Salzburg, Munich, Oktoberfest

Written from the train station in Hannover:
*My trip to Salzburg last week was primarily for the purpose of taking the "Sound of Music" tour (plus I knew I'd be working Sunday so felt I deserved a day to explore). Of course I loved the obligatory sights like the gazebo and the “doe a deer” gardens, but the best part of it was the chance to wander around a few places in the “Salzgammergut” region outside the city where they dropped us off to explore. I made my way to Munich that night and had a brief beer-garden dinner with Burns fellow Curt.

*Friday in Munich was a work day. I didn’t really do much sightseeing, but I got to do some “man on the street” interviews on the Marienplatz, a central plaza where a pre-election political rally was set up, and then walked down the pedestrian boulevard to do a little work at an Internet café. Curt and I had dinner with his host family, and then we ducked into a neighborhood hangout for a couple of beers.

*The next day was the opening day of Oktoberfest, and the Burns program had arranged for all of us Burns fellows to have a meeting there in the evening and treat us to dinner and a hotel. The dangerous part of this was that Oktoberfest opened at noon, and of course we wanted to head straight there. It was cold and raining outside and we didn’t have a prayer of finding seats at a table inside a beer tent, so we did our best to brush the water off of an outside table and we hunkered down under umbrellas. Once the beer started flowing, it really wasn’t bad at all. They served us hot lunches there, and after a while a group of Italians sat behind us, loudly singing drinking songs, so we got the full Oktoberfest atmosphere. I drank two and a half of the giant liter mugs of beer, and soon started turning a little green. So I made my way back to the hotel and had time to recover during a nap so that I was coherent for our evening meeting. We ended up having one of the better dinners I’ve had here in Germany at a contemporary Bavarian place called Brenner’s – I loved it even though my fish was served with the head still on it.

*Sunday morning we all wearily dragged ourselves out of bed and made our way to Berlin, where most of us had assignments to help cover the elections. However, since the returns weren’t due to start coming in for a while, I ended up with a nice sunny afternoon at an outdoor café in the city with friends. I then went to the Dow Jones office and stayed there until around 11 p.m. – my story had mostly been written ahead of time, which was a good thing because my lack of fluency meant I couldn’t really understand what was going on with the outcome until I started reading English-language stories from other services. As many had predicted, it turned into a too-close-to-call situation with no clear winner, though I feel sorry for opposition leader Angela Merkel – she’s viewed as a failure for blowing a double-digit poll lead in the last two weeks, but I’m convinced that part of the reason that happened is that there is a deeply held sexism toward her. True, she suffers from a severe lack of charisma, but she did what most voters say they want – she clearly laid out a platform of the actions she planned to take to fix Germany’s problems. She may yet end up chancellor, but that’s not at all certain at this point and it will take several weeks to sort out.

*Today I traveled to Hannover for story interviews, probably my last new German city of this trip, but unfortunately didn't get to see much of it. But at least it was a beautiful day.