Tag Archives: Bavaria

Oct 21 2021
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Architecture, Germany, Munich, TV series

Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood. Meh ….

Certainly ambitious in conception, but it all feels so rehashed and by the numbers, kind of half-baked and jaded by its own pretensions.

There are moments when you think it’s finally going to throw off the shackles and descend into proper depravity and capture the macabre, but it never does, like it’s constrained by committee. And there’s not enough of a portrait of Oktoberfest or Munich or … Germany in general, and those times were wicked times.

I was expecting a Bavarian Red Wedding. It never happened. Plenty of beer, but not enough blood.

Oh well, the intention was there.

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Jan 04 2020
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Air travel, Architecture, Germany, Photography, Tourism, Transport, Travel, TV, TV series, Uncategorized

New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.

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Autobahn.

I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.

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Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.

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Midnight fireworks.

Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).

Freezing run action in this park.
Goodies.

Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).

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All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).

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Jun 14 2019
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Air travel, Architecture, Art, Germany, Munich, Photography, Soviet Union, Tourism, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized, USSR

Bavaria. Booze. Bantz.

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Straubing.

Back in the Fatherland again for more lazy gallivanting, a week of Lidls, pubs, and killer insects. This is my seventh trip to Bavaria, so only a few new insights. I do quite like the place – it’s quiet (mostly), civilised (mostly), and people have manners (mostly).

Ice cubes.

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All of these goodies and no ice cubes. Tragic.

Why the dearth of them in supermarkets? Is this some ‘German thing’ in which they’re too ashamed to purchase the cubes ready-made, that the locals would rather be all labour-intensive and concoct the beverage coolers at home? Irritating.

Lidl. 

These convenience stores continue to be an experience. One can always unearth a wee treat in here, from cut-price protein bars to knock-off Jägermeister. I also admire the checkout staff; they don’t attempt to initiate pointless small talk when you’re more dishevelled than Jimmy McNulty during his peak Baltimore mishaps. They get on with it, which is how it should be done. British people suffer from an affliction: talking about the weather. It’s boring chat and you get no such gibberish from these Germans.

Mosquitos. 

These fuckers need wiped out regardless of the wider ecological ramifications. They attack O negative blood like those choppers in Apocalypse Now (1979) taking down the village to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. I’m a so-called ‘universal donor’ and this is how I’m rewarded – bites in double figures to my face, arms, legs, and arse. Charming. “Burn them all,” as Aerys Targaryen would have wailed.

Wheelchairs.

Where are the people in wheelchairs? In Straubing and Passau I didn’t see a single Ironside. Strange. Are they kept indoors or something?

Chernobyl connotations. 

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Lined up my midget e-cig with this and felt quite grateful I didn’t grow up anywhere near Ukraine circa 1986. I thought this snap quite the arty-farty creation; it will be doing the rounds on Instagram.

Overall, another cracking jaunt. I’ll be back next year for an Aldi blog.

 

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Apr 12 2018
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Cinema, Film, Germany, Uncategorized, World War Two, WWII

Where Eagles Dare (1968) – Wehrmacht Stormtroopers.

Where Eagles Dare (1968) surely must have been watched on a loop by George Lucas as he was penning A New Hope (1977) and the expanded Star Wars universe.

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Fan art poster.

 

Hohenwerfen Castle is this movie’s Death Star, the German troops the most incompetent ever assembled in what is the peak Hollywood WWII turkey shoot; Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood mow the fuckers down like Stormtroopers. Reducing a complex military operation to the wits and whims of two ‘superhero’ protagonists, it’s this blasé depiction of war that has young lads all giddy (“chomping at the bit”) en route to army recruitment offices.

The Wehrmacht grunt here is a Stormtrooper sans the Arctic clobber, and by the end one could be forgiven for thinking that Messrs Burton and Eastwood casually take out an entire division.

It’s quite the escapist experience, and its influence is rampant – the Medal of Honor video game series, for example, is an unabridged adaptation of the movie’s aesthetic. In an ideal Pentagon monopoly on propaganda, the enemy is devoid of dimensions and the battle a cakewalk.

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War is no messy struggle when you’ve got personality pulling the trigger.

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Aug 17 2017
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Germany, Tourism, Travel, Uncategorized

Gäubodenvolksfest in Straubing.

Munich.

