Dorfy Day Trip: The Best Train Station Restaurant Ever

When you're a double threat like a Prince-Bishop,
you get live in a Brühl shack like this.

We all have regrets. They might be decisions we made or errors in judgement that haunt us long afterwards. Yep, I'm talking about train station food.

One of my many train station food regrets were two boiled sausages I bought because I was hungry and couldn't imagine a three-hour trip with an empty stomach. It did not long for me to start imagining how nice that train ride would have been on an empty stomach. 

The sad, week-old boiled sausages. The dry, crusty bread that tasted like diesel exhaust. Yellow mustard somehow made more yellow from age. If some foods can knock years off your life, that meal took a few off mine.

The train station in Brühl is a delicious exception to the rule, which is ironic considering when you pronounce Brühl: you draw out the umlauted 'u' like you're puking. Try it out loud.

You might not have an opportunity to practice saying it though. Brühl is a small village outside Cologne. Aside from the stately homes near the train station – usually these neighbourhoods are for scoring rock or smack, not a 19th century mansion – Brühl's main draw is the Max Ernst Museum and the fancy Baroque palace, with its gardens, Cologne's Prince-Bishop lived in.

After working up an appetite visiting an M.C. Escher exhibit at the museum, and it being a cold, soggy Rhineland afternoon, we went into the Brühler Wirtshaus for a warm snack and cold beer. 

It was crowded and not with the usual desperadoes you might encounter at a German train station. There were old folks and young families, all enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon at the train station.

Even without a reservation – they make those at this establishment – we managed to get a table in this crowded spot and order some beers – Brühl is just outside Cologne, putting in Kölsch country, which is fine by me because it's delicious stuff.

Kata ordered the tomato soup and the a warm pretzel, both of which passed muster with her, since she knows her soup and pretzels. The pretzel was served warm, an uncommon thing at a train station, but also with hunk of garlic butter. This was a first-class pretzel experience.

I got the Currywurst, which could go wrong when you order it in the wrong place. 

In its crudest, simplest form Currywurst is a sliced sausage covered with ketchup and curry powder, often with fries on the side. A nice place, like Brühler Wirtshaus, will blend the curry and ketchup into a tasty sauce. My first brush with it was from a Berlin street vendor, where the Currywurst slinger just squirted the ketchup onto the sausage and then shook some curry powder on top.

Most food places put a little effort into their Currywurst. There's a place in the Dorf that sprinkles gold dust onto theirs. Another outdoor patio spot on the Rhine serves so-so sausages with an amazing ketchup. The train station Currywurst in the Wirtshaus Brühler had the whole package: a decent sausage, fried crispy on the outside with a dose of ketchup that was actually spicy (German spicy is usually mild by North American standards).

So if you ever find yourself in Brühl, ask yourself why. If you know the answer, then hit Brühler Wirtshaus for the best train station dining experience ever.

Have you ever met happier people about to eat at a train station?

Omnibus Blog 3: Mostly Politics

Once again I am cramming several posts into one awesome Omnibus Blog! This time it's all about politics.


Karneval's Political Parade Floats

Karneval is a time for debauchery, but on Rose Monday, it becomes a time for parades. During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, people mount the floats and toss beads and doubloons to the crowds below. In the Rhineland, they take on a political bend.

Tsirpas takes aim at Cyclops Angela in 2015's Rose Monday parade.

In what is my favourite Karneval tradition, the parade floats become gigantic, 3-dimensional political cartoons. This float was applauded by the crowd (this was shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris).

Some floats make fun of topics of the day, like the one above of a cycloptic German Chancellor Angela Merkel and slingshot-wielding a Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas. One of this year's floats pissed off the new Polish government, which is too angry at everything to realize that when you complain about satire about you more people pay attention to that satire.

Many floats target political extremism of Islamic terror groups like ISIS or the increasingly hateful far right-wing fringe of german politics, like the Alternative for Germany or, as shown below, the National Democratic Party of Germany. 

These are all things worth satirising and demonstrates that politics belongs to the streets just as much as the legislature.

Trump got the Karneval treatment this year.

The float that angered the new Polish government.

Canadians, please remember NDP in Germany stands
for the National Democratic Party of Germany.

Britain out? Scotland in?

Reading the news lately you would think the European Union is in a lot of trouble. This isn't new. The EU feels so precarious at times – staying together it seems with nothing but hope, a tangled bureaucracy, dental floss, and chewing gum – that it's natural to see every problem as a crisis that will tear the whole thing down.

