Big Fün
July 7-16, 2022
In July of 2022, the pandemic was not over. In fact, the virus was acting more virulent than ever, but most everyone in the world just sort of decided to ignore it. Coronavirus was now just another new facet of our hell-reality, and regardless of spiking transmission numbers and the very real consequences of long-covid, it was time for humanity to pack itself tightly inside of airports again. Two whole summers had already been disrupted because of the pandemic, and so everyone tried desperately to cram all that lost leisure time into the summer of 2022. When they did, the airports didn’t break exactly, but they did bloat and rupture. When the increased number of people traveling combined with the great resignation and a bunch of airline strikes, all sorts of flights got canceled. Bags got lost. People stood in big lines. It was not a good look.
Somehow, Seester Becky and Brother Brian were able to make it from California to visit us in Berlin without incident, marking the first friends and/or family from abroad to step inside our apartment in nearly 3 years. We had missed it dearly. This time, they brought the third of Brian’s boys, Sage, completing the trilogy of 16-year-olds who have been subjected to sleeping on our tiny, urban floor.
Unlike his brothers, Sage came to Germany with his own agenda: He had acquired an online German girlfriend from a Minecraft server and they were eagerly awaiting their first in-person meeting. The whole family was set to convene in Munich the next week, but she ended up being in Berlin for a school trip and wanted to meet up right away. After feeding Sage his ceremonial first döner, we met his cyberfriend on the train platform nearby and were delighted to learn definitively that he was not being catfished. Kirb and Brian held a sidebar and agreed that the boy was old enough to be set free in the city with this strange internet girl, as she and her friends already knew how to ride trains and be self-sufficient Europeans. Only moments later, the teenagers informed the adults that they “did not feel comfortable” walking together, so we ditched those teenagers and went and drank beer instead.
Becky and Brian have been to Berlin plenty of times before, so we had to figure out something new to show them that would also keep the attention of the manchild. The answer was the massive Soviet WWII memorial in Treptower Park, which is somewhat hidden away in the woods that used to house the biggest theme park in East Germany, only two miles from our house. The Soviets took the heaviest losses in the war, and when they captured Berlin they left some real intense reminders of the fact that they squashed fascism. The one in Treptower displays that idea quite literally, with a towering iron statue of a Soviet soldier carrying a child and stomping on a swastika. Along the sides of the football-field-sized grounds, the story of the war from the Soviet perspective is illustrated in giant, carved slabs. Sometimes it’s easy to forget such brutal reminders are tucked away in the parks where we live.
Treptower Park also has our favorite beer garden, Zenner, which is situated right on the river Spree, overlooking an arching bridge that leads to a little island filled with other beer gardens and paddle boats. Due to some clerical errors at the travel agency, their stopover in Berlin this time was only a few nights, but we filled it with lots of tasty things to drink and delicious sandwiches. There’s really nothing quite like a döner at 2 in the morning after a long night of späti beers. It is as real of a Berlin experience as one is going to get.
The family went ahead to Munich to visit castles and meet up with Sage’s girlfriend and her father, who didn’t speak a word of English. A few days later, we took the high-speed train down to Munich as well, which wasn’t even an option the first time we visited the city in 2016. Back then, it took 8 1/2 hours by train to get there from Berlin; now it takes about half that. Other than that long-distance ICE train, all our public transport for the trip was covered by the new €9-month pass which was introduced to curb reliance on Russian oil due to the war in Ukraine. It lets you ride unlimited busses, trams, and regional trains across the entire country. We love expanded, affordable public transit, and while this deal was overwhelmingly a good thing for just about everyone in Germany, it did mean that a lot more people were taking the trains to tourist spots. Like the airports, the German public transit system also began to bloat and rupture from the newly-added pressure. Almost immediately after the €9 pass’ implementation, memes mocking the insufferably overcrowded trains began to circulate on the internet.
