Dirty Dozen: Munching in München

Today I am writing in Munich, Germany. I have just finished a conference elsewhere in Bavaria and so I am spending a couple of days in the city to make the most of the flights. I chose a reasonably priced serviced apartment that has a kitchen in order to keep my costs down while here. However it is so hot that real cooking is somewhat out of the question, so today I will be preparing a simple tuna salad. However I would like to demonstrate that modest nutritious goals and an exciting international destination is no barrier to creating a truly depressing meal for one.

I am breaking a golden rule: what happens in the reasonably priced serviced apartment just outside of Munich city centre STAYS in the reasonably priced serviced apartment just outside of Munich city centre

Above is my entire ‘haul’ from the budget supermarket downstairs. While I was not aiming for this, the entire shop was under €10. We have two types of mixed salad, A cucumber, cheesy bread, drinks and a tin of tuna. The tuna is a little interesting. I recognised the word for ‘Sunflower oil’ on one can, and reasoned that they other variety must be in brine. However the tin is marked ‘in eigenem Saft’, which I believe means the tuna is packed ‘in its own juice’. ‘In its own juice’!? That’s fine for apricots, but how in the world does one juice a tuna? Actually no, don’t answer that I really don’t want to know.




I got a total of four drinks for my weekend. Three are pretty self-explanatory: a beer, some coffee and some syrupy lemon ice tea. The coffee is that terrible instant type that meets only two criteria of coffee, being hot, black and caffeinated while tasting purely of starch. There must be one factory in the world making this, because it seems to be the ubiquitous world standard for terrible instant coffee.

The last drink is something special that I could not resist: sauerkraut-saft. That’s rotten cabbage juice to you anglophones. I love sauerkraut and miss it a lot when in England, so it’s a real treat when I am in Germany or the USA. However I had no idea that people were drinking this as a beverage. It was in the drinks aisle so I do presume that it is indeed for drinking rather than salad dressing. It also comes in a small carton that looks suitable for drinking from, so my curiosity got the best of me and I had to have it. It’s also World-Wildlife-Fund-approved for some reason.

And you got upset when your mum put apple juice rather than orange juice in your lunch.

The preparation of the salad is easy. If you need a recipe for this, I refer you to the internet, where you can find many people willing to tell you how idiotic that is. Having prepared many, many such salads in my time, I can confirm that preparing it with a soundtrack of german hip-hop does improve the experience. The salad was a little waxy to the touch while I washed it, but that might be because Munich is currently the temperature of the sun, and the quark-gluon plasma that my room has become might have dehydrated the leaves a bit. The tuna is indeed in brine, and not anything else that might be implied by ‘animal juice’.

At least my sense of presentation is better than some at the conference.

I decided to prepare all three cold drinks, as some nagging suspicion told me that the Sauerkraut juice might not be all that pleasant. It has a somewhat lemony appearance, a bit like the liquid that separates out on top of greek yoghurt. It does indeed smell like relatively fresh sauerkraut. The nose is surprisingly spicy, but pungent. Apparently you are meant to drink it within three days of opening, but I don’t understand how something like this can really go ‘off’. Nothing about this seems very wrong: I love the flavour of sauerkraut and no major alarm bells are ringing. Yet I find it very hard to approach the glass. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Oh well, bottoms up.





If you can’t watch that video, allow me to summarise: It did not go well. That's not a voluntary pause at the start, it's an attempt to prevent vomiting. Neither the syrupy iced tea nor the surprisingly unremarkable beer could truly wash out the taste. Turns out the water that seeps out of rotting cabbage does not make a very nice beverage. This product exists purely for parents who hate their children and want to express it through the medium of juice. The reason the WWF endorses it is because if they can kill off enough humans we will stop encroaching on the pandas. It’s poison.

The rest of the salad is fairly unremarkable. I consumed it while watching a music channel. They are doing a piece on how one of the top German singers rips off loads of other female singers like Britney Spears with her videos, performances and songs. I am not sure if they praising her for this or chastising her. They showed clips of her covering Robbie Williams and the 2012 Eurovision winner song, so at least nobody can accuse her of having taste.

The big disappointment is the beer, as Bavaria has a strong tradition in this area. Then again, it is an ‘export’ which implies they don’t want to drink it here. Regardless I shall be going to a beer garden after this to get something more palatable. I will leave you with a tribute to one of my favourite depressing Youtube channels, which consists of over a thousand point-of-view videos of various Finnish elevators. I present the most depressing elevator in existence from my hotel. Auf wiedersehen!

The Roundup:
Juicyness: Way too Juicy
Ambient Temperature: Solar
Rating: 2/10. Made worse by the knowledge that bratwurst is nearby.