The Road Less Traveled

Arrival and immigration

When the plane arrived from Paris at Eyadema airport in Lome at 6:30 p.m, it was already dark. Nevertheless, I could make out palm trees around the airport. My UCR colleague Carol, who spent 3 years as a Peace Corps volunteer in nearby Burkina Faso and
visited Lome many times, had raved to me about the palm trees. I didn’t see how palm trees could be exotic coming from California, but the palm trees in Togo really are different. There are two kinds: one with tall thin trunks and short thin palm fronds, and
the other short with long, broad fronds. Both sway easily in the warm gentle breeze.

I got off the plane and walked to the terminal. My “expediter” was waiting just inside the entrance. It was the first time I’d ever had assistance BEFORE going through immigration and customs. He took me to the front of the line and the officer stamped my
passport without saying a word or checking my yellow fever vaccination. I put my bags through the x-ray machine, and then I was out.

First haggle

In the airport there were a couple of men playing drums. They had a series of paintings on the ground in front of them. My expediter asked me to sit down at the café near these men while he went to check on another American who was still getting his visa. I ordered a Sprite. The price was 900 CFA (a central African currency, pronounced “Sefa”), which I calculated should have been about $1.50. I didn’t have CFA, only dollars, so the waiter asked me for $2. I gave the waiter the two dollars, but when he came back with the Sprite he informed me it was $3. I was ripped off.

As I was drinking a Sprite, one of the men playing drums came up to me and smiled. He talked to me in English
with a heavy accent. He laid a painting and some shells on the table. He asked if I was interested in buying it. The one on the table was nice but it was dark brown and not my style. I asked to see a light blue one instead, which turned out to be a group of
women carrying baskets on their heads. I had to admit it was beautiful.

Then the bargaining began. He said it would be 20,000 CFAs (about $40). I told him I didn’t have CFAs, and asked how much it would be in dollars. He said it would be $100! I said in French that was crazy. He asked how much I wanted to pay, and I said $10. I knew that was a ridiculously low price, but I really wanted to pay $20 or $25 so I knew I had to start at $10 to get to $25.

In the meantime, my expediter came and looked over the painting. It was through his inspection that I realized it had been painted on the back of a cutout from a large canvas bag that had been used to carry other goods such as rice or flour. It wasn’t framed
in any way and I started to wonder how to hang something so soft. But I still liked it, so I gave the drummer a final price of $25, and he took the money. Then he said it would be $25 times two. I don’t like having a price accepted and then raised. I
said $25 yes or no; he gave me the money back. But he gave me the shells for free, and his phone number so I could call him in the morning before he went to the beach. I’m still not sure what that was about. Then he went to the bar. When he came back, he said he talked to his friend and found out the right exchange rate. (That was probably a ruse to save face.) Then
he agreed to sell me the painting for $25. Ironically, I probably would have gone up to $40 or $45, and was now feeling like I had fleeced him instead of the other way around. I even thought about buying a second painting, but was barely sure what I’d
do with the first one and didn’t feel like bargaining again.

The Hotel Ibis

Finally, I got in the car with the program driver to the hotel. The driver, Jacques, was a university student during the day and he spoke English very well. He pointed out how many motorbikes there were on the road, and said that I might be surprised to see women carrying things on their heads. I did see women carrying things like large baskets and plastic jugs, and even with the painting I’d just bought I was surprised at the sight. I also saw many people selling goods on the street, with a homemade kerosene lamp for light.

Jacques dropped me off at the Hotel Ibis. As I got into my room, I heard African music in the distance. I asked the porter what it was from; he said from the beach. But like my guidebook and Jacques, he informed me that the beach was dangerous at night and I
shouldn’t go there. Since it wasn’t safe to walk around, I decided to go to the hotel restaurant. Although I’d had an excellent dinner and lunch courtesy of Air France, I needed another big meal to take my anti-malarial pills with.

The restaurant turned out to be an outdoor grill near the pool, covered with a large hutlike roof. It was very relaxing. In the morning though, I found several bug bites because I’d failed to put on my DEET. So far I have no symptoms of malaria.