It had been long enough since we’d last visited Munich that we were excited to have all the same good stuff we enjoyed the first time around, and now we could share it with Becky and Brian. That meant going to Tegernseer Tal to eat roast pork knuckles, taking in the city’s truly over-the-top gothic town hall, and drinking a whole lot of Augustiner beer on tap. It also meant another visit to the gargantuan and always-packed Hofbrauhaus, if only to poke around inside and marvel at the whole scene of it all. We didn’t get drinks there, but Brian had still somehow materialized a pretzel by the time we got back outside.
Sage didn’t join us that first night out in Munich because he was locked in his room quarantining. Turns out, his internet girlfriend tested positive for covid as soon as she got back from Munich, and Sage had definitely been exposed to that virus, if you know what I mean (don’t be gross, they’re teenagers). Luckily, Becky and Brian had rented a spacious double room with a big balcony, so the adults could hang out together outside without masks while the teen was safely locked away in his germ capsule. He continued to test negative again the next day, so we brought him along on our excursion to the town of Tegernsee and made sure he kept his face covered up in public. Somehow, he never ended up catching the bug, even though he totally made out with it.
Tegernseer is Brian’s favorite German beer, so it seemed like a good idea to take a train out to its namesake. Our €9 tickets covered the hour-long train ride from Munich, depositing us in a quaint village on a gorgeous blue lake with a sizable monastery/brewery along its shore. We eventually snagged a table at the packed-out beer garden and ordered some hefty liters, schnitzels, and a lovely roast chicken, all served with proper Bavarian potato salad. We spent the sunny afternoon exploring the town and walking around the lake and then hopped a train back to Munich, where we could continue our evening at some different-yet-essentially-similar beer gardens. We showed up to one that had gluten-free food for Mazz just as the kitchen closed, but found a surprisingly good döner and döner box option nearby that we could enjoy outside with our beers (even gluten-free beers). It’s a simple brand of entertainment in Munich, but it’s an effective one.
The beautiful blue waters of Tegernsee
The next morning, we said our goodbyes as the family continued on to Portugal and we caught a train southbound towards the mountains. We brought all of our camping gear with us and had found a campsite located on a bus line on Kochelsee (Lake Kochel) with ample tent spaces. It was just supposed to be one train ride from Munich to Kochel and then 15 minutes on the bus...and then something with the train tracks broke and everyone was kicked out of the cars in the middle of nowhere, still several miles from our destination. Supposedly there were taxis that were going to take all the passengers the rest of the way, but it was unclear how many or when these cars would be coming. We decided to walk through town to the bus stop, and in doing so met another stranded traveler, a native German speaker, who called the local cab company and somehow got the van en route to the train station to come pick us up instead and drive us the rest of the way into Kochel.
At the bus stop, a German girl hijacks a cab for us, so Kirb hops in the back and waits to be deposited somewhere else
When we finally arrived at Campingplatz Kesselberg the people who ran the place were on their afternoon break, so we plopped our bags down in the grass field designated for tents and did some more waiting. Camping in Germany is nothing more than an attempt to cram as many people and tents into a grass field as possible, so we were happy to get a spot on the edge with a little bit of shade. It was hot and getting late in the afternoon by the time we finally checked in and set up camp, so there wasn’t much chance of getting a hike in that day. Instead, we took the bus back into Kochel to get supplies for the weekend. The lake was cold - still just a little too cold to want to jump in all the way, even on a hot afternoon - but it was the perfect temperature to chill our beverages as we sat with our feet in the water. We cooked our dinner of sausages and zucchini directly on the shore, paired with some excellent pre-made potato salad from the butcher shop. Bavarian potato salad, made with vinegar instead of mayonnaise, is really the best stuff.
Kochelsee
When we got back to our tent, the couple next to us introduced themselves and it was clear right away that they were lovely people, so we invited them to join us for some local Kräuterlikör once their kids had been put to bed. Another of their friends, also camping with his children, joined in as well, and for the first time camping in Germany we were actually glad to be packed in a field with strangers. Our new friends seemed happy to be doing something adult with their evening once the kids were put to bed, and we were happy to provide the booze and humorous conversation. It was easily the most fun evening we’ve had at a German campsite.
