The breakfast that lili chose for her elite gift was
abundant but ordinary. I sampled all the animal protein
offerings, which were unexceptional and unexceptionable.
No chocolate croissants, so I had maybe six glasses of
juice of various sorts. The grapefruit is pretty good;
the orange doesn't taste like anything I know but is
very sweet; and the strawberry was the unsweetened fruit
puree, very healthy-tasting. Mango had run out by the time
I was ready for it.

We checked out, promising to return in a couple days.

The R3 train runs pretty frequently, and an hour and change
after embarking, we were in Bayreuth.

I'd booked the CPH Bayerischer Hof, because there was no way
to get lost - it's next door to the train station. Our room
wasn't ready (it was still quite early), so we stored our
traps in the closet behind the desk there and started on our
tour of the city, beginning with the famed Festspielhaus. It
was closed, partially shrouded in construction wrap, until
festival time in July. The grounds are very nice, though,
and there was a cooling breeze, and lots of historical
displays, mostly about the Jewish question, and we took our
time. A very thoughtful treatment, pretty detailed, in
German (for what German I can read, slowly and imperfectly),
with a somewhat thoughtful and not very detailed precis in
English. Commemorative monuments for those artists who fled
or were imprisoned or died during the Reich. Powerful stuff.

When we went back downhill, our room was ready, so we put
up our traps and went downtown, to find that the Richard
Wagner Museum and the Margrave's opera house were also
closed for renovations. The Hermitage is way off down the
way, and I didn't know which bus to take, so we merely
wandered around town, ending at the Hofgarten, which is
worth a visit. It being almost dinnertime, we went back
into the pedestrian district and resolved to park at the
first likely-looking place for drinks.

This turned out to be the Cafe Louis, which serves a mixed
menu of local specialties and Italianate dishes. We were
only going to stop for a glass or two, but the waitress
cunningly put menus in front of us, and lili discovered that
she had a sudden yen for pepperoni pizza. I said, they don't
have pepperoni pizza. Here it is - she pointed to an entry
that said pizza con mozzarella e peperoni. I broke it to her
gently enough, I think: peperoni of course aren't pepperoni,
they're peppers. Further perusal of the carte allowed us to
discover that salami pizza was on offer, so that's what she
got. Being caught up in the mood, I ordered lasagne. The
pizza was quite good, the salami tasting just like American
pepperoni but with no hot pepper. The lasagne were hugely
abundant and very good-tasting, the only issue being that
there weren't enough layers, and each component was blobbed
all together - white sauce, then three noodles in one layer,
then red sauce (with meat), then mozzarella, then grana,
instead of an artful arrangement such as I would do myself.
But then I do it as a labor of love, and the poor apprentice
in the back room here does it as a labor of labor.

Our drinks: a couple iterations of Aktien Landbier, which I
liked, and some Argentine no-name Malbec, which lili thought
merely okay.

It was still light when we walked back to the hotel, as
some of our destinations had been unavailable. The hotel
is a kind of eccentricly-designed place. Each floor has a
sort of planned identity - the one above ours sort of urban
grunge; ours antique '50s America. There's a sunning roof,
unfinished and so far uninviting, and a little ground-floor
garden. The place is a warren of nonrectilinear passages,
not what I'd expect from the name or the location, Kind of
fun all in all. The renovations are not complete, and there
is a pervasive smell of paint and new construction, and one
might turn a corner and discover an unfinished passage with
painters' tarpaulins or construction detritus. This goes
only so far, so it was early to bed and early to rise.