The airport is a micro city, something you’d design back in the day on The Sims when you’d be sat in your jammies before the PC thinking yourself a Svengali creator. The airport design is pants, though, and the online maps a shambles, too. Why have low-resolution JPEGs all over the web airport guides? Even the official site is lacking in detail and shoddily put together. For someone as obsessed with airport preparation (I like to escape them upon arrival and not waltz/shuffle around like a penguin on Valium) as I am, a detailed exit plan is desired. Anyway, I tell myself it’s just an airport.

Straubing, Regensburg, and the Autobahn.

Upon arrival I think of Richard Wagner and mad King Ludwig in that period when Bavaria, under the Hohenzollern yoke, somehow in a rapidly modernising new Germany managed to bridge a link to a romantic past of myth and folklore. I think of Visconti’s Ludwig (1973) especially, this a half-baked banality of a movie.

I have a vision these days of a latter-day Julie Andrews doing her hills-are-alive thing, but only this time it’s now tainted with the image of a dreadlocked lady in a trackie clutching an alcopop in one hand and a boombox in the other. The Sound of Music (1965) scene was of course shot a fair bit away at Obersalzberg, but one can be forgiven for thinking this encapsulated all of Bavaria before time caught up with it.

I was expecting ‘Old Bavaria’ here – tradition, peace and quiet, a conservative(ish) enclave. It was this to an extent but such things are now fantasy. It’s this globalisation virus again – granted, the same virus which enabled me to stroll off a cheap easyJet flight for the price of two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Every city feels the same for me, and I even reckon Venice will be anonymous by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, the bantz was top quality and taxi drivers aside (they refused to stop on countless occasions) I thought it a cracking wee adventure.

Booze?

Oh aye, the ethanol intake was high. This I figure is the reason mosquitos were nibbling me to smithereens in my sleep – I was a free drinking session.

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Nov 23 2016
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Austria, Germany, Tourism, Travel, Uncategorized

München, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, Alkohol.

Guten Morgen.

Arriving in Munich, we wander around the Hauptbahnhof before our 17:54 Salzburg departure, stumbling into an assortment of ghetto eateries (for the booze). What is it about train stations and their surrounding streets that attracts the oddballs and the riff-raff? I’ve never felt entirely safe sparking up a ciggy near a railway. One is invariably sniffed by the local hyenas wishing to devour their carcass of tobacco. We escape a verbose gentleman in green dungarees and find our seats on the train. When I finally conduct my Trans-Siberian Express jaunt, I wish it to be just like this, but with several suitcases filled to the brim with liquor.

Salzburg.

The delights of Salzburg. They have some cracking pubs – notably Alchimiste Belge – and a fag machine. And a SPAR selling Bacardi Breezers. What more could one want in a city? Oh, and a born-again Christian outside a nightclub gave me a book about God and things. I endowed it to the hotel for a lucky person to devour.

The wee Sunday market left the most memorable impression. Tiptoeing from stall to stall with a beer in each pocket, I got the sense that I was somehow intruding upon this idyllic community gathering. They all appeared so happy and thoughtful, like this was the day to take stock of the week’s events and indulge in a little R&R. There’s an ersatz ‘German Market’ back home in Edinburgh – it mostly consists of teenagers in tracksuits being very loud. No comparison, really.

Morning entertainment.

A spot of Apocalypse: The Second World War (2009) and a Jägermeister chaser performed their noble role as Room 304’s pre-eminent hangover cure. The hotel were showing The Sound of Music (1965) on a loop, but it’s just not graphic enough for my sensibilities. Julie Andrews doesn’t do it for me; I need proper carnage.

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To Obersalzberg.

Driving to Hitler’s notorious crib above Berchtesgaden and peering up awestruck at its twin delights of the Berghof and the Eagle’s Nest and all the tumultuous, tragic history that was made here, left me with a sense of being quite insignificant. The overwhelming splendour of the milieu merely magnified the feeling that I was an ant ripe for a trampling.

Munich (again).

By the time we reach Munich and go our separate ways after a few more drinky-poos, I’m content to conk out on my bed as Richard Wagner emanates from a tacky Bluetooth speaker. I wake up in darkness and feel my way around the room, realising I’m in Munich and not a lucid dream three minutes into this escapade. I crawl to the shower, then luxuriate in another cheeky nap, and depart at the first sound of a cleaning lady (I presume) patrolling the corridor. In the railway station I get visions of an anthropomorphic dog in a leg-cast playing Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” from a boombox. I don’t know why.

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