Three Cities - Munich, Lyon, Paris. A plane, a train, a bus. Warm brown, cool blue, cloudy grey. One friend leaving a place she has come to know as home, one in a limbo between leaving and staying, and one who has made her new city her home.
Munich
Leaving England began with a plane ride that took me over a sea so smooth it looked like glass. With the reflection of the clouds upon its surface, at times I was unsure if the plane was upside down, the sea sky and the sky, sea. It made the sensation of flight all the more surreal, reality's ties cut loose from gravity and movement and time, and now orientation too made malleable with the glint of sunlight against the stillness of moving water.
Arriving in Munich began with relief at seeing Natascha and a drive back to her apartment under the light of a sun so orange and large it looked like it came straight from the Serengeti. Again, the feeling of Erholung when I stepped into her home, entirely neat except for the funny white patch on the blue wall that we've laughed over so many times.
We took the U-bahn to Theresienwiese for the Winter Tollwood Festival, where ecological and environmental awareness is expressed through art, culture, food and the festive atmosphere. Surrounded by a constant stream of tent, food, light, smells, stars. In one of the tents, we could make a home in a jar, and we put in banana bread, a forest, a girl in yellow clothes, and lots of liebe.
On the train back, Nat managed to slip through the doors while I was caught outside, and after the split second panic after the doors snapped shut she mouthed to me 'Next stop!' I got onto the next train, and in the short interim between that stop and the next, I imagined what it would be like if I truly was in Munich alone, taking a train alone. I was glad when the doors opened and Nat was there.
In the morning, we made cold breakfasts, took the U-Bahn again to Stachus from a platform bathed in sun. As we came out of Stachus a man approached us, first speaking to me in rapid German and then, registering the lack of comprehension in my eyes, turned to Nat to explain his new healthy food delivery company. I still said 'tchuss' when we left him, clinging to the pretense that I can speak German.
We skated that morning, fingers knotting the laces tight - friction somehow hurts more in the cold - and then taking first wobbly glides onto the cold blue ice. First shaky, then false confidence where you move fast but you feel like your feet can't leave the ice, and then abandoned fun, where we jumped and danced.
And then we ducked into a warm restaurant for lunch, walked a little more for dessert, walking a little faster in an area where Nat saw a group of young people who didn't seem too safe. Everything after dessert became so German - Christmas markets, wooden tree decorations, little nativity figurines, gluhwein everywhere. The soundtrack to a German market is a rustle of coats brushing coats as people walk past each other, the rumble of conversation, and in Weihnachtsmark, a woman singing to a happy crowd, where two girls whirled around and a man in the crowd sang along. We ducked into the corridor of a residence for a 'warm-break' as the sun begun setting and emerged to more Christmas Markets, now dark but lighted by congregations of pin prick fairy lights.
The next day we took the train, chugging our way to the 'surprise' that Nat had prepared me for. 'I'll give you a hint, it is on our bucket list!' she told me on the first day in the car, coming back from the airport and in my mind it was one of two places: Schloss Neuschwanstein, or hiking in Liechtenstein, which, considering the distance, would be rather unlikely. The train out of Munich sliced through the fog of the morning, which cleared to crispness when we got out at Füssen. A bus ride, and then a hike from the snow scattered base of the hill to the castle - Schloss Neuschwanstein.
Two women told us the path to Marienbrücke was closed, and we looked at each other not really knowing what to do with quite some time before our tour, when they told us we could walk down and hike up another trail to get to it. Which we did, in about half the time it was supposed to take, despite feet slipping on loose rocks and the steep uphill climb. On the way, we passed an upside down rainbow, despite there being no rain that day. It was probably a "circumhorizontal arc, which forms when sunlight refracts through plate-shaped ice crystals in thin, cirrus clouds" which only very rarely occurs outside the arctic circle.
Schloss Neuschwanstein was built by Ludwig II, who I'd heard about in the Munich Tour in Summer. All I remembered from that was his affinity for fairy tale castes, and his mysterious death when, after being deposed from his monarchy under the charge of insanity, he went for a walk from Starnbergsee with his psychiatrist, and neither returned. Both bodies were found floating in the lake the next day, the doctors face scratched and bruised and his fingernails broken. They were officially said to have drowned, but conspiracy theories following the revelation of diary entries of a fisherman in the search party that discovered them suggests that they were murdered, or that one murdered the other, among other variations. But if the official reason is true, I can imagine why Ludwig II would have wanted to commit suicide, having been confined to a castle near Starnbergsee with bars on the windows and doors, after the fairy tale world he had created for himself in Neuschwanstein. The Neuschwanstein castle is inspired by medieval folklore and Wagner's Operas, like the Venus grotto, an artificial stalactite cave based on the legend of Tannhauser.
We came out of the castle and into the golden hour, and all was soft and romantic, as if Ludwig II had spun some sort of magic and anything emerging from his castle kept some measure of the fairy tale magic that had inspired it. On the bus back, I was lulled to sleep on the train but woke up mid way to see the sky ablaze with colour, and I woke Nat up to look at its majesty.
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