We slept in. Grayson came to the hotel, then off we went.

Our hotel is the Creatif Hotel Elephant. We chose it on the internet because the price was right, the location was good, and the design was irresistible. Here’s the exterior:

The rooms, recently renovated, looked bright and funky:

As it turns out, we like the Elephant very much. The room is very comfortable, with the duvets actually being a perfect sleep situation: we each have our own, so there’s no tugging at the sheets. The neighborhood is relatively quiet (although as Grayson pointed out, there is not much traffic to begin with and certainly none after 10:00.)

The staff is friendly; their English is good, and they don’t laugh too much at my German.

First we hit the Hauptbahnhof, right across the street almost, for breakfast and ATMs. I had a chocolate croissant, which I didn’t realize meant “with thick, goopy chocolate huddled at the end of the croissant.” Chocogoop, mmmmm.

Our agenda of the day was museums, specifically three of the four major museums. We took them in chronological order, starting with the Alte Pinakothek. This is the early Renaissance to late 18th century stuff, including the largest collection of Rubens on earth. Apparently, according to our tour guide Grayson, the whole museum was built around one gigantic Rubens, the centerpiece of the central hall. It’s about 30 feet tall, depicting the reward of the virtuous at the Last Judgment.

No world-famous works here, except maybe the Dürer panels of St. Matthew and Luke. Still, seeing such great work is still an education for the eyes and brain.

The museum itself (no picture; at this latitude the sun is always behind it) is magnificent: one long gallery of huge rooms on the back of the second floor with a secondary gallery of much smaller rooms (and smaller works) across the front. The exterior is therefore a long, thin building, fronted like a palace.

To get to the gallery, you climb this gigantic double staircase which was tacked on to the back of the building in the 1950s as they were rebuilding it. (Yes, we bombed the place. At least it could be repaired, with brick that deliberately does not match the original; its partner, the Neue Pinakothek across the street, was completely destroyed. Its building is modern.) The effect of the staircase is quite nice: the former back of the building was left, the brick scrubbed, the architectural detail mirrored on the new exterior wall. It’s quite a post-modern look.

Next was the Neue Pinakothek. Most of this was worthless 19th century Academic crap. I am not over-exaggerating. When we got to the period where they decided the best thing to do was to fall back and copy the Renaissance masters, I just started walking through the rooms without paying much attention.

Finally we hit the room where the late-19th century began to fall apart, and the art once again became interesting. You could tell that someone had been to Paris and seen what was going on. There were a handful of the French.

Lunch was at a little Italian place near the museums. Ginny said her spaghetti was good. My lasagne was not quite what we’ve been taught to believe Italian cuisine is like, nor was it warm.

Third and last on the day’s agenda was the Lenbach Haus. Herr Lenbach was a portrait painter of the gilded age, and he built himself this quite large Italianate mansion. It now houses the Blaue Reiter group, plus exhibits of new, and here I mean new, stuff.

The exhibit was very nice, showing the growth of the Reiter style through Kandinsky’s work and that of his lover and their best friend couple, none of whose names I remember. As they picked up adherents, those paintings joined the walls. I was delighted to see Paul Klee, one of my favorite artists.

After the three museums, I was parched, so we went to a bar and quenched our thirst before setting out for supper. This was at a restaurant recommended by our hotel, the Al Teatro, which true to its name was next to a Fox-style theatre. A show called Miami Dance was playing, and it looked truly trashy. However, Grayson resisted seeing it, too gay or something, so we ate and let him hit the bus to go home.

We headed back to the hotel and were soon asleep.

Already it’s a hassle:

At least one of the travel websites we’d gone to said to declare any electronics before leaving the country so that Customs wouldn’t give you a hard time when you brought them back in.

So after we made it to Concourse E, I went to do so: back down the escalator, where there was no visible office for Customs. At information, I asked and was given a paper slip, a pass to get to the Customs office. Where was it? “Around the glass.” I fumbled my way down a glass corridor, where a TSA lady sat at an office desk plopped in the middle of a hallway.

She looked at the pass, called on her walkie-talkie for a supervisor. Eventually one showed up. I needed to go to the Customs office to declare some electronics, I said. You don’t need to do that, he said.

Oh, OK. As we began to move back, I asked for his name, suggesting that it would come in handy if I were in fact hassled on my return to the country.

Well, we’re just TSA, he said, we have nothing to do with Customs. I need Customs, I said, I told the lady I needed Customs. Around there, he said.