At one point, there was an incredible blast of warm air that washed over us, which our new friends informed us was called “fün” (pronounced “foon”). Apparently, these winds travel all the way over the mountains from the Sahara, and some Germans think they can cause temporary madness; some have even testified in court that the “fün made them do it.” We wrote down the word in our notes and had our new friends spell it so we would reference it accurately in this blog post, but a thorough internet search in both English and German once we got home could not substantiate any of their claims.
The weather cooled down significantly overnight, and we woke up on Friday to a layer of clouds obscuring the mountains. Our planned hike for the day was up in those mountains; an extremely popular hike that we specifically planned for a weekday to minimize crowds. But the views were the big selling point of the hike, and now there was a chance we wouldn’t be able to see anything if the whole area was overcast. We hemmed and hawed about whether we were screwing up by sticking to our itinerary, but there really wasn’t a feasible way to do the hike the next day when the weather was supposed to clear up again, so we took the cable car up to Herzogstand and tried our luck. Unsurprisingly, we were deposited into a cloud. We waited at the lodge for an hour, hoping it would burn off, but it didn’t. We hemmed and hawed some more, and then decided that it was what it was and hit the trail.
Even though we couldn’t see much of anything in the distance, it didn’t take long to realize that hiking the ridge between Herzogstand and Heimgarten on a cloudy day had a mysterious quality that was actually quite cool. The rocky trail bobbed in and out of rising mists, separating momentarily to give peeks of Walchensee below and the alps in the distance. The trail was marked as “difficult” and was definitely not suitable for those who are afraid of heights. The path was narrow and dropped off steeply on both sides, and often required scrambling up rocky sections with both hands. After a few hours we arrived at the hut atop Heimgarten, which was bustling with other hikers even on a weekday afternoon. We ordered some beverages and tucked into some really fantastic wild boar salami and mountain cheese we’d bought in town, both of which seemed infinitely more appetizing than the pea-green hot dog soup everyone around us was ordering from the hut kitchen.
Scrambling up the rocky path
The way down from Heimgarten back to the bus stop on the lake was long and grueling. For three hours we traversed steep, rocky switchbacks that never let you take your eyes off of what was immediately in front of you for fear of tripping or twisting an ankle. After two hours we began to verbally berate the trail, thoroughly done with its “rocky bullshit.” Eventually, we reached what seemed to be the final, forested hillside above the town at Walchensee, but after descending those switchbacks for 45 more minutes it didn’t appear as if we were any closer to the bottom than when we had entered those haunted woods. We live in Berlin, which is entirely flat, and there is nothing in our everyday lives that could have prepared our quads for walking down switchbacks for three uninterrupted hours. We both had trouble walking for nearly a week afterward.
Though tired and sore, after returning to the campsite we still chose to continue walking to the restaurant 20 minutes down the lakeshore for dinner, as a proper Bavarian meal after a hike sounded particularly enticing. We were pleased to find both of the families we had befriended the night before already seated at Restaurant Grauer Bär, celebrating the birthday of the twin boys camping in the spot next to ours. The food there turned out to be exceptional: Mazz got fish stuffed with bacon, mushrooms, and shrimp that was out of this world, and Kirb got Allgäuer-style cheesy pork schnitzel served on Käsespätzle, topped with fried onions. It was serious comfort food, and exactly the sort of stuff we love to eat in Bavaria.
The night before, one of the camp kids became enamored with Kirb after learning he has a podcast, and not long after seeing us at the restaurant came to join us at our table, preferring to chat with the American adults rather than his tween peers. Not long after, his younger sister joined in as well, and they chatted our ears off for a good hour or two. Occasionally, their parents would send over shots of schnapps to our table, toasting us for being such good sports entertaining their inquisitive and talkative children. At one point, the boy tried to get Kirb’s phone number, “In case he wanted to voice concern about the story,” and Kirb had to politely decline and tell him that all story complaints are handled via email.
