Bayreuth, Germany
The Bayreuth Trip: July/August 2004
One thing about travelling that I can honestly recommend, when possible, is to travel with a seasoned traveller. I learned this recently on a trip to central Europe in July/August 2004. Our trip started in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. and took us to Germany [Deutschland], the Czech Republic [Cesk Republika], and Austria [Osterreich].
I spent the two evenings prior to departure battling with the decision of which clothes to take; the packing part itself being a breeze, but the decision-making part proving to be a challenge. Naturally, I discovered on the trip that half of what I had taken was inappropriate and went unworn and the things I didn’t take were the things I needed. Mix and Match turned out to be my best friend. I had previously lined up my professional petsitter, forked over $330, assured the kats that I would, in fact, return, and left with only a minimum of guilt. Wearing my old weight-lifting belt, I was able to wrestle my 62-pound suitcase downstairs.
The adventure began when the limousine service picked us up around the rarely seen [for me] hour of 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, 24th July, 2004. We checked in through the Elite Access point at the Continental Airlines section, got rid of our bags, and headed to the lounge where we indulged in complimentary bagels and juice. We also got started on watching a DVD series of a television show called “24″ which just ran for a 3rd season. This turned out to be somewhat of a mistake for a couple of reasons. The first and foremost was that I became instantly addicted to the thriller show! The second, which did not occur until the day of our return, was that the DVD player broke down. You’d think with everything else we had going on with this trip that watching these TV shows would have been the last thing we’d do, but we had a few pockets of spare time when we didn’t have enough time to go do something else, so the DVD’s came in very handy. [As of this writing, I still haven’t seen the last episodes of the series.]
We flew Business First Class from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, passed the 3-hour layover by watching some “24″ episodes in the lounge, and then boarded another BFC flight to Frankfurt. I don’t remember how long the second flight was, something like 10 hours or so. It didn’t feel that long, what with watching a film, reading, eating every 23.5 mins [the food was excellent], guzzling free wine, and sleeping several hours. However, when we arrived we had “lost” 7 hours and it was now 9:30 in the morning in Germany. We staggered a tad bleary-eyed into the Frankfurt airport and over to the Hertz car rental place. Hertz immediately failed to produce our VW rental and we found ourselves waiting two hours for a rental car! Despite the mix-up, we came out ahead because we were upgraded to a Mercedes with GPS. While we were waiting, I printed out directions from Frankfurt to Bayreuth, where we would be staying for the duration of our trip. Said directions turned out to be absolutely incorrect and thus useless. I also grabbed a map book. This might be a good time to mention that I have absolutely no map reading experience beyond the skill level of a 3-yr old. Having not been a seasoned traveller I’ve never had any need to learn map reading beyond the very basics. My method is to always get directions and a simple map before getting into the car. My inexperience proved to be a major issue in the next few minutes as we drove out of the airport and at that point I was urgently asked which way to go on the motorway. Let me make this clear: Men do not ask for directions, men do not look at maps beforehand, men do not pull over once the car is on the road. This Mars vs. Venus approach caused a bit of tension for a few minutes, but we muddled through and I resolved to make it a point to learn how to read a map. Three hours or so later, we arrived in Bayreuth.
Bayreuth appears on the surface to be a sleepy little town. A town that comes alive for one month out of every year when the annual Wagner opera festival, which features his four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, takes place. [Bayreuth was Wagner’s home town.] However, we were very surprised to learn that Bayreuth has approximately 70,000 citizens, of which about 8,000 are students. Bayreuth is a truly beautiful small city with clean streets and lots of flowers, an open market, good local restaurants, and of course, some gorgeous baroque architecture. The residents are very friendly and the vast majority speak excellent English. [My German mostly consisted of saying “sprechensie bitte Englische” when I was mistaken for a local due to my blonde plaits.] My only complaint was that I didn’t see a single kat during our entire visit. I even complained, twice, to our concierge, to no avail. I decided that all the kats must be kept indoors, away from the tourists. It was that or I was going to have to stop asking what was in the sausage meat. On the other hand, I saw plenty of dogs, aside from the live ones there were black plastic life-sized replica statuettes of Wagner’s beloved dog all over the city. Apparently, they were commissioned this year specifically for the opera festival.
