Days since last round up: 14
Weeks spent in lockdown: 2
Best bit of vocab: Stutenkerl (a bit like a gingerbread man, but out of brioche dough, traditionally eaten on Martinstag - more below)
Major achievements: Winter coat successfully delivered from England
Reading: Die Blechtrommel by Günther Grass
Weather: a surprisingly mild spell following some icy cold days
It now seems a long time since I dropped the girls off at their grandparents’ two weeks ago, and I’m pleased to report that the first two weeks of lockdown haven’t dragged quite as much as I thought they might. My day-to-day life isn’t hugely affected, but gyms and restaurants closing means I’ve had to change things round a bit, and have got into a bit of a different routine, which is working well for the moment. It probably helped that the first week of lockdown was my week off, although it did mean a lot of time with myself and my thoughts. I did my best to distract myself with some exciting takeaway options, which proved largely succesful, but it’s a shame that some of the best independent places I’ve found in Munich have had to close due to new measures and can’t even open zum Mitnehmen.
Monday was a day of goodbyes, waving one Anna off at the station and celebrating the other’s last night in Munich with some homemade fondue. The week continued at a moderate pace with a good few lie-ins, calls with home friends, trips out discovering running routes in Munich (usually strategically ending at a well-selected food location), and steadily working my way through Döblin’s (not brief) masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Highlights included a morning walk in the English Gardens featuring a picnic brunch of cinnamon rolls, dinner at Yasmin’s (another Oxford friend here doing a law internship), featuring an amazing chickpea and coconut curry, as well as some brilliant finds on the TooGoodToGo app, and takeout vegan pizzas at Yasmin’s apartment on my last free night.
The journey back to the grandparents’ went really quite surprisingly quickly for 5 hours one-way, and I was warmly welcomed, a little too enthusiastically by the girls, who were having a bath and decided it would be hilarious to splash me as a greeting. The house is absolutely lovely and very much in the country, they still had hand-carved pumpkins up from Halloween (from which we also had homemade pumpkin soup), and it was a really nice experience to go back already knowing the set up there. The girls absolutely love the time spent with their grandparents and already can’t wait to go back at Christmas. After staying one night there, we got an earlyish train back to Munich, where the parents met us at the station, and things got back to normal quite quickly with the standard school run the following morning, with me accompanying the older girl on her cycle to school to help carry the various bags she had to take back after the holidays. I also got to experience Martinstag, maybe a kind of rough equivalent of bonfire night, on the 11th November, when children walk around with lanterns to commemorate the death of a certain St Martin from many hundreds of years ago.
A few navigational mishaps led to my running distance increasing beyond what I thought I could do, and I’ve found this an especially enjoyable way to consolidate my knowledge of the city and soak it all in on what have been bright, if quite chilly, days. It’s also a great thing to do in the day time to beat the inevitable blues when it starts going dark at half past five. The rest of the day has been occupied with Die Blechtrommel, a mammoth work from last century which is proving surprisingly readable, even if incredibly bizarre, but there’s more to come, as the 730 pages won’t be finished any time soon.
An ongoing Thema this week has been beginning to make plans for my return home for Christmas - luckily (and unlike a lot of friends doing internships and studying) the family are happy to let me go quite early, so I’ll be travelling back in mid-December. Exactly how, when, and what I’ll have to do on my return to England are still up in the air, but it does mean that I now know that I’m entering my last month here in Munich. Relations with the family and the kids have their ups and downs, ‘Lass uns in Ruhe’ and ‘Geh weg’ still being quite frequent, but this weekend, even though I’ve worked really quite a lot of hours, it’s been some of the nicest time I’ve spent with the younger girl, and I’ve realised that my mindset and the energy I put in to being positive and happy, both with kids and parents, plays a huge part in how good I feel about everything and how much I enjoy the job. It’s been a week of ups and downs about the whole idea of lockdown life, but generally I’m fortunate to be in Germany already, things could really be a lot worse, and there is still some hope that things might open up a bit in December, even if it is looking increasingly less likely.
Just like Oktoberfest, it’s going to be a shame that I won’t be able to experience the classic Bavarian Christmas markets in the way that I’d planned, and I’m not setting hopes too high for what I’ll be able to get up to in the next month, but for now things are ticking along nicely, with a reduced but increasingly close-knit Oxford community here in Munich, creative ideas for how to get together without going to a restaurant or bar, good books, walks and runs around what really is a beautiful city, and the potential for the occasional solo day trip or hike. Nikolaustag is also on the horizon, and I think even despite lockdown the magic of the upcoming period will find its way through. My first weekend spent entirely in locked-down Munich also proved very promising: dinner with Natalie, (an Oxford friend studying at LMU) and her German flatmates was a fantastic way to relax after a long day at the park, and a bit of walking and running through the English Gardens and along the Isar, followed by brunch on-the-go was the perfect start to a Sunday. The countdown really is on on my time left in Munich, but I think despite lockdown there are plenty more experiences to come, even if they’re not exactly what I planned. The end is in sight, and I’m planning to make the most of the time I’ve got left.
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