violist

Return by train to NUE

By some miracle we all made it to the platform on time
and got 18 seats together. Plus beer, which some of us had
picked up a case of and the swilling of which in public is
not frowned on in this country, which is enlightened in
this regard.

Some cute young girls came down the aisle selling what I
thought was schnapps but turned out to be weird fruit
liqueur - I didn't have any singles so bought a bunch,
of which I had a plum and a something else and gave the
rest to whoever wanted. I think this contributed to my
being under the weather later. Anyhow, I recall little
after that. As the hotel was so close, lili and I went
back for a wash-up; after a bit of recuperating time, we
joined the group for dinner at Marientorzwinger, which,
thank the gods, is right close by. The weather was fine
enough, so we found the group in the outside Biergarten.

I was oddly tired of roast pig parts by now, so I ordered
a Schnitzel (of course pork) au naturel; the waitress was
surprised that I didn't want any side dish with that. lili
had a burger, I believe her first on the trip. To go with,
beers. They tasted like Lederer I think, but in this
condition I was unqualified to judge. The Schnitzel was not
overwhelmingly large, which disappointed me at first, but it
turned out to be just the right size. It was properly
pounded thin, breaded, and fried just so. Quite good.

I forgot that I'd paid. lili reports that I tried to pay
twice. It's lucky the hotel was just a couple blocks away.

-

Many thanks to f0zzyNUE for arranging everything and
shepherding a bunch of FTMMers around Franconia.

-

LH 147 NUE FRA 1115 1205 733 24E, 25F
LH 236 FRA FCO 1540 1725 321 10F
was
LH2157 NUE MUC 0945 1025 CR9
and
LH1846 MUC FCO 1600 1730 321

United is prone to messing up things, as you may know. And
booking tickets on partner airlines is not its forte. I had
reservations out on a particular set of LH flights and back
on a set of LX flights. The itinerary failed to ticket
properly not once, not twice, but three times, and I was
eventually forced to make an all-LH reservation for about a
hundred smackers more. Isn't LX part of LH or something?

The good part is that I got to fly out on the first leg with
lili.

We left the hotel at 9 something and were inside security by
10, even with an eventually successful attempt to get my *G
number in the reservation and a futile one to get seats
together (I'd been too under the weather to figure this out
the night before).

We ended up with a middle seat in the third to last row and
a window seat in the second to last row. I tried to reassure
myself "it's only a dream ... only a dream ...," but when
that didn't work, "it's only a 25-minute flight ...".

The Senator lounge was far away, the Business one close to
where she was leaving from, so we chose ease and convenience
over deliciousness. She was leaving before I, but we had
just an hour or so to make future plans and to nosh on the
abundant but not particularly tasty food offerings: the
Wiener sausages were actually quite okay; the bean soup
(contains chicken and pork products) shall we say not
Senate bean soup. A Sicilian red ink was better than the
local stuff - I let lili sample and choose which one she
wanted; she made the right choice; the other was almost but
not quite throwawayable, so I drank it down. Had an hour
after we said goodbye to repent my foolishness and cleanse
my palate with other potables.

My next flight, way up the way, was uneventful, except
that FCO is in a certain state of turmoil because of the
fire that had ravaged Terminal 3 some weeks before.

The train to Fara Sabina, where my friend Jim picked me up,
is the end of the line, how convenient is that.

And upon these heels follows a few days of down time during
which my friends and I ate stray rabbits and chickens and
drank copiously of cheap red wine and reminisced about
decades-old triumphs and failures in musical life, whose
description would interest nobody, myself included.