At what point during a five week tour of European cities do you know it’s time to go home? I believe I know the answer to that question: when you puke in a hotel bathtub and have to clean it up with a tea cup and your bare hands, the universe is telling you to pack your things and go.
After we arrived to Munich, our final destination, Tom asked me how I felt about the impending conclusion of our travels. I had spent so many hours over the course of so many months planning and anticipating this trip, and now that it was coming to a close I was feeling all the feelings: joy, relief, sadness, gratitude, a looming sense of despair and loss of purpose. We had gone on so many adventures, enjoyed so many activities, and made so many discoveries as a family, I couldn’t have asked for a more wondrous experience. I was beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to travel with the people dearest to me, to do what I loved most with the loves of my life. I was relieved that, miraculously, we hadn’t suffered any major disasters or illnesses and, for the most part, most things had gone according to plan. I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed. I was disappointed that this adventure was now mostly in the past instead of the future, and wistful about all the cities we hadn’t gotten to see yet. I wished we had more time to explore…until the second to last day when I puked in the bathtub, at which point I was glad to be heading home.
I didn’t intend to have excursions on our last two full days in Munich but due to rain we moved a concentration camp tour and a castle tour from the beginning of the week to the end. I thought it was important for the kids (and us) to learn more about the history of Nazi Germany, so on our second to last day we left our hotel room around 9 in the morning to grab some breakfast pastries before our 10 o’clock tour. I had a bite of a doughnut and a sip of coffee before we boarded a train to the concentration camp site. The timing of the tour wasn’t well-planned because it lasted over 5 hours with no scheduled meal break, and since food wasn’t allowed on the premises, Tom took the kids outside of the camp grounds around lunchtime so they could eat the snacks we had packed. I didn’t want to miss any part of the guided tour so I stayed with the tour group until the end. By the time we got back to our hotel room around 4 in the afternoon, I was famished and greedily stuffed my face with charcuterie, bread, and cheese from the local outdoor market. I remember sharing a bottle of sparkling wine with Tom, but he swears he had only one glass and I polished off the rest. That’s probably what happened, because I passed out in a drunken stupor and woke up a couple of hours later feeling nauseous. Tom was napping in bed beside me and the kids were watching a German cartoon on TV with their backs toward us. I stumbled out of bed and into the adjacent bathroom, which, unfortunately, didn’t have a toilet. Many of our European hotel rooms housed the toilet in a separate room away from the rest of the bathroom. In this case, the toilet room was by the entrance on the other side of our enormous suite, and there was no way I was going to make it there in time to do what had to be done. So I launched myself face first into the bathtub and vomited the entire contents of my late lunch. Lovely. I turned on the faucet to try to rinse out the disgusting swill, but guess what, regurgitated charcuterie is rather lumpy and doesn’t drain well. My horror rose commensurately with the water in the clogged bathtub. Do you ever have moments in life where you would give anything to not have to deal with the present reality? Where you would pay any amount of money, every last cent you owned, to escape the consequences of your actions and postpone the moment of reckoning? This was one such moment for me. Too anguished and hungover to deal with the fact that I had clogged a hotel bathtub with my puke, I turned off the faucet, drew the shower curtain closed to conceal my sins, and tumbled back into bed. By the time I woke up again it was dark and I was alone; Tom must have taken the kids out for dinner. With dread I stepped into the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain to confirm that I didn’t just have a bad dream. Alas, it was no dream — the watery puke was swimming right where I had left it. I gritted my teeth and summoned fortitude for the task ahead. All I could find in the hotel room to aid my efforts was a teacup, which I used to scoop refuse from the bathtub to transport to the toilet on the other side of the vast suite. After shuttling back and forth several times, I stuck my fingers down the bathtub drain, pulled out the remnants causing the clog, and was finally able to wash the remainder of my vomit, along with my dignity, down the drain. The bathtub wasn’t exactly clean, however, so I lathered body wash between my palms and scrubbed the basin with my hands until there was no longer any residue of my crime. No physical residue anyway. The odor and shame lingered. When my family got back from dinner I was grateful to learn that the kids had been oblivious to my sickness, although Tom had caught a glimpse of the horror show behind the curtain. He felt badly for me but couldn’t bring himself to clean up the revolting mess, though I would have been mortified if he or a housekeeper or anyone else but me dealt with it.
We had one final excursion on our last day: visiting two of the famous palaces commissioned by the eccentric (code word for gay) King Ludwig II of Bavaria. A different kind of disaster struck during this tour, more psychological than physical. I’d always been a maniac about capturing every noteworthy vacation moment on camera, and as we were waiting in line to cross a footbridge that offered the perfect vantage point for a beautiful shot of Neuschwanstein Castle (on which Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle was modeled), I was devastated to discover that the memory card in my camera was completely full. No more pictures? No more pictures on the last day of our 5 week vacation, the day we were going to tour fairytale castles built by a flamboyantly gay king?? What was the point of going anywhere or seeing anything if we didn’t have photographic documentation??? I was about to have a panic attack when Tom whipped out the video recorder he randomly brought along and retrieved a back-up memory card that, thankfully, worked in the camera. Crisis averted. I was able to take castle and swan photos to my heart’s content, although the prospect and potential trauma of having to rely on our memories of the day felt like another sign from the universe that we had overstayed our welcome, and the time had come for us to stop being tourists.
The best parts of Munich weren’t the tours or attractions or pictures of the tours and attractions, but simply enjoying good food with good friends. Isn’t that always the best part? We had a disproportionate amount of Asian food during our stay in Munich because our friends Lu and Wei took us to some amazing eateries, including an obligatory biergarten, and Wei fed us even more amazing homemade noodles, God bless her. After 5 weeks of bland Central European cuisine, we savored Wei’s garlicky noodles like manna from the heavens. The kids really hit it off with Lu and Wei’s daughter, who they didn’t quite remember from our Malaysia travels and who we will always call Ting Ting no matter how grown up she gets. It’s nice to reconnect with old friends and compare notes, to see how much our kids have grown. In the end our travels reinforce and remind us of the things that give us so much pleasure in life: family, friendships, beer, food, wine, merriment, memories (whether digitally recorded or not).
https://photos.app.goo.gl/zwi7EdTMQvK5Zu266
Life's Too Short 