"If you want so sit alone, the church is across the street!"

Got off the train in Munich, and for the first time in a long time, someone was there to meet me! And someone wonderful in fact...Rowan! (character: Rowan, I believe he may have been introduced before, but he is a good friend from Harvard, a genius in the academic area of medieval trading in the Adriatic, and was an amazing Chesire Cat in my version of Alice in Wonderland. He is studying German in Munich for some weeks in order to translate medieval German texts for his PhD program.) Anyway, Rowan met me with a huge huge, a big smile, a great chocolate croissant, and a Munich map...all very much needed. He then wisks me away through town to many a beautiful church, including one which I never really caught the name of, but can be described, at best, as Rococo on steroids. Found out that the famous glockenspiel is being rennovated for its hundredth anniversary next year, thus it doesn't play. After a whirlwind tour and lunch at the market, we decided to run back to our respective homes, change for a night at the opera, and get in line for standing room tickets to a Korean opera of "Alice in Wonderland" with puppets. (That would probably be JD's worst nightmare.) Anyway, we get to the opera house two hours early in the freezing cold, stake out our place, despite some nudgy old women, and get inside to find out that the student rush line is our only hope. We stand there until the last call bell, and then the ticket manager says, "Bad news, students. No tickets." It's an opera, by a Korean composer, about Alice in Wonderland, with PUPPETS...it got terrible reviews...and people are still flocking to see it?! Well, we are dressed up with nowhere to go in particular, but we decide that we are famished, and craving Bavarian cuisine. We find the Weisshaus, a popular touristy restaurant, and get sat at a big table with two other couples. At first, we are all hestitantly smiling at each other, talking amongst ourselves and looking at a menu which sports cow's lung, pork knuckles, and boiled calf's heart. Yum. Well, I choose cheese spatzle, which I have been craving, and Rowan goes for the weinerschnitzel. The waitress comes by and the woman to my right orders a combination platter of the aforementioned "delicacies" of lung, knuckles, heart, liver I think, and something else. Our waitress, whom we fondly refer to as Hildegard because it would just fit her perfectly, gives her the strangest look and gasps, "You LIKE that?!?!" When the woman says that she is being adventurous, Hildegard responds, "No, no. You don't want that. No. Lung? Heart? They're cooked! I don't like them cooked!" (Oh, so you like raw heart and lung, Hildegard...I wouldn't want to mess with this woman.) "No, it is not good. You want this." Scared and taken aback that the waitress would talk her out of her choice, the woman orders what Hildegard suggests. Once H leaves, we all just burst out laughing! And that was the beginning of a great meal! Both couples were school teachers, Rowan is probably going to be a professor, and I have a great respect for school teachers, so we all talked about school and education, travel and languages, studying Latin and meat farming in the US. One couple was older, and the husband had just retired as a PE teacher in Wisconsin, so he know raises cattle on a farm. His wife, a middle school science teacher, grew up on a cattle farm and has cooked aforementioned delicacies, but she really liked what Hildegard suggested. The younger couple were new teachers taking a group of language students on a field trip to Munich. We talked for hours! At the end of the meal, Hildegard comes up and bellows, "See! See! You come in alone and now you are all chatting away as friends! This is what happens in Bavaria! I say, if you want to sit alone, the church is across the street!" That may be the best quote I have ever heard in my entire life, especially coming from a huge Bavarian woman. Oh Hildegard!