We stayed at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel on the Bahnofstrasse, which was in the centre of town. The hotel was small and intimate. The staff were courteous, efficient, friendly, and obviously bemused by our moderate informality. Our room was on the 3rd floor which, for some strange reason, had Frank Sinatra piped into the hallways 24/7. There was a very strange “sculpture” on our floor which consisted of a garbage can with a pair of torn Levi’s hanging out and what appeared to be … well … some sort of … ummm … plastic replica dog poo literally bulging out from under the lid. Oh, there was also a scaled down Statue of Liberty next to the lift. I don’t have a clue what we did that day besides unpacking and freshening up! Around dinnertime we obtained a map of the city and took a walk to a local restaurant named Wolfenzacher [for those of you who don’t speak German, “w’s” are pronounced as “v’s”, so think “Volfenzaker”]. Wolfenzacher was an adorable little local restaurant with an outdoor dining patio. Since the weather was glorious [and remained so for our entire trip], we opted to sit outside for dinner. Next door to the restaurant was an ice cream parlour which was quite popular judging by the stream of patrons visiting and sitting on its patio. It felt refreshingly European to sit outside and people-watch. This must sound strange coming from somebody who lived in England until the age of 21, but truly, England is not like Europe, or wasn’t when I lived there. In Houston it’s impossible to sit outside most of the year due to the mosquitos and/or heat and humidity. In Germany, lots of people walked around or sat with their dogs; even the owner of our hotel allowed his little dog to run around indoors. On another evening we ate dinner at a local college bar called Oscar’s. While the patronage was initially local families and college students and faculty, later in the evening a few people in black tie showed up from the theatre, causing an interesting mix.
Having checked beforehand, we were aware that the opera nights were all black-tie formal. I took four different designer evening gowns — two black, one red, one purple. My wonderful friend/coworker Susan, came through for me at the last minute and knitted me a fabulous shawl in case the evenings were on the cool side. We had nightly reservations at the theatre’s restaurant since the operas spanned four nights and ranged from an initial 2.5 hours to a final 6 hours [with two 1-hour intermissions]. Since the first night of opera was “only” 2.5 hours we settled for champagne and hors d’oeuvres prior to the opera. People-watching proved to be endlessly entertaining. Several times I commented that it felt like being at a wedding reception due to all the evening wear. Since the operas started in the afternoons around 4pm, I found myself falling back on the Hollywood premiere style of wearing an evening dress with RayBan sunglasses because I’m virtually blinded in sunlight. After considering a suggestion from my companion that we walk from our hotel to the theatre, I pointed out that I didn’t think I could walk 1.5 miles uphill in 75-degree sunshine while wearing a formal gown and heels, so we took taxis to the theatre each opera night. A couple of times we shared our taxi with other hotel guests; one an elegant older Italian lady and on another night with some British guys. The Italian lady — who I think was some kind of countess — told my companion that I was “beautiful!” which absolutely made my entire week. When we left the theatre each night the temperature was perfect for the walk back to our hotel. The first night of opera I actually walked back all the way in 5″ heels!
As for the operas themselves … I have very mixed feelings. First, I should mention that opera lovers, and most especially Wagner lovers, from all over the world attend this annual sold-out event. Tickets are quite hard to come by; the average wait for “decent” seats is approximately seven years!! Premium seats, which we had, took *fifteen years*. The theatre, which was designed and built by Wagner himself, was quite splendid with beautiful moulded ceilings and globular lighting fixtures. The seats were obviously designed in an era when people were physically smaller; however, I couldn’t help but wonder how the ladies of the time fit into those small seats in their fashions of the day! There is no centre aisle in the theatre, the seats span from one side of the auditorium to the other side, which means that everybody has to remain standing until all the seats are filled, otherwise they’d be constantly jumping up and down. This proved to be an issue with one particular patron who we nicknamed “Audrey” as she bore a vague resemblance to the late actress, Audrey Hepburn. I have no idea who this woman was, possibly a bankrupt minor European royal, but she apparently thought she was somebody important and she consistently arrived at the last minute for the performances, causing everybody in our row to stand waiting for her arrival. Immediately prior to the start of the performance, all of the exit doors were closed and curtains were drawn over them. I was just cursed enough to have two extremely tall men sitting in front of me. This turned out to be a problem since I am very claustrophobic and the combination of closed doors, curtains, no centre aisle, blocked view, and no air-conditioning had me white-knuckled on several occasions; feeling very light-headed and wondering if I was going to faint [how very 18th century *that* would have been!]. The operas, musically-speaking were truly fabulous. The orchestra was spectacular, the performers were terrific. The format, however, was crushingly disappointing. I was expecting a very traditional Wagnerian opera costume format of Viking armour, breastplates, helmets, horns, boots, etc. Instead, the opera was staged in “modern” format. Symbological modern format. Abstract symbological format! For example, what should have been a forest was an office building. What should have been Viking costumes were business suits! I gather this has become somewhat common, but by Wotan, we were expecting tradition dammit! On the “bright side”, if you will, since I couldn’t see around the Moose Brothers in front of me and since I was feeling hemmed in anyway, I found that by closing my eyes that I could absorb the music and singing while privately envisioning the traditional costume format. Naturally, closing my eyes did cause the occasional nodding-off effect [I noticed a lot of that around me too]. The curtain calls, while ridiculously lengthy, were entertaining in that the tiered rows of seating had wooden plank flooring. As well as hand-clapping, the audience would also stamp their feet on the wood planks. The combination of the sound and the physical feel were quite thrilling! Our favourite characters, by far were Wotan [the “father god”] and Brunnhilde [daughter of Wotan and his wife, Frika. Brunnhilde was also a Walkyrie]. Both were stupendous performers.