On I went, allowed through two little stanchions by a polite TSA lady. Into the Customs office I went, where I was told by the Customs man that I could declare them if I wanted, but it wasn’t really necessary any more.

::sigh::

So back I went.

Only I was now in the international transfer area, and to get back to the other side, I had to once again go through security. I asked the polite lady who had let me through if she could let me go back through, but no, I had to do the whole security thing.

In my case, it’s not only the shoes and the jacket and the personal effects, it’s the laptop (out by itself) and my carry-on bag and my C-PAP, which is in the carry-on bag and has to come out. It takes three trays, plus the bags.

I get all the way through and am waiting for the final item, when here comes a TSA person with my C-PAP. Is this a breathing machine, he asks? Yes, of course. It has to come out of its case. Don’t touch it. You have to go back and unpack it and send it through. It’s the new policy.

New since ten minutes ago upstairs? When I went through upstairs, no one was aware of this new policy. So back I went, leaving my laptop and everything to the mercy of the continuing flood of international drug lords coming through.

He plopped the C-PAP case and a tray down and walked away. I peremptorily called him back to ask exactly what had to be unpacked. He pointed to the reservoir. I asked if he didn’t mean the motor part. He mumbled. I took both of them out. The next guy told me only the motor part needed to be out, and waited until I repacked the reservoir.

Finally I was through and began repacking all my crap. I was down to my personal effects, and that’s when I noticed my passport was missing. I was about to blow my stack when the first guy came back, bearing it.

Grr. It is no wonder that undercover people from the GSA were able to sneak bomb parts past security in all 19 airports they tried it in. They are inefficient and inconsistent.

An uneventful flight. The dinner was not bad. We watched Hairspray on the little monitors, and it was entertaining, although I was not convinced by Travolta in drag. He seemed to be in another movie altogether; his accent especially seemed more authentic than the rest of the cast was willing to commit to.

Fitful sleep, of course, and we arrived in Munich about 20 minutes late, 8:11 CEST.

There is no child to greet us, needless to say. He had all the information he needed, and at this very moment it is one hour past our original arrival time. I imagine he will wish he had written down all the info I’ve sent him over the past few weeks, like the hotel we’re staying at. There is no internet access here at the arrival gate. We may actually have to wait until we abandon hope and go to the hotel to email him and catch him up to speed.

Ginny has wandered off to the shopping area to see if she can find a cell phone for the week. I wish we had a camera crew with us; she has absolutely no German.

Soon we will have to figure out how we’re getting to the hotel on our own. An adventure!

It seems that the child had already booked an adventure with friends. He didn’t know exactly when or even what day we were coming in. (Can I show you the emails?)

We took a cab, which was stupid and very expensive. We’ll be taking the train back, needless to say.

The hotel is small and funky, very cute. Our room was not going to be ready until 2:00, so we left our luggage and headed out to see what we could see.

We managed to make it to the Marienplatz in time to hear the newly restored Glockenspiel play, with its double-tiered parade of carved characters. The Neue Rathaus in which it perches is an excessive pile of late Gothic civic pride:

We saw three major churches, each a different style: Peterskirche, majorly roccoco; Frauenkirche, quiet neoGothic; and Michaelskirche, a tremendous baroque effort. (I have no pictures. I don’t know why.) The Frauenkirche’s chorus and orchestra were rehearsing Bruckner’s Mass in F, which they performing tomorrow night. We may attend. It is gorgeous, especially in a space with a 5-second reverb.

We also stumbled across what passes for the Apple Store. Whee! I went in to play with the new operating system, Leopard, my first chance to do so. Very cool, as advertised. I tried to pull up this blog, just as a mark-leaving kind of deal, better than tagging buildings, I dare say, but that particular iMac was not hooked up to the internets. (Not really an Apple Store, was it?)

We finally wound our way back to the Creatif Hotel Elephant, where we found that someone had been looking for us, fruitlessly. Good. Serves him right.

After a nap, I finally got in touch with the child. He came back in from his suburban home and we walked the city with him, getting history and art along the way. We ate at one of his favorite restaurants, where the food was good if not exactly cheap. (Is anything here cheap at this point in history?)

He took great delight in correcting my faltering German, and especially clueing us in to the social niceties. Not just nochmal gin und tonic, but nochmal, bitte.

Overall: Munich is a beautiful city. Ludwig I did a massive building job post Napoleonic Era, and even after the city was bombed to bits in WWII, they rebuilt it all.