The next morning we broke camp and made our way out to the bus stop just in time to see it leave without us, only a minute away down the road. When the bus only comes once an hour, this is a frustrating failure of timing. Eventually, we ended up in the gorgeous alpine town of Mittenwald and were able to lock away our camping packs in lockers at the train station, which presently had no train service. There was something wrong with the tracks down here, so to get back to Munich, we’d just have to take a bus to a different nearby town where there was a functioning train connection. It seemed pretty straightforward.
From town, we took the road south to a flowing stream and then followed it back into the woods. There was some kind of mountain ultramarathon happening, and hundreds of sweaty runners were coming down the path in the opposite direction, with a person yelling into a bullhorn cheering them on in the distance. It was a relief when we finally split off on a different path from the race and were able to explore the Leutaschklamm, a gorge with platforms built into the rock that stand nearly 1,000 meters above the river below. We would have loved to have explored the area more thoroughly, but losing an hour with the bus gave us a small window to enjoy it before we felt compelled to start making our way back to Munich.
We chose a train back to Berlin from Munich Station on Saturday night at 8pm, thinking it would be nice to have a full day to hike around and then get home late (between 1 and 2am), leaving us an entire Sunday to enjoy at home. It should only have taken about an hour and a half to get back to Munich from Mittenwald, but when we started looking at the bus connection we’d need to make, the estimated times were now stretching to several hours. More train tracks had broken, and now there was no way to get back to Munich by train until you got quite a distance farther north than we currently were. We got on a replacement bus and then immediately thought we had made a terrible mistake - Google said we needed to go to Oberau, and the bus was taking us to Garmisch Partenkirchen. We’d given ourselves a generous 5 hours to get back to Munich to catch our train home; the phone now said it would take 5 and a half from our current location.
What followed was the most terribly-organized and poorly-communicated attempt at diverting humans to working public transport that we have ever experienced. One woman gave us a detailed list of the combination of busses and taxis we would need to use at different locations to reach our destination, but most of that information turned out to be wrong. No one communicated where the shuttles were terminating, and for some reason, the bus full of people needing to get back to Munich weren’t taken to the train station that was still functional - everyone was dropped off one train station before the place they needed to be, and then shuttled the last few kilometers with taxis. It was nearly impossible to enforce a line with two hundred people elbowing each other to get one of six spots each time a taxi van sporadically showed up. Why hadn’t the bus just taken us to the station we all needed? It had driven us over half an hour and then dropped us off with only ten more minutes to go. Why were they using TAXIS for this many people? Eventually we made it to the station where the train would arrive, but we just missed one heading to Munich, so it was time to wait another hour on the platform. When the train to Munich finally showed up, it seemed too good to be true, like the moment we got on board and departed a big fün was going to come rushing over the mountains and topple the train onto its side, or drive the conductor temporarily mad and cause him to careen off the tracks.
We made it to Munich central station with just enough time to buy some food and drinks for the ride home, which was another four and a half hours on a train. When we went to sit in our assigned seats, there were two women with around 20 screaming small children already overwhelming the area. We thought that they might be Roma but weren’t entirely sure. We had watched them get on the train; the entire group had no luggage and really, just a lot more children than made any sort of sense for the number of adults present, and there was a very weird vibe to the whole scene. We were too exhausted to put too much thought into the whys of what was happening around us, and definitely too tired to deal with the noise produced by that many children in one concentrated area, so we found ourselves a nice, quiet spot a few cars down instead and stared off blankly into the distance until we were back in Berlin. Getting from the campsite to the gorge and then back to Berlin that day had necessitated the use of nine different busses, trains, and taxis, and the majority of our waking hours waiting for transit or sitting in it.
In the end, trying to navigate our way across Germany with the €9 pass turned out to be strangely similar to the apocalyptic memes we’d seen online beforehand. They had seemed like hyperbole, until they became our reality. Unlimited public transit across the country is a great idea in theory, but it doesn’t work all that well when the tracks break on literally every regional train trip you try to take. Still, we were technically able to make it work. We went camping and hiking with no car, and that felt like an accomplishment of some sort. It just required an awful lot of patience.