I ordered the grilled chicken legs and a large (1.5 L) bottle of water to take my pill with. I watched the cook over the grill as she fanned the smoke and flames with a fan that appeared to be made from woven palm leaves. I watched the other chef cook omlettes in a castiron skillet, steam vegetables and boil fresh spaghetti in a steel pot, and fry French fries in a Western-style basket.

The food was surprisingly good. The legs were grilled and seasoned with salt, garlic, and one or two other spices I couldn’t identify. It was delicious. The vegetables were merely two slices of cucumber, but I could forgive that given the quality of the chicken. There were two sauces on the side: one that was mayonnaise-based but had extra seasoning in it, and a second which was a tomato-flavored chutney; it tasted like a thick spaghetti sauce. The total for this was 6700 CFAs (at the hotel’s exchange rate, $14.25). A bit pricey, but worth the convenience and ambience.

The Drive to Munich

We left Peter’s hometown in the morning. Although there had been some snow the night before, the roads were remarkably clear. We had Peter’s father’s Mercedes with all-weather tires just in case, though.

About two hours into the drive, we stopped at a highway rest stop for lunch. Peter said the Jagerschnitzel (Hunter’s Schnitzel, breaded and pan-fried pork fillet with a mushroom sauce) and Spaetzle (a traditional German noodle dish) were a little expensive at 9 Euros, but we agreed they were delicious nonetheless. At the rest stop I also picked up a free book about German highways that listed the full name of every city abbreviation on German license plates. Whereas American children on a road trip try to spot license plates from different states (which are clearly marked), German children get 1-3 letter codes which they have to try to decipher. Some of them are fairly easy—B is Berlin, M is Munich, MA is Mannheim, but some are more obscure. The book helped us find the correct answers for a while, then took the fun out of it.

We arrived at the hotel with no trouble around 2:30. Upon our arrival, we found two reasons to believe Fortune was smiling on us. One, we found a parking space right in front of the hotel. Two, we walked into the hotel but no one was at the front desk. In fact, the front desk looked closed. A woman walked downstairs and said, “how did you get in? The door should be locked.” Peter explained that it wasn’t locked, and we had a reservation. Then she said, “Oh, we’ve closed this hotel up. You have a room now at our sister hotel up the street. We tried to contact you, but we didn’t have a mobile number for you.” Now, that may not seem like a good thing, and certainly it was an odd welcome, but if the door hadn’t been open and the lady had not come downstairs at that moment, we really would have been up the creek with no hotel and no idea what to do about it.

We checked in and went to the room. It was small and basic, but also very reasonably priced at about 80 Euros a night. The location was good too—It was close to downtown and the “Schwabing” neighborhood, a traditionally hip area of the city near the main university, Ludwig-Maximillian University.

Exploring Munich

We started our tour by walking up Ludwigstrasse. The State Library building looked beautiful, and I convinced Peter to go inside for a look. We walked up the long marble stairs to the second floor, and found a special exhibit on a nature writer we’d never heard of. Unfortunately, we didn’t find ourselves caring any more about him after seeing the exhibit.

We kept walking up the street towards the Victory Arch until we got to the university. Seeing the university was very special to me. It was here that Sophie Scholl, her brother, and several friends had been university students in 1942 when they formed an anti-war society called the White Rose. They distributed flyers protesting WWII and Hitler’s actions. They were caught and executed within three days. I had never heard the story, but it was pretty famous in Germany. Two months earlier, though, I had gone to a film festival in L.A. and seen a movie about it—“The Last Days of Sophie Scholl”. It had been a very good film, and now here I was seeing the university where the events in that movie had really happened. I am not sure if they filmed the movie at the university, or if they had created a set. Nonetheless, I recognized from the movie the balcony where Sophie and her brother had pushed their leaflets onto the floor below. In addition, we saw at least two plaques commemorating Sophie and her brother. There was also a very small museum, but it closed at 4:00 and we got there at 4:10.

After the university, we started walking towards the Englisher Garten. We hadn’t planned on going there originally; it was December and everything I’d read about the garden made it sound like someplace to enjoy in the summer. But Peter had had his hair cut recently, and had mentioned to his hairdresser that he was going to Munich. It turned out Peter’s hairdresser was from Munich, and had advised him to go to the Englischer Garten; he said it would be beautiful even in winter.

