A Throwback and Aus-Checken

Returning from our boat trip, we look for some dinner – August 2007

This follows on from Valhalla.

Greener on the other side

Back in Regensburg, we decide to cross to the other side of the river, where we’d read it was quite pretty, and to keep our eyes open for a possible restaurant. It was pretty. Lots of picturesque houses in picturesque lanes, and a party, could be yet another wedding or even the same one, going on on the ground floor of what seemed to be a building site with the builders still working. There was a traditional-style band playing but we thought it wouldn’t be right to do more than stand and stare for a short while.

Immediately over the bridge, we saw a kind of beer garden on our left, and we wondered if they might do food, but we saved this thought for after our exploration. Our exploration brought us to the same beer garden but from the main entrance, which was the grounds of the Spital brewery, and clearly they did do food, for there were people eating.

A throwback

This beer garden was like a throwback to the images of Berlin in the 1930s. Lots and lots of wooden slatted tables on metal legs, with chairs to match, under the trees, and with waiters and waitresses in traditional dress walking fast with jugs of beer and plates of food.

The beer came in either litre of half-litre glasses, and the food was essentially meat, bratkartoffeln, and salad. I had liver for my meat, by way of a change, and Hilary had the special which was meat in a melted cheese sauce. Just what we needed, and we sat overlooking the river, accompanied at the nearby tables by families, couples, groups of friends, groups of men playing cards after having eaten – no groups of only women in evidence though that may have been chance.

The weather in the Spital beer garden was perfect, a balmy still evening, though with worrying-looking clouds coming up, and it did start to rain rather seriously on our way home. If there’s an evening of rain, what happens to all the staff and food in the Spital brewery beer garden? For there must have been a couple of hundred seats, at least. Do the staff hang around smoking and the company write it off as an expense? Presumably they must do.

The famous eddies

We walked back to the hotel over the old stone bridge, watching the famous eddies swirl around in the river – which they do here presumably as a result of the bridge supports, though since the bridge has been there for centuries no one’s going to change it.

Aus-checken

The following morning we were to check out of the hotel and since we’d pre-paid I wasn’t quite sure what was required so I somewhat puzzled the man on reception with my question to him in German. To be clear, he asked, “Wollen sie aus-checken?”. So now we know, the German for check-out is aus-checken (which will need the hyphen so you pronunce checken the English way). I tried it some weeks later in a hotel in Würzburg and the receptionist understood it immediately. “Genau”, she said, in answer to my suggestion as to what we might do on checking out, “genau”. (Exactly – Germans say genau more than any other word, possibly).

The Sausage Stübe

In Regensburg – August 2007

This follows on from Two Nights in Regensburg

The sausage stübe

By the Danube in Regensburg is an ancient sausage stall, it’s like a hut with tables and chairs outside plus a few inside, and the kitchen cooks sausages over charcoal and boils up big pots of sauerkraut. Also you can get beer and other drinks, which come from the bar that’s part of the hotel alongside and are served by a different waiter. This sausage stall is advertised to tourists as being an attraction, so when we arrived it was busy, and we thought that if we were to find ourselves some places at the tables, we’d probably end up cutting it fine for the boat, but you could obviously queue for a takeaway so we decided to do that. Queuing for a takeaway turned out to be a wise choice, as it was probably more fun.

The famous sausage stübe is called the Wurstkuchl and has a website (in German) at http://wurstkuchl.de.

The queue for takeaway led from the kitchen of the hut, and out through the door where the waiter was gallantly pushing past to serve people, at a rate of knots though staying mostly cheerful. In the queue with me were part of a party of schoolchildren – it seemed that not all the children were getting a sausage in a roll from the Wurstkuchl, possibly it was just those that had some money to supplement their packed lunches. A teacher was orchestrating the relevant sections of the queue.

While queuing you could see the folks getting served at the tables, and there were a fair few foreigners among them, possibly they were all visitors, including a group of about twelve speaking English. Tour party maybe?

It did seem to be much more comfortable standing in the queue, and the other advantage was that the service point for the takeaway was actually in the kitchen, so you got to see the sausages being cooked.

