The Hofbrauhaus is massive, a kind of giant temple dedicated to beer-drinking - rows upon rows of tables stretch off into the distance like wooden pews, and the air vibrates with the sort of human rumble more commonly associated with really intense sporting events or 1970's political rallies - basically the type of atmosphere you'd expect from an establishment whose sole purpose for the past four hundred years has been to get its patrons mind-bogglingly drunk. Beer here is served by the liter in tankards that, judging from the amount of abuse they go through, look like they're made out of military-grade Pyrex glass. These are carried eight (sometimes ten) at a time by traditionally garbed waitresses, 90% of whom are tall, blond, and almost absurdly well-endowed, such that you can't help but wonder at the level of finesse that must be involved for an establishment like this to tiptoe around anti-discrimination laws.
This writer would also like to posit, after healthy sampling, that said beer is really fucking good.
Germany is playing Greece in the EuroCup on the night that we arrive, and like every other place in Munich the Hofbrauhaus is on edge in a vague, fanatic sort of way, and its only through sheer outrageous luck that we're able to secure a table that has a clear view of the screen. Halfway into my potato salad Germany scores a goal (one of four that night), and the resulting physical shockwave actually explodes the fork out of my hand like a tugboat being hit by a depth charge. The only other things that will be said about the rest of the night are that soccer enthusiasm is, understandably, quite contagious, and that one-liter serving sizes should be made an international standard.
Chronologically, the next place we visit is Dakau, but I'm going to skip over that because I still can't formulate my thoughts on it, and because any attempt on my part to describe it feels almost obscenely inadequate.
After Dakau we head back to the center of Munich and attempt to find what's been described to us as a Bohemian artist colony. But it turns out that we're all hungry, and take so many detours trying to find a suitably tasty/cheap restaurant during the next hour that we make almost no progress at all towards our destination. We do however take a walking tour, led by a somewhat austere but ultimately large-hearted English woman, that winds through the city and ends up becoming hands-down the best history lesson I've experienced in my fourteen years of education. This isn't very surprising - if you did the same tour two times a day, seven days a week for three and a half years straight (and your ability to pay rent depended on how aggressively interesting you were) you'd be damn good at it too - but to someone like me whose own conversational coherency has a half-life of approximately 8 minutes, the ability to make people give you money by literally talking at them seems magical and suspiciously occultish.
Munich is also a draw for stag parties ("It's classier than Amsterdam," one man tells me), and during the course of the day we actually come across four such groups; roving packs of men with matching T-shirts and an air of desperation, as if they can see middle-age on the horizon and are paddling away frantically in the opposite direction. Where this gets interesting is later in the night, in a beer garden, when two males from the stag party next to us migrate over and start hitting on the girls in our group so hard that it becomes almost a joke to watch, some sort of staged production.
What they have going for them is cockiness, an English accent, and what's obviously a lot of experience picking up girls. What's against them is heavy-handedness, and the slip-up that one of them is married (not a determent on flirting with other woman, apparently), which for me sours the entire affair in the same way seeing what goes into killing my meat will kill my appetite. The girls enjoyed it though - it's understandably flattering to be the object of attention and I assume it was a refreshing change from college guys who are, after all, still amateurish at times - and they stayed there for a long while after I left.
What I think about in retrospect is the double nature of that exchange, the way it seemed on the surface to be an entirely funny and smiling and human interaction, but had such marked tragic subtext that at the turn of every sentence I felt an unease in the soul I usually reserve for existentialist phases in my life. I can approach it on several levels:
1) that this is somewhat disturbing to me because what I normally associate as something joyful (marriage) has become a cause of dread in the groom's entourage, the spur for them to quite literally regress and act like horny middle-schoolers going through puberty, basically causing the exact opposite of a wake-up-call, a sort of emotional poverty.
2) that I've become fluent enough in status theory to be wary about these sort of overt exchanges, clinically removed from it the same way a surgeon is able to look at a leg and see bunches of muscle and tendon and bone instead of a leg, and have been struggling to just go-with-the-flow so to speak and not intellectualize it and get all heady, but at the same time realizing that this struggle has been throwing me off on this whole business of existing.
3) that I'm on some level I'm judging this transaction when I should perhaps just let it be, and get down from my ivory tower and stop thinking so much and just sort of interact on gut instinct right? that maybe there's been a little too much liberal-arts education in my drinking water and that its insulating me from the "real world," whatever that means. And that, you know, perhaps this determined immaturity is the whole point of stag parties, and is something I'll process and enjoy come whatever number of years from now.
And of course all of these things happen at the speed of thought and while all this is going on I'm also enjoying my beer and mammoth-sized pretzel and taking in the crowd and the soccer game and the feel of gravel beneath my shoes etc., but nonetheless this unconscious parallel processing whirs away, and stores these mental Rubik's cubes safely in the back of the mind for the inevitable long train rides ahead, when the rain drips sideways down the windows and the remembering self starts sorting this primordial blob into small neat piles and pulls out the string and starts wandering down that labyrinth again, solving away.
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