Peter’s hairdresser was spot-on, as the British would say. Actually, just the architecture of the houses in the surrounding neighborhood was a beautiful sight. When we got to the garden and I saw the river and the bridges and the snow and the pagoda and the sweeping snowy hills, I was impressed. Peter enjoyed it, too.

One sight that Peter did not like, and which we argued in a friendly way about for the rest of the trip, was my attire. It was December and cold, and I had my beautiful coat from Ukraine and my new fur hat from my friend Tina. The coat was okay, but Peter thought the hat was a kind of fashion crime. He was probably right about it being a little big for my head, but it was gift from one of my dearest friends and it completed my “Ukrainian girl” look. I finally told him, “I like it, I’m gonna wear it, deal with it.”

We walked through the Englisher Garten and past the Hofgarten Chancery (which looked like a big greenhouse), and the Residenz. It was already after 5:00, so we couldn’t go in and see the sights. That was okay, though. We made it to the Rathaus (town hall). Wow! It was so big and beautiful in its neo-Gothic way. Now it’s mostly a shopping center and tourist stop. But the Rathaus and the square around it were still beautiful.

We stopped inside a café on one of the side streets for a late 4:00 coffee (a Peter tradition). It was run by two people who clearly were from Italy. Peter thought it was a little strange to walk into a coffee shop in Germany and hear “Bon Giorno”, but I didn’t mind so much.

It’s Hofbrau Time

After our cup of coffee, it was time to wend our way to the kind of place I hated to want to go to: The Hofbrauhaus, the king of Bavarian beer halls. When we got there, the place seemed quiet and empty. A little too quiet, thought Peter. He asked a server, and sure enough, we had walked into the restaurant. The beer hall was downstairs.

We went downstairs and found a room with many people sitting at long tables. Servers in traditional clothes were carrying large mugs of beer, just like you see in every traditional image of Germany. Such pictures don’t capture the horrific wonder of the oom-pa-pa band that was playing.

We managed to find two seats together at a table with strangers. Peter didn’t want to drink too much, so we agreed to share a mass (a 1-liter mug of beer). I guess we’re lucky his passport and national ID weren’t taken away for this. :0 We were a little hungry, and Peter suggested I try Weisswurst (white sausage). It wasn’t his favorite dish, but it was a traditional Bavarian dish and therefore he thought I should try it to have the experience. The sausages were boiled and served in a white ceramic pot of water. I had to agree with Peter; they were just okay but I was glad to have tried them. A better choice was the pretzel. Peter bought one from a vendor who was walking around with them to the tables. It was only 3 Euros, very soft and filling, and not too salty.

After we finished our beer, we got out of there. We got some postcards at the gift shop and hit the Hard Rock Café across the street to get a t-shirt for my friend Nick, who collects them. We walked back towards the Rathaus and walked down the street looking at the shops. We followed the road to the Fraukirchen. We didn’t think it would be open, but when we tried the door, it worked. For reasons I still can’t explain, I felt closer to God in that place than I have felt in any place of worship in my whole life. It wasn’t overly gilded with gold and pictures as some churches are. Yet it didn’t look like the church elders were taking a vow of poverty, either. The ceilings were so high they seemed to already be in Heaven. There were some interesting exhibits on historical figures of the church as well. We sat down in the pews for a minute to collect our thoughts, and suddenly heard a choir singing. It was surreal.

We quietly thanked one of the priests for letting us in, and walked out. Facing us was a lingerie shop—I thought it was an odd location but I guess it forces people to make a clear choice in life. We walked past the shop and found the Augustiner Hall. It wasn’t as over-the-top as the Hofbrauhaus, but Peter said the Bavarians who were there were probably just bringing their out-of-town guests to see it.

We each had another half-liter of beer, and tried another kind of sausage. This sausage was served with lentils, which Peter said was traditional. I always associate lentils with Indian food (i.e. dal), so I was a little surprised to hear that.

Walking back towards the U-Bahn (subway, literally “Underhighway”), we saw a woman playing an accordion. She was wearing a special blue satin robe and white hat with a fur trim. The costume looked familiar, and then it hit me—she was Snegurichka, the Russian granddaughter of Father Christmas! I said to her, “Snegurichka”? She said, “da”. I gave her a Euro and said “Spaceba”. I think it surprised Peter how excited I got when I saw that.