Last weekend Ginny and I returned to the University of Georgia for the first real visit since we left, which was 30 years ago. What a long strange trip it was.

The occasion was the Department of Theatre & Film Studies’ invitation to the New Georgia crowd to come and share its collective wisdom with the student body. And what might the “New Georgia crowd” be, exactly? After they graduated (more or less) in 1977, David Wright and Wayne Knight went to New York City to break into show business. They found an apartment, and in their own words, “we were all like cockroaches: you open the door for one, and the rest streamed in.”

Others followed to the 71st St. apartment, fanning out to their own places, but never losing touch with the home base. These 10-15 UGA theatre students found jobs for each other, found places to live for each other, supported each other through the hard times, rejoiced when they triumphed. And every year they came together for a Thanksgiving feast.

The Dept. of Theatre & Film Studies thought it was important for their students to see what that kind of support group was like, a group that was still in touch with each other 30 years later. Also, I’m sure that the fact that one of the group was Wayne Knight helped in deciding to pull this thing together.

As it came together, there were more than a few of us from that era who had not gone to NYC who got pulled into the event: me, Paul Pierce from the Springer Opera House, Paul Gendreau from LA, a couple of others. Our tangentiality to the main New Georgia crowd didn’t seem to present a problem to the department.

There was to be a large dinner on Thursday night, a Friday full of sessions, and then a tailgate party and football game on Saturday. Ginny and I had planned to drive up Friday morning and lurk through the Friday events, staying in a hotel in Commerce before coming back on Saturday morning.

So I was a little astonished when we all got an email outlining the agenda for the day and I found I was part of a session with Paul Pierce discussing “Future Developments for Regional Theatre.” What? I quickly emailed back and said that was fine as long as everyone understood that I ran an adventurous community theatre, not a regional theatre in any sense of the word. Not a problem, they said, the students will love it. Which does not argue for any perspicacity on the part of current UGA theatre students.

Both Ginny and I had deep misgivings about going to this thing. Ginny, especially, felt she had gone far astray from the path we all thought we had set 30 years ago, and the thought of coming back into contact with those who followed that path did not make her happy.

I had different feelings, of course, because I essentially have followed the path I laid out for myself: teach, run a community theatre. But there’s always the Road Not Taken, isn’t there? I have absolutely no regrets over my choices; I have gotten exactly what I wanted and probably more than I deserved. But I don’t think anyone can avoid the wistfulness that comes with age: what if I had gone to New York? What would my life have been like then?

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in all likelihood. But at least one of those alternate lives had glittering prizes, didn’t it? I can’t even solidly imagine what those might have been, of course, but I know they’re there, in that other there. As Hemingway wisely says, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Overall, the event was a lot of fun. The memories poured out, one former professor, now retired, showed up for the tour of the building just because he wanted to hear the stories he knew would emerge. Wayne, our most famous compeer, is still just as funny as he ever was, and seemed quite happy to be among those of us who knew where he came from. He and Paul Gendreau, also a tremendously funny guy, had a lot of interesting things to say about life in the Big Time at lunch, especially with the writers’ strike going on.

We were all appalled to see that the Fine Arts Building, after being renovated during our final years there, has not been touched since in any meaningful way. The department has expanded to fill the building, the music department got its own huge, new, shiny building on South Campus, and they are about to begin major expansion/renovation, but last weekend it was exactly the same as we left it.

That led to a lot of interesting frissons: seeing the costume shop, where most of us toiled in joy; the stages where we directed and acted; the classroom where Ginny and I first met. It seemed a lot smaller. At least one other former couple in the group had a similar experience, in a different classroom.

Everyone’s lives have gone nicely and everyone seemed happy. Of course, we were the ones who chose to return and whose lives have positioned us so that we could afford to. (Another plus to the Current Road, of course.) There were quite a few people whom we missed; some of them, we don’t know where they are.

You always wonder: how far off our glorious path have they wandered? It’s easy to say, Oh, that doesn’t matter, they should have come, we just would love to see them. But I know that if even someone as successful as Ginny and I are had qualms about attending a reunion for “real” theatre people, how much more daunting might it be for someone who is selling used cars in Indiana? If one thinks that one’s undergraduate degree was simply a stupid detour, an ill-conceived conceit of a clueless adolescent that gave no meaningful direction to one’s eventual life, how crushing would it be to have to revisit that decision in earnest?

And what a relief, truly, to know that I have never been faced with that particular Road.