Emperor Pretzel
An Iranian, a Finn, a South African, an Italian couple and myself where having pho in a Vietnamese restaurant in the centre of the Bavarian capital. What sounds like the setup for an elaborate joke was how I ended my time in Munich. By my final night I had relented to the hostel receptionist’s recommendation of trying the local Vietnamese food. It’s not that I don’t like Vietnamese food, quite the contrary. I just thought I was being sent down a tourist trap. “He won’t like our food, give him something he’s used to.” However in the succeeding days I learned about the international identity that marks modern day Munich.
The city’s cosmopolitan feel means that, whilst there is plenty of Bavarian fare, the various migrant communities from places like Italy and Vietnam have broadened the spectrum of Munich’s culture and food. And so, three days in, it made sense to be enjoying a soup, thousands of kilometres away from its origins in a city colder than any Vietnamese city would ever get with travellers from four different continents.
But Munich wasn’t all rice bowls and plates of pasta. The open marketplace preserved in the centre of Munich was a great touchstone for my immersion into Bavarian cuisine. Utilising my keen sense of the German language, I managed to decipher that goulashsuppe mit brot was goulash soup with bread. Other attempts at German language skills where less successful. On my first day I attempted to order a cheese pretzel, or käsebretzel. However my mispronunciation meant that I more likely was requesting a cash pretzel or, worse still, an emperor pretzel, much to the dismay of the bakery owner. I chose to stick to English after that.
I enjoyed chowing down on seventy cent giant pickled cucumbers, olives, cheeses, lots of breads and baked potatoes at the market. I was enamoured by the discovery that Lidl, Aldi’s omnipresent competitor, sold pretzels for thirty-nine euro cents. This discovery was probably the most life-changing in my journey so far.
There was also some beer. Just a little bit of beer. In the beer gardens, in the famous hofbräuhaus beer hall, in the Vietnamese restaurant, at the Irish bar, in the hostel bar. Most people don’t know this but Munich is actually famous for beer. They even have an entire festival in October dedicated to it.
Not all of us could handle our alcohol, though. At the hostel bar, a man from Indiana called Jeff introduced himself to me as Jeff from Indiana three times before projectile vomiting over his arm and the table. Clutching a one litre mug of beer in one hand, apparently for a friend who never arrived, and a jug of beer in the other, which he had been drinking directly out of, Jeff was slowly able to get himself up and off to the bathroom, but it was too late.