On our first night at the opera I happened to overhear the couple next to me make some comments in English and I struck up a conversation with them which proved to be most fortuitous. The “couple” turned out to be from Australia and were, in fact, friends and not spouses. They’ve been friends for something like 30 years and are both retired from music academia. Dowie is 67 years old and a dapper and charming gentleman. Truly, this man is just the epitome of dashing; he reminded me of a film star from the 1940s. Suzanne, at 61, is an attractive and stylish lady. She has been married to a man 9 years her junior for about 25 years. Her husband works as an IT contractor in their homeland of Australia. Since Suzanne is retired, she travels a couple of times a year with her friends. Dowie and Suzanne turned out to be refreshingly funny, bright, affectionate, and all-around good company. They ended up joining us on day trips to the Czech Republic and also to Austria. By the third night of opera, Suzanne apparently informed “Audrey” that she needed to get herself there on time as a courtesy to others. At that point I began to sit down and declined to stand up when “Audrey” finally deigned to make her appearance, instead making her squeeze past my knees. While it was not terribly gracious of me to ignore her, I felt her rudeness canceled out mine.
Driving to distant locations turned out to be something of an adventure. Our GPS [which we collectively later nicknamed “Erda” after the Earth Goddess] was spot-on in the cities, but she would lose us for stretches on the autobahn. We managed to muddle through between Erda, road signs, and various maps, but we’re pretty sure we took the long way a couple of times. The autobahn got pretty bogged down in places, at times we literally had to brake from 120 mph to bumper-to-bumper traffic. The Mercedes was an incredibly smooth ride, it didn’t feel like we were going near as fast as we were. When it was my turn to drive, I took full advantage of the stretches of no speed limit to exercise my lead foot up to 160mph
We managed to dine at several 5-star restaurants listed in the Relais & Chateau international restaurant guide. They were all elegant, classy, had superb service, and the food was excellent in every restaurant. Prior to meeting Dowie and Suzanne, we drove into Murnau am Staffelsee one day and had lunch at a gorgeous restaurant at the Alpenhof Murnau hotel. We also had lunch at the Schloss Tiergarten in the Bayreuth area. I’ll leave the restaurant guides and critics to describe the restaurants we dined at in detail, but I’ll simply say that not one of them disappointed me. Not the 5-star locations and not the more earthy local pub-type restaurants. Hopefully, my photographs will add a little colour to this section of my journal. In Prague, Czech we ate at the Hotel Hoffmeister. Afterwards we walked around the city a little, checking out the sights, including the famous Charles Bridge [named after Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV] which was jam-packed with tourists, vendors, and street artists. We stopped at a gift shop and purchased a few pieces of crystal for gifts, including a crystal dragon for myself. Prague has some beautiful buildings, but they need to purchase a high-pressure water hose and clean them up, as I heard some other European countries have begun to do. In Austria we ate at the Sporthotel Singer which is nestled in a mountain landscape and probably sees a lot of winter business during the ski season. After both day trips we stopped at Dowie and Suzanne’s hotel for a glass of wine and conversation. It was truly lovely. All in all, during the 10-day trip we consumed about 52-lbs of sausages [each], 36 bottles of local Franconian wines, 4 vats of fresh creamy butter, enough crusty bread rolls to cause Dr. Atkins to roll over in his grave [pun intended], and more eggs than the average chicken can lay in 3 months. The breakfast buffet at our hotel was sumptuous and out of sheer politeness each morning we attempted to scarf down at least three courses of eggs, cheeses, butter, bread, sausage, prosciutto, ham, etc. One day I even gamely ignored my lactose intolerance and had cereal with milk [course four]! No sooner had we almost digested that binge than it was time for lunch at one of the 5-star hotel restaurants to which we drove. Having some faint sense of propriety left, we would limit ourselves to ordering only one entree per person … usually something like “the lady will have the full leg of veal with the side of sausages, the potato dumplings, and please bring an extra pound of butter with the next dozen rolls … and the gentleman will have the large sausages with the small sausages, a side of medium sausages, a large order of sauerkraut with a side of sauerkraut … sweetie, did you want the mega-spetzl with that?” After consuming the breakfast buffet and the huge lunches, we were usually too stuffed to go overboard with dinner, so we would end up agreeing to split