It’s a few minutes before 8 am and I wake up in a slight haze. It’s the haze of waking up still tipsy in a different city and in a hotel room you don’t recognize. I sit up. Oh, right…we’re in Munich. I get up and get dressed.
Burke and I travel well together. This is mainly because we both have a good idea of when walking around and looking at old stuff should transition into sitting down and sampling local delicacies and whatever the local version of Becherovka happens to be. Being in tune with your travel partner in this way is incredibly important. If you disagree, then you have yet to be on a trip with a person whose ideas of fun on a weekend trip differ from yours. The sweet innocent weekend trip has ended more than one relationship. It’s almost certainly ended more than one friendship. And it’s probably led to a murder or two. So, we’re lucky we agree on most points.
We have traditions too. One of them is that in the morning, Burke sleeps the sleep of a fairytale princess who’s been cursed by a witch, while I haul my hungover ass around our neighborhood to find us baked goods and some coffee. And it is such a quest for which I am currently pulling on my pants. After purposely forgetting to brush my teeth, I step out the door to find out what morning wares our neighborhood in Munich pitches.
The evening before, we noticed a place called Boogie Donuts, which seems right in line with what I’d like to destroy my waistline with on this weekend trip. I make my way through quiet – too quiet streets to where the donut place is. I visited Austria a month or so ago with my brother and undertook the same morning task. The result couldn’t have been better. The Austrians called me forth to their bakeries, explained their strangely-just-out-of-reach-linguistically cakes and pastries, congratulated me on the Eagles’ Superbowl victory, gave me a cake for free, and sent me home. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for something similar.
I first come across a local shop. There’s bread in the windows. It’s colorful inside and I see men inside working in yellow uniforms and the little hats of those ordered to keep their hair out of food. As I need toothpaste and maybe some juice, this will be perfect. I present myself at the entrance and step inside. One of the men lets off a string of (I suppose it was) German. He is wearing a smile of pure pleasure, as if he’s telling me I’ve just had a healthy child or that my mortgage application was just approved. I studied German in high school and hoped some of the old words and phrases (Das ist ein blauer Bleistift and Ich habe ein kleines Schlafzimmer) might come in handy. It doesn’t. To the chagrin of thousands of American second language students, language describing pencils and bedrooms rarely come into play while ordering breakfast.
Instead, I mutter that I don’t speak German. The man, no change to his face, switches instantly. He informs me, with the same genuine smile, that they open at 8 am. We both take that opportunity to look at the digital clock on the wall and watch 7:58 change to 7:59. I look back at him. With the (now creepy) smile, he tells me ‘just a few minutes.’ I take my leave for donuts. On the block and a half walk to the donut places it occurs to me that when a local shop isn’t open at 8, a donut shop isn’t going to open til 9.
Actually 10 am. The donut place is dark. A man is making donuts (I guess) in a low-lit corner. He notices a disturbance in The Force and turns to me in order to shrug me off completely. I walk back towards the store with the sour-graped logic that the donut-maker was skinny. If there’s one rule I apply to my life it’s that you don’t trust a skinny person to make your fat people food. Logic would state that they are either not good at making it or not good at eating it. I wouldn’t want a temperate person making my beer and I wouldn’t want a happy person making my country music.
The store is open, but no more dour than it had been. I suppose I thought that at 8 am (on.the.fucking.dot) someone would have yanked a lever that dropped balloons and calypso music would have spilled forth into the shopping area. This hasn’t happened. The same three workers are there and I grab a basket and meander into the aisles.
It takes a moment – maybe because of the language barrier or my own denial – to realize that this is no run-of-the-mill corner grocery store. Nope. Natural deodorant. Vegan cheese. Vegan protein powder. Soy curls. Almond butter. Jackfruit. Beeswax-free wraps. Oh, God. I’m in a vegan grocery store. I panic slightly. The sociopath who wouldn’t let me in at 7:59 is also a vegan? Just breathe. Just breathe. I make the circuit of the shop, pretending that my shopping cart isn’t completely for show. Cruelty-free toothpaste? No, thank you. I want my toothpaste to be as cruel and vindictive as possible. When I reach the door, I drop the basket in the stack and run into the day. Whatever may befall me and my morning, at least I didn’t fall into the hands of vegans and their cruelty-free ways. I shiver to consider the possibilities.
I walk home. I am defeated. I do not relish telling Burke that my mission has failed, that instead of pastries, we will have to go to the Penny on the main road (when/if it opens) and get Oreos and instead of coffee, coffee-drinks. I arrive at the hotel. Looking past it, I note a sign. When I get closer, I realize it is not only a bakery, it is an empty bakery with three employees behind the counter. They jump up when I come in. The woman speaks to me in (I guess) German. I explain my linguistic conundrum (namely that I took German in high school because I thought I might be a POW like in The Great Escape, but which I’ve largely forgotten, and any German I do have now gets mixed in with Czech). No problem, she says, I speak English.
After ordering a banquet of pastries, bottles of juice, and coffees, I walk the fourteen steps back to our hotel, a little wiser, a little more wary, a little more sober. I head to the room. I am greeted like a hero. We lay out our snacks. We sip our coffees. I tell Burke the tale as I hand her a drink.
‘These are vegan,’ she says, pointing to a label on the juice.
Damn. They followed me.