As of this posting, a British exit from the EU is one such possible problem being blown into a crisis.

During last year's UK election, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on the country's EU membership. Doing this helped him placate his increasingly anti-EU base and arguably win the election.

Using that as a bargaining chip, Cameron negotiated a settlement that allows UK exemption on stop paying welfare and child care benefits to migrant workers and special protections for City of London financial sector.

Despite the lack of political or economic sense to leave the EU, the concessions might be enough for the UK's eternally-angry Euroskeptics or for EU Parliamentarians, who vote on them as well.

Many EU member states already resent the UK's special status and take umbrage to the settlement. And Eastern European member states, where many of those migrant workers come from, are not liking this either.

Now, a referendum on joining the EU in Denmark was narrowly defeated in 1992, which put the whole EU at risk of not being formed at all. A special agreement was reached to gave Denmark exemptions for military independence and keeping its currency, the krone.

The UK's case is a little different. Denmark's referendum threatened to kill the EU before it even began. Britain's exit is an unprecedented problem, but it won't imperil the EU – it's just not so good for the continent's economy.

The tangle doesn't end there. Scotland, which held a referendum on its own independence and voted it down by 10 per cent, is mostly pro-EU. The Scottish National Party also holds the majority in its parliament.

If the UK left the EU, there'd certainly be another referendum on Scottish independence, with EU membership as a central issue in the very near future. If Scottish attitudes toward the EU remained the same, Scotland will vote for independence and likely join the EU shortly after.

This would be a double-whammy for the UK: Exit from the EU closes off a market of 300 million people to its exports and leads to the independence of the region with all the UK's oil and whisky.

In the long run, the EU comes out as the winner. It loses its loudest whiniest, grumpiest member state, which wants the economic benefits of being in the EU without the obeying its rules, while getting a new member with a healthy economy and great whisky.

Karneval For Foreigners

Combine these images in your mind: Mardi Gras. Halloween. Spring Break-style hedonism. Germans.

If your mind hasn't been blown, you should have a good idea of what the days before Lent look like in Dusseldorf, Cologne, and all over Germany's Rhineland. 

That is what Karneval looks like. 

There are parades, marching bands, folk songs, costumes, and dancing. There are costumes, candy, and fun for the kids. And there is a lot of partying for the older kids.

Our first brush with Karneval was while we were living in Dusseldorf's Altstadt, which meant we were ground zero for the drinking, carousing, dancing, bingeing, pissing, puking that accompanies Karneval.

A younger me might have loved that. But I am an old man now, and I had vertigo, which is not a lot of fun when everyday for five or six days (I lost track) there is either a party for 18 hours or street cleaning machinery for the remaining 6 below my window.

It's important to point out this is not a typical German phenomenon. It's strictly a Rhineland tradition. While the Rhinelanders party, the rest of Germany look on with a mix of surprise and dismay. It is, if we're going to rely on stereotypes, the most un-German thing you can imagine taking place in Germany.

Many non-Rhinelander Germans colleagues pack up and leave the area for an extended long weekend – the same way people in Florida board up with their windows and leave the coast when a hurricane is approaching.

Fun-loving, whatever-goes Berlin endures it, thanks to the government workers who relocated there from the old West German capital of Boon, in North Rhine-Westphalia.

And for Rhineland Germans, you either love Karneval or you hate it. Remember, they've been living with this all their lives, and many develop a powerful hate for the debauchery or the costumes or the Karneval songs (which all seem to sound the same to me).

As a foreigner, I have an advantage and a disadvantage. 

The disadvantage is I am an outsider to the festivities. I don't know the songs or the dances or the traditions. I didn't even bother with a costume last year, although Kata did. 

But being the outsider also means I don't have the years of hate for Karneval that others have for it. I just don't feel that strongly about it. I loathed the boozy carnage last year – I was also understanding, because I was a wild man once – but I enjoyed the spectacle of the costumes and the politically satirical parade floats.

As a foreigner, it would be easy to take the weekend off and ignore the whole thing. We almost did.

Instead we embraced our outsider-ness, put on costumes (well, just a wig for me), grabbed a few beers, and joined the crowd in Cologne. I might not love it, but I definitely don't hate it, and I don't know where I fit in, but we enjoyed it anyway.

The beer buying experience during Karneval in Cologne.

Daughter of Frankenstein.

A store in Cologne's downtown prepares for Hurricane Karneval.