Liebe Servicewüste Deutschland
Love service desert Germany
Actually, it is inexplicable that Aachen was so important. Charlemagne, Holy Roman Empire, coronation of the emperors, all in a city without a river. I'm only here for a few days and therefore can not determine whether the absence of a watercourse has a negative effect on the romance ability of Aachen, but I can imagine that the lack of opportunity to stroll up and down something completely and obviously independent and unimpressed by worries, plans, dreams and other human jokes straight into the North Sea or the Black Sea flows, beats on the mind.
The proud inhabitants of Aachen say they have at least one stream. When I came to the street where it allegedly flows, I did not recognize it first, then I had to laugh. A gutter like a sewer flows between the street and the sidewalk to somewhere, at least not into any ocean. No wonder the Romans felt superior to the Teutons when they saw it.
At this would-be Venice lies the Café Einstein, which just came to rest my tired from the German-Belgian-Dutch cross-border hiking feet. In addition, the name promises a collection of geniuses and intellectuals. At least it's not one of those annoying pubs that sound loud, but all the louder sounds to visitors. It is rather one where disguised geniuses at shaky tables over a beer discuss everything from Alemannia Aachen to the role of tuberculosis in Soviet literature.
At one of the other tables in front of the café sat a lady, too, and ordered a cup of tea. That was a perfectly understandable wish, because it had cooled down considerably on this last July evening, and the otherwise ubiquitous weather-jamming only lasted because people had felt in the weeks before that global warming was not just for islanders off the coast Bangladesh would be deadly, which, to be honest, most in this country does not really care, but that she now dared to be unpleasant for the inhabitants of Central Europe.
Maybe the lady was cool too, because she wore only a dress, a very elegant, not at all intrusive, but all the more attractive. She looked like an actress, but she was not, at least not a well-known one, because if I had seen her before, I would have remembered her name to see everything of her, even if she had starred in vampire movies or medical series, even if I found that, without knowing her, below her dignity.
She was all dressed in black, so maybe she had just become a widow, though she was not in the typical widowhood, but rather in the prime of life. Probably her husband had just been shot and she had to spend the evening outside the house while the bloodstains in the apartment were painted over. But I would never know, because I could not address her with my hiking boots and an unstrawn shirt, was clear.
It was not until later in the transcript of the day before, but since then not out of my mind, that I realized that it was not as complicated as it was customary, conceited, individual, ostensibly cosmopolitan, like "cherry blossom tea with ginger salt, but please in a ceramic cup and only let three and a half minutes "ordered, but just" a cup of tea ". Nevertheless, the wish of the waitress was rejected.
"I have already cleaned the coffee machine."
Why people make the hours before the shutdown of the restaurant, understand only people in a mainly beer-drinking country. However, nobody at all understands the connection between the coffee machine that has fallen victim to the exaggerated cleaning and a cup of tea.
Even the truly not complicated customer hooked up, quite unobtrusively, as if to imply - certainly despite better knowledge - that she had perhaps misunderstood herself.
"Oh, I did not want coffee. Only one tea. "
Now the waitress, who apparently did not serve, explained why this was not possible.
"The water for the tea runs through the same machine, you understand? It can not be done today. "She had already become angry, perhaps because, when she was already on the subject of water, she had thought about how nice it would be to live on the Rhine or on the Volga.
"That's Germany," I thought. A country where hospitality professionals likely to complete a three-year apprenticeship, passed exams, and earned diplomas no longer realize that you just have to put a pot of water on the stove for tea rather than pressing any buttons to press complicated and overpriced machines. Or they do not understand that even a cleaned machine is not contaminated by the boiling of water, but at best is even more purified. And why does a pub not create a kettle for a few euros? Every student has something like this on the shelf.
The lady, who got nothing hot, I was sorry. She showed no sign of it, which in turn showed her cosmopolitanism, for that someone of this appearance and effect came not from here, but probably from Paris, from Milan or from the fairy tale, I was sure of that. But as our eyes wandered, only once, but so insistently, she gave a brief smile, probably because of the absurdity of the situation that electrified me so much that I needed no tea to warm up and no coffee to stay awake. She was extremely adorable, but she wore her beauty with a nonchalance, as if she woke up so perfectly every morning. And those dark eyes, the - but wait, you really wanted to know more about the tea.
Tea is really the easiest in the world: hot water and a bag of pure. I already cooked it in the mountains, on the fire. One of the first skills to learn in prison is to make a plunger from wire to draw power for the tea. In railway wagons there is a samovar, who always donates hot water. Even in Vorkuta there was tea.
Since then, every time I prepare a cup of tea, I have to think of the unknown woman. And soon the autumn is coming.