Three women dressed in pink check traditional-style dresses with bib and long flowing skirts were topping up the charcoal, putting and turning sausages on the grill, and boiling up pots of sauerkraut. Do they do this every day? Every day cooking sausages in a smoky room, you must go home at night dreaming and smelling of sausages.

Ohne senf, ohne kraut!

One pink-check server was dealing with the takeaway orders, which consisted of a sausage in a roll, with or without either or both of sauerkraut and senf – German sweet mustard. The schoolboy in front of me was being instructed by the teacher, “Ohne kraut, ohne senf!”, she was shouting to him, which she was telling all the children, whether because they had a minimum budget, or perhaps more likely because she didn’t want to deal with the parents complaining of stains on trousers later, I thought it too forward to ask. The sausages were fairly straightforward pork sausages, nothing particularly special about them, it was the venue that counted.

The Chinese contingent

We ate our sausage rolls sitting on the steps leading down to the quays, along with hordes of others, and watched the people at tables in their somewhat more crowded conditions. A group of Chinese men turned up, dressed alike in a kind of blue collarless jacket and matching trousers. They were very cheery and looked like they might be academics possibly and they tried to find themselves a spot at the tables. They must have done this before because they persevered quite assertively, and did find rather a cramped space eventually. The Chinese men obviously liked the sausages and sauerkraut, and maybe potato, since at the tables you could get your sausages with bratkartoffeln.

Time to go when the smokers arrive

On the steps we were careful not to sit near anyone who was likely to light a cigarette, but then someone nearby us moved away and some rough-looking smokers took their place so we thought we’d make our way to the boat, though there was still nearly half an hour before it was due to leave.

The story continues with Valhalla.

Two Nights in Regensburg

August 2007

Regensburg sounds nice

We decided to spend a couple of nights in Regensburg. We’d heard that Regensburg was one of the German cities least damaged by WW2 and it’s also the birthplace of the Pope, not that we’re great fans of the Pope but one needs to know where he’s coming from. We’ve passed nearby to Regensburg a couple of times but never stopped.

First impressions

Entering Regensburg past the university, which is obviously a major element in the town, along leafy avenues with young people riding bicycles, we find our hotel. First a walk to the old town to get a general impression of the place, over the wide many-tracked railway with few trains in sight and past an old peoples’ centre – looks like a block of flats where old folks live and have a pharmacy and health centre and shops on site – and then through an arch and into the historic centre. Our plan is to get a drink in a bar and suss out somewhere to have dinner.

Too much pizza and pasta

Seems a young people’s town, no doubt because of the university. Downside of this is that the only thing you seem to be able to get in restaurants is pasta and pizza. You’d hardly come all the way to Regensburg for pasta and pizza. Pasta and pizza, they’ve been exported from Italy to everywhere and have become the universal staple fare in cafés and restaurants, and supermarkets for take-home quick cook meals. Part of the reason in restaurants is that they are quick to cook. And they can be light and appeal to the healthy-conscious. But at some point they’ll be superseded, they’ll come to be seen as outdated. Wonder when and what they’ll be superseded by. No clues on this as yet.

Two beers and free theatre

We find a bar that looks like it won’t be hoping to sell us some pizza and order two beers. And we watch the world go by in the square. Tourists, students, people going home from work, children, eccentrics on bicycles, eccentrics not on bicycles. Civilised. Not quite mainstream Germany. Haven’t got to grips with it yet.

The river

Next a stroll by the Danube. We see the museum ships, closed now as it’s evening, one a paddle steamer that once did the 100km trip to Passau. We think that tomorrow we’ll take a boat trip on the Danube, but there’s no indication this evening of how you do that, or even whether you can. Tomorrow we’ll find out. Let’s look for somewhere for dinner.

A restaurant

We find somewhere for dinner that isn’t pizza and pasta, though this took a bit of strolling the streets. We did pass one bierstube that looked a possibility, though not immediately appealing – we’ll come back to this though if all else fails. But all else didn’t fail as we came upon a triangle on one of the main streets, on the edge of the pedestrianised zone, by some bus stops, where there was a restaurant with tables outside, and it looked like the food might be Bavarian. We checked the menu, which was hand-written and hard to read, but a newspaper-cutting on the display board said that this was a newly-reopened restaurant focusing on local Bavarian specialities, so we decided to risk it and sat down at one of the outside tables. (Photo at www.europeanbeerguide.net/regepubs.htm#muenz)

As can sometimes happen, this turned out to be the perfect choice, notwithstanding there being just we two, plus another couple who’d just arrived, and a table of three drunks (see my page on Drunks in Restaurants. But the restaurant was obviously trying hard, with the waiter in his brown suede waistcoat and clogs and the menu in a kind of locked wooden frame, with hand-written pages that were hard to read.

