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| Riding into Meißen | Linda dressed up for dinner in her funky new jeans |
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| Picturesque buildings around the town square of Meißen | In the town square |
“I hate cream,” said Dwayne, as he lifted a small mountain of it off his dessert at Riesa: caramelised pancakes with ice cream.
“Then how come you like eclairs?” countered Linda.
Dwayne was initially stuck for an answer, a rare and noteworthy occurrence, but he finally explained: “In an eclair, the cream is integral to the whole thing; in this dessert, it’s an add-on.”
The rest of us also display these little quirks of taste, judgement and behaviour. For instance, I hate the concept of Facebook with its “like” button, which strikes me as crass and superficial, yet I love blogging, internet surfing and YouTube.
Linda in her turn also has some endearing idiosyncrasies. Despite her Vogue-worthy home and elegance (which she sums up as “being posh”), she is sometimes drawn to items in shops that I never would have contemplated buying for her. In Riesa, a rather sterile town where we stayed in a forgettable hotel (though the breakfast porridge was creamy and irresistible), she insisted on buying two funny little decorative mushrooms, ignoring Dwayne’s groans and my tactless remarks.
We all suffer from these odd little quirks – and whole countries display them as well. For instance, the attitude of some Germans to their perfectly drinkable water is unfathomable. While restaurateurs in Melbourne provide tap water to every diner without a murmur, fresh water is hard to come by in German eateries. It’s even tricky to get a decent swig of water at breakfast, because the glasses that are provided are like sherry glasses. Yet, as Dwayne pointed out over his flaming dinner in Riesa, the beer glasses here are gigantic. Beer is treated as a necessity of life, while water is bought and sold in small bottles and drunk in thimble-sized glasses.
And another thing: we tend to assume that the Germans are technologically advanced and far more innovative than we are. In some respects, this is true. Nevertheless, many of their schools still use blackboards and appear not to provide wifi or digital projectors. In several of the towns we have travelled through, moreover, we have had to pay with cash. PayWave, so widely available at home, is rare here. Visa and MasterCard are often rejected even in cities the size of Meißen.
Of course, the inconsistencies of my own country are often not just baffling but also disturbing. We could learn a lot from the Germans’ decency in their treatment of refugees, for instance, and from their relatively swift legislative decision to permit homosexual marriages.
Final Notes
- Hotel in Meißen: Hotel Residenz und Café am Markt – charming, right in the centre of the Old City
- Meißen itself: A gem of a city; famous for its pottery; seemingly unspoilt by tourism; compact old inner city with bookshops, restaurants, clothes shops and memorable architecture all within walking distance
- Weather: Vicious headwind nearly drove those with ordinary bikes off the cycling path. Elite athlete on superbike completely unaffected (but it was unpleasant at times). Thankfully, the rain stayed away.
