The gray day matched perfectly with our hangovers. Tom, our Airbnb host, gave a dull wave from the living room, his hair matted at obtuse angles. “Oktoberfest should really just be one day,” he admitted, sitting in his underwear, and I suspected this wasn’t the first time he had this epiphany. Courtney and I nodded knowingly but did better not to speak.
We spent thirty minutes at the convenience store on the corner downstairs, trying to cure Courtney’s sore throat with a mixture of fruit, bread products, and caffeine. Trying to salvage our last day in the country, we took cover from the rain in an English-language bookstore that reminded us of Shakespeare and Sons in Prague, before venturing to the English Garden. Helped by the rain, the Garden was lush and green, an urban park on a scale slightly larger than Central Park and similarly located in the center of the city. We explored the grounds, passing both a Japanese teahouse created on a small island at the south end as well as, more curiously, an artificial stream that had been rigged for standing wave surfing. Surfers lined up along the bank, taking turns entering the water with their boards. It was hard to imagine being able to surf hundreds of miles away from any ocean, like someone had hacked the system.
We had one last food item to check off our bucket list: currywurst, that unholy amalgam of pork sausage and curry ketchup. Even Courtney, disdainful of all tomato-based condiments, was willing to give it a try. We arrived at Pommes Boutique, a cheap counter-style restaurant that clearly catered to the college crowd. The currywurst did not disappoint, the perfect balance of spice and chew. But even better were the 30 or so dips, lined up in identical plastic pump bottles, that we could use for the fries. Zesty mayo or snack sauce? Teriyaki or tartar? No need to choose!
As someone who is criminally bad at making decisions, the luxury of choice is often squandered on me. After lunch, we doubled back to the Airbnb and headed to the Hof for the last time, this time to board a seven-hour train to Amsterdam. The people sitting on all four sides of us were loud to the point of screaming, but our tickets ruled out any possibility of switching seats. At the railway station in Frankfurt, we had a fifteen-minute stop for dinner. Staring down a cavernous food hall lined with stalls, there wasn’t nearly enough time to make an informed decision!
In quarantine, I’ve started to become comfortable with having a lack of agency. The choice of food is never ours to make, nor can we ever see the person who delivers it. I send messages about the meals I like to our faceless quarantine overlords, hoping for a repeat, and they respond with messages of their own: animated stickers bearing the faces of bears and rabbits, the words 謝謝 scrawled above them like a halo. I don’t know what effect, if any, it has.
At breakfast, we eat the same quadruple-stack white bread sandwich stuffed with cucumber, tomato, egg, American cheese, and occasionally a piece of fried fish. It feels like I’m swallowing a loaf of Wonder bread each morning. “You know you don’t have to finish it,” Courtney says, in our thrice-daily video chats. She’s sitting cross-legged, like me, on the yoga mat on the floor, the phone tipped awkwardly against a water bottle. “Sure,” I say, though my plastic clamshell container is spotless each time.
Back in Frankfurt, we panicked and ended up buying two ham sandwiches that looked like they’d been sitting out since before lunch. We rushed back onto the train car and joined the unruly revelers around us to dinner. Peeling back the plastic wrap, there were only two layers of bread each, and not eight, but we ate them all the same.