Expensive drinks

I've blogged before about Germany's strange relationship with drinking water, but here I am, doing it again.

Last week in Berlin, Elias and I shared a .75L bottle of bubbly for a whopping €7,50.

Of course, when water comes in bottles, your waitperson needs to unscrew the cap for you so you don't strain your genteel hands, and that comes with a price.

Yesterday, back in Bayern, Elias and I stopped in tiny-town Seefeld (OK, at Schloss Seefeld, the local tiny-town castle) for refreshment during a long walk, and we shared a .75L bottle of stilles (non-bubbly) Wasser for €6,50.

See that "Getraenke Divers" for €2,00? That miscellaneous beverage was a mug of cold milk--a drink so foreign to Germany that restaurants don't even have a receipt name for it. Hot milk is another thing. The milk yesterday was actually lukewarm, suggesting it was ultra-pasteurized long-shelf-life boxed milk. You'd think the effort of getting the milk out of the cow, pasteurizing the wazoo out of it, putting it in a box, and hiring someone to open the box and pour the milk into a mug would be more expensive than putting water in a bottle, forcing some carbon dioxide into it, and then getting someone to pour it into a fancy glass, but what do I, a gauche American tourist, know about such things?

In Germany, as in the U.S., ganz normales Leitungswasser ("totally normal [i.e. plain ol'] tap water") tastes quite fine and is available for cheap from most sinks. Why folks pay hundreds to thousands of times more money to get water from a bottle, I just don't understand.

A vegetarian abroad

When I first started coming to Bavaria with Stefan 21 years ago, it was a challenge to find vegetarian fare in restaurants. Times have changed, however, and it's much easier now to find at least an ovo-lacto option such as Käsespätzle mit gerösteten Zwiebeln und Blattsalat (little boiled egg dumplings, pan fried with cheese, served with fried onions and a side leaf salad), or a Gemüse Teller mit Spiegelei (plate of cooked vegetables with a fried egg). Salads have also undergone significant changes, shifting away from arrangements of potato salad, cooked cabbage, and corn kernels, toward a variety of green leafies. Still, as in the U.S., the vegetarian in Bayern occasionally faces limited options*:
and has an excuse to cobble together a tasty if questionable complete protein.
(The beverage pictured above is Mineralwasser mit Kohlensäure, of course, because fizzy water is always available in this cultured society.)

*You'd think the carnivore has limited options here too, as all there is to eat other than french fries is Wurst--but the Wurst connoisseur understands the differences between grilled pork sausage, beef 'n'pork sausage, white pork sausage, and hot dog chunks in curry sauce.

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.

Amazing Sprudel

St. Peter is an old and beautiful town that lies about 12 miles east of Freiburg. I will write more about today's visit there shortly, but for now, I want to share this photograph of a 1,5L bottle of Mineralwasser perched on the wall outside the Kloster square. At the tiny grocery store in St. Peter, this bottle of Sprudel cost .23 Euro cents plus .25 cents Pfand (bottle deposit). I offer this image as proof that amazing things can happen in even the most unexpected places.

City seal

The Freiburg Stadtarchiv has a collection of Freiburg city seals and stamps dating back to the 13th century. A seal from 1245 depicts the town wall with three archways, three towers, two watchmen blowing horns, four stars, a fleur-de-lis, and the text, "SIGILLVM:CIVITATIS:DE VRIBVRCH IN BRISGAVDIA:" ("Civic seal of Freiburg im Breisgau"). Copies of the seal can be found all around the Altstadt on the charming manhole covers, bearing the less regal text, "Kanalisation Freiburg i. Br."

The 13th-century values represented by the logo became a life-sized physical reality (minus giant horn blowers) in 1895-96, with the construction of the Wasserwerk building on a hill above Wiehre (along the southern edge of Freiburg). Presumably the manhole covers then followed as part of the new water works branding concept. The building is known as the Wasserschloessle because it's too small and too kitschig to be a Wasserschloss.

Copenhagen*

Yesterday we drove to Strasbourg International Airport, a place that, apart from the International bit and the lack of an ornamental reflection pond, could easily be mistaken for the airport of my childhood: Willard Airport in scenic Savoy, Illinois. This similarity, coupled with a 20-minute absence of check-in personnel beneath a sign flashing "Check-in Ongoing" for multiple flights, had me in smug giggles for a good half hour. Later, just before our shuttle bus departed for the tarmac, a flight attendant dashed breathlessly on board carrying a toddler. "Ha ha," laughed the other nine people on the bus, "oui, that little girl is ours! How funny that we forgot her in the airport!"

From Strasbourg, we flew to Copenhagen, capital of Denmark, where Stefan is meeting up with research collaborators at the university. One of our first observations about this lovely city is that the Danish not only think water out of a tap is potable, they think it's worth drinking. They even give it out without comment and for free at restaurants! In exchange for this free-flowing libationary excess, we are learning to calculate the Copenhagen cost of a meal by multiplying whatever a reasonable cost might be by the number 5.

*Not in Southern Germany.

Deep thought

Stefan just pointed out that a liter of Mineralwasser at the grocery store costs about the same as a liter of diesel at the gas station.

4929 Miles to Wall Drug

When I was a kid, my family took quite a few how-many-miles-can-you-drive-in-how-little-time vacations. On one memorable trip, we started from our home in Urbana, Illinois, and headed west, out to the South Dakota Badlands and Mt. Rushmore. That was the vacation when I got to see not only the Mitchell Corn Palace ("The World's Only!"), but also "America's Favorite Roadside Attraction" (turn left at the Jackelope), Wall Drug.

Munich is 4929 miles from Wall Drug. Freiburg is a little closer at 4811. But the point is, everywhere in Germany is a long, long way from Wall Drug.

Founded in 1931, Wall Drug made its claim to fame by offering visitors free ice water. Germany is a long, long way from free ice water. (That Germans don't put ice in their beverages is beside the point. We're a long, long way from free water.)

To drink water in a restaurant, you must order water. In a restaurant, "Wasser" usually means "Mineralwasser," which usually means seltzer--or "Sprudel" here in the south (although if you order "Sprudel," the waitperson usually asks "Mineralwasser?"). To drink non-fizzy water, you must specify "stilles Wasser." Like Sprudel, restaurant-grade stilles Wasser is gathered by hand from a pure mountain spring hidden deep in the Black Forest or high in the Alps, then gently cleansed and carefully siphoned into a pretty glass bottle anywhere between 0,2L and 1L in size. Your waitperson opens your bottle of bubbly (or stilles) for you, then pours it into a wine glass marked with a 0,2L line near the rim.

Stilles Wasser does not come out of a tap in the kitchen. Oh dear. That would be "ganz normales Leitungswasser" (totally normal tap water). Ganz normales Leitungswasser actually tastes quite good in southern Germany: cool, clean, refreshing, and chock full of chalk tasty minerals. You could order "ganz normales Leitungswasser" in restaurants, but doing so would be crass, and your unimpressed waitperson would accidentally forget you ever asked for it, so Don't Do It.