We saw on the menu, kimmelbrat, and we asked the waiter what kimmel was. His Bavarian accent was so strong that neither of us understood barely a word that he said, so I ordered it anyway. When it came I immediately saw what it was, for it was a meat stew with caraway seeds, kümmel in the German we know, obviously kimmel in these parts.

Kimmel

For starter I had a wurstsalat, which I’ve eaten before in southern Germany, strips of pale pink sausage, cold, in oil and mild clear vinegar, and Hilary had a beer soup, which was a meat broth with beer in, with lumps of bread floating in it. Both our main courses, my kimmel and Hilary’s pfifferlinge – yellow wild mushroom which were in season – came with bready dumplings, far too much breadiness for us to be able to eat. And to drink: local beer, though this is a wine-producing area, but beer seemed right.

As we were eating, some youths were drinking cheap wine by the bus-stop, see Under-Age Drinking, German Style.

Thanks for the Bavarian

Other diners arrived, and when we came to pay the bill Hilary thanked the waiter/owner for providing somewhere to eat that was different from pizza and pasta, which caused an elderly couple sitting nearby to join in loudly and say how much they agreed with her, and how this was just about the only restaurant in Regensburg now where they can get a meal of the type they appreciate – a Bavarian dinner.

Actually, the elderly couple weren’t being quite truthful, as we discovered on our walk back to our hotel, when we passed through the grounds of Regensburg’s four- or five-star central hotel, the Arch, which had a yard with many tables and people were arriving and asking for a table and the waitresses dressed in pink check Austrian-type dresses with full shirts and a bib and flounced-out sleeves on their white short-sleeved blouses, presumably Bavarian style as well as Austrian, were telling them there wasn’t a free one, the restaurant was busy and it was full. We looked at the menu and it seemed to be Bavarian but with a modern twist, and quite expensive, but we thought we might give it a try tomorrow.

Rich and poor alike

The people passing the restaurant where we had actually eaten – and in the Arch you wouldn’t have had such entertainment for your money – included not only alcohol-abusing youths; smartly-dressed theatre-goers got off the buses too, and at the other extreme a group of women with their children, some in pushchairs, passed by, and as they walked past the municipal rubbish bin one of the children instinctively opened the lid and had a look inside. Didn’t find anything though so just as quickly closed it again. Won’t waste time on empty crisp wrappers.

And that was the end of the first part-day in Regensburg. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

Motorway South of Ulm

September 2005

An Icthus

My lunch at a motorway service station in Bavaria. The brown substance is lentils (not baked beans) and the yellow is noodles. The sausages could be viewed as one of those Christian fishes that people stick on the back of their cars (and which only ever face left – look out for a rare right-facing one – if you spot one you get a prize). My companion is reading the instructions for eating her salad and the blue car behind is telling me what it thinks of me for including it in the scene.

For more about the icthus and its use as a symbol for the Nordsee fish shop chain, see Nordsee Fish Restaurants, Are they symbolic?

Working Class Mustard

Ruhr Area – April 2005

A drive through the industrial belt, Duisburg, Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, it was Easter Sunday and therefore practically no big wagons on the road which, while it made the journey smoother no doubt, lent an unreal air to the roads (literally). We stopped in a service station of which the region has fewer than elsewhere, and ate Frankfurter sausages with senf alongside the natives. Actually, we didn’t, we had something else, but the natives certainly were eating little else but sausage and mustard, great mounds of mustard which, once their sausage was consumed, they spread liberally on their bread and chomped down heartily. Personally, I don’t like German senf, I find it too sweet and too vinegary. Why is it that ‘working class’ people love sweet, vinegary things so? Not like me, I’m privileged middle class you know.