Back in Bayern

We left SamfaylYOUdayGWEEshoals early Thursday morning and flew from Barcelona to Munich. Oh Bavaria, how I had forgotten I missed you so--your rolling farmland, your afternoon coffee and cake, your Brezeln and Semmeln, your solar farms, your roll-up-your-sleeves enthusiasm for tidiness manifested by swept sidewalks and invariant village house colors, your incomprehensible fondness for thick white asparagus rather than tender green, and your Mineralwasser. If anything epitomizes the difference between Germany and the rest of the world, it's Mineralwasser.

In Barcelona, you need walk no more than a few blocks to find a very small, slightly grungy, well organized, supremely friendly family-run grocery store where you can buy fruit and vegetables and, if you're lucky, score a bottle of Vichy Catalan (Catalan's self-proclaimed finest healing mineral water, apparently most healthful when served cold). In the Munich airport, you need walk no more than half a terminal to find at least two large, well-polished, impersonal corporate-owned grocery stores, where you can buy fruit and vegetables and at least five brands of mineral water with four different varieties each (high fizz, medium fizz, low fizz, no fizz). I'm not sure who goes to the airport to buy fennel and beets, but surely every frequent flier can use a liter of medium-fizz seltzer, and it's good to have choices.