Volume 2, Days 71-73
Falling off the wagon sometimes hurts. My body, unaccustomed to processing alcohol, woke me up in the middle of the night and left me unable to fall back asleep. So I laid in bed and tried not to disturb any of the peacefully snoring folks around me. At 7 am, I figured it was a reasonable hour to go ahead and get up, but as I was heading to shower someone slipped into the shower room ahead of me and locked the door. I stood in the hallway in my towel waiting twenty minutes for that asshole to finish washing. To be fair, I hadn’t even realized that the door shut, let alone locked, and had been hopping in and out of the showers on previous afternoons on full display to anyone who would happen to walk by. But the key fact is that it was a room with two showers.
I enjoyed the breakfast buffet and tried to eat my money’s worth, going so far as to be unpleasantly stuffed. Though, it was really hard to tell if the upset stomach later was a consequence of the hangover, the overeating, or the bus journey to Würzburg. I had plenty of time in the morning to eat, turn in my recycling, pack, and checkout for the 11am bus departure.
I hadn’t really read up on Würzburg, but was excited to be staying in a hostel called Babelfish, after the universal translator in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The hostel did not disappoint. Located across the street from the small town train station on two floors of an office building, the handpainted decor captured the classic aesthetics of an old backpackers hostel. I was luckily able to check right in, despite being a bit early and plopped down on the bed to take a nap.
After waking up, I made myself a coffee in the shared kitchen and tried to work on my computer a bit. The weather was rainy so I wasn’t in a rush to go look around town. Despite being only like 3 in the afternoon, a Korean traveler was already starting on beers from the hostel bar. Looking at the activity board advertising a beer tasting at 8:30, I figured it would be better to wait. We chatted a bit, and J was just starting a 3 week vacation and trying to learn a bit of German. I encouraged him to practice with me.
It was a pretty lazy afternoon and other than going on a supermarket run for dinner, I didn’t have much on the docket. I watched another episode of Babylon Berlin back in the room, finishing up about the time a motorcyclist checked in. He had driven 200 km in the rain to attend some punk concert in the town that night. I wasn’t even tempted to join, but expressed consolation that he would miss the free beer.
J and I went out into the town to find an open supermarket, which was not easy as there was some Christian holiday involving Mary flying up into heaven. Würzburg was basically a ghost town. Even on Sundays, though most shops are open, the plazas and squares are still full of life with people enjoying a coffee or a drink, but there were hardly any people around and even the bakeries were all closed up. A few of the foreign snack bars (Chinese noodles, Turkish doner) were still open for the day, so one wouldn’t starve to death.
The train station was another story with all of its businesses open, including a drug store, two bakeries, and a quasi-convenience store. I didn’t buy anything at the moment since it would all be ready eat and I wasn’t ready for dinner yet, but I headed back some time later after there was a critical mass people hanging out in the common areas with beers, including an old American, a young American, and an Australian. I wasn’t too keen to be buying 2.5-3.5 euro beers from the hostel, but was able to sample a local Würzburger Hofbrau with a good sized bratwurst for the same price.
I had a long, somewhat contentious talk with the Australian who insisted that I had to have a hometown.
I popped down to the train station one more time that night to grab a canned Paulaner hefeweizen and stretch the time before the beer tasting. I was surprised by how many people had disappeared by that point, but the hostel bartender literally included one of each of the beers they sold (including a radler and an alcohol free beer) in the tasting. So there were about a dozen beers sampled by only 4 or 5 people. And its a crime to waste beer in Germany so it had to all be finished.
When that task was finished, the young American guy, who originally wanted to go out to a bar to spend 60 bucks his dad had sent him to have a good time in Würzburg because his dad had lived here in the 80s, wanted food so a couple of us went over to the Turkish place to find that they were already closed for the night…leaving just McDonalds as an option. It didn’t take much effort to talk me into a McFlurry and it was interesting how long and complicated the ordering process became with a typical American blazing ahead with English.
| Pfand return | -0.98 |
| Flixbus | 8.09 |
| Hostel (2 nights) | 42 |
| Bratwurst & Beer | 4.33 |
| Hefeweizen | 1.14 |
| Total: | 54.58 EUR (425.7 RMB) (USD 60.44) |
Running Total: 26118.7 RMB (USD 3708.51)
Daily Average: 367.9 RMB (USD 52.23)