Mia and I went to a local supermarket,
we lingered in the milk section:
a 1L bottle of milk is only €0.99!
So I drank two liters of milk in three days and farted up a storm. (Really.)
At the fruit shop, we bought about a kilogram of apples for only around €1.
In contrast to the cheap basic foods,
some other things appear much more expensive than in China.
For example, we took a bus,
one-way costs about €5.
A wash-cut-blow at a hair salon is €20…
What’s more funny is,
we bought a 1L bottle of Nongfu Spring purified water,
total price €0.44,
of which the price of water is €0.19,
but the price of the bottle is €0.25.
erlangen
On day three in Germany,
we bought day passes and took the train to erlangen to visit old Han.
Train stations in Germany don’t require any ID,
no fried-chicken ticket-check gates and no fixed seats,
just buy a ticket, board the train, and find an empty seat.
Immediately I remembered the ticket-inspector joke series I read in elementary school —
indeed, every land has its own jokes.
Old Han is Mia’s friend of ten years.
Writing this gives me a shock too —
our university classmates,
now in another way of saying, are friends of ten years.
Time really doesn’t last.
In erlangen I saw the open-campus university.
Mia told me German universities are all like this.
The whole town isn’t big,
one main street cuts through the entire town,
with libraries, bakeries, breweries, classrooms, mobile reading rooms, and large malls distributed on either side.
All those walking on the street are vibrant young faces.
The university is like being broken into many invisible rivers,
fusing with the town of erlangen.
We asked old Han what he usually does on weekends.
Old Han laughingly said:
“They say what friends back home feel now
is what we exchange students feel —
super boring.”
But after learning that Germany has quite a demand for programmers,
no overt age discrimination,
good internet speed,
and not too many external temptations so people usually don’t go out,
I started to have a little fancy about picking up German again at 30.
To Be Continued
These past days Qatar said some flights to China have been cancelled.
Though our flight isn’t affected yet,
we’re traveling with a constantly looming joyful “can’t get back home” feeling.
In Germany we’ll also go to Cologne Cathedral,
and when we get to Barcelona we plan to visit Barcelona Cathedral and a series of other landmarks.
Hope by then we can resist the urge for a leap of faith,
just pressing E to sync should be enough.
(End)