something light. Meaning, we would only get one order of the mega-spetzl and everything else as previously listed. After consuming the usual hearty breakfast, having a 5-course lunch in Austria, and stopping at the Aussies’ hotel to split a bottle of wine, we somehow found ourselves, by sheer accident of course, walking down the hill to a local hotel/restaurant named Weihenstephan Restaurant, where we had previously already had dinner on another night. The food was so good we decided to revisit but only for a light supper. We were about halfway into our mountains of sausages and potatoes when along strolled our Aussie friends who joined us for their own “light supper”. Sometimes we had to ask our various servers to translate food words and that turned out to be quite challenging for them! Amazingly, I didn’t gain a pound the entire time!! People keep telling me it’s because we must have been walking so much, but in all honesty, we didn’t do that much walking. There were a couple of days that I grabbed my camera and walked around the town centre photographing buildings and street-life, but aside from that and the walks back from the opera, we were pretty much sloths. Of course, I’ve gained two pounds since my return from vacation, what’s up with that?
Speaking of the internet, the hotel did have a public-use computer for guests. One guy, who I came to name The Slug, would take over the computer for about two hours every morning. I don’t know if he ever actually typed, but he would sit there staring slack-jawed at the screen for endless periods of time. Since I type about 120wpm [at top speed], it was especially frustrating for me to have to wait for him to finish his business. It was a glorious day when I hit the PC before him and kept him waiting!
It wasn’t until our last day that we managed to carve out an hour to shop for last-minute trinkets. I had been looking for some specific figurines of dachshunds and other animals but hadn’t found anything. I was at the point of thinking about buying beer steins and wondering how on earth I’d get them home in one piece when Suzanne discovered a great gift shop near their hotel. I found some adorable [albeit expensive] pewter figurines for my coworkers. After we checked out of the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, we drove back to Frankfurt and checked into the airport Sheraton. We giddily planned to watch a few more episodes of “24″ but that was when the DVD player bit the dust. We had martinis at the hotel bar [named Lemons and Limes], remarkably good martinis, in fact, as good as any I’ve had in the U.S. We had a Metropolitan which was made with currant vodka and cranberry juice and our usual lemon drop martini. After drinks we had dinner at the hotel’s Taverne restaurant. We remembered to stuff ourselves full to capacity since this was to be our last dinner in Germany. In the morning we helped ourselves to the breakfast buffet, which was quite extensive and sumptuous, but did not have the incredible flavours of the food at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel.
I managed to restrict myself to only one Blonde Moment throughout the trip [I refuse to count the Map Reading Incident as a Blonde Moment]. I went to use the restaurant bathroom [”toiletten bitte?”] in our hotel on the first morning. The outer door had one of those automatic closer arms things on the outside. Such closer-gadgets are usually on the *inside* of doors. I grasped the toilet door and firmly pulled it towards me … and instantly nothing happened. I tried jiggling and turning the handle. Nothing. I then noticed there was a keyhole directly below the handle. So, I patiently returned to the concierge desk and asked if there was a key available, explaining by a pulling-towards-me gesture, that the door wouldn’t open. The concierges [all 3 of them] did an admirable job of keeping straight faces while one suggested that I try pushing the door open.
Have I mentioned how much I liked the German bathrooms? They were the traditional type found in England, whereby the toilet is enclosed within actual walls and not paper thin dividers that are only 6-feet tall and which stop 6 inches from the floor [and usually have gaps between the door and the frame]. In other words, I didn’t have to share in anybody else’s toilet functions.
And so, we survived the lengthy journey home by eating several more meals and drinking lots of white wine, all the while forcing ourselves to stay awake, and I arrived at my house on Tuesday, 3rd August, at about 9:30pm, which was the equivalent in German time of about 3:30am. The kats were furious at my absence and refused to come out from under the bed for about an hour. After which, and continuing until now [Saturday, 7th August], they haven’t left my side for a moment. They follow me from room to room, curl up with me on the bed, and generally keep several big blue eyes on me. With any luck they’ll adapt to any future trips I make because after this vacation I intend to take a few more!