Years and years ago, as a very young man, I came to Munich on a holiday.  Like today, it was after I had been on the road for a long time, and I was ready, longing for a rest.  I found an ancient pension just east of the English Garden, and stayed there for almost a month, sharing a room with a Canadian from Nun’s Island.

The other residents at the pension were mostly fashion models, men from Southern California and women from South London who did catalog work.  I had never thought of Munich as a fashion center.  Paris?  Milan?  Sure.  But Munich?  Who’d have thought of it!  But there they were, a dozen models primping and preening, smoking cigarettes, eating spaghetti carbonara at the restaurant next door, and speaking no German at all.

I was the youngest person at the pension, desperate to be older and more popular.  So I did my best to live just like those models, so that maybe one of the women would notice me, and then I would feel like a big man.  I smoked cigarettes, ate spaghetti carbonara at the restaurant next door, and though I had studied German in college I spoke hardly anything but English while I let a summer month in Munich drift by.

Needless to say, all my of efforts to be older and cooler were to no avail.  I remained exactly the same person I had been when I walked in the door of that pension for the first time.

And needless to say, I remember hardly anything of the days and days I spent hanging around, pretending to be an out-of-work fashion model.  Years later my most vivid memories of that time in Munich are: the sound of the woman’s voice in the U-Bahn that announces “Nächster Bahnhof…”; the way the Maximilianeum looms up out of the darkness when you cross the Isar at night; and one strangely glorious day when all of us at the pension went to the Chinesischer Turm and lay aside our grownup cigarettes and our fashionable coolness, just being our true silly selves, a little drunk to tell the truth, as we watched the grandmothers sit in a circle draining tankards of beer fully half the size of the small children who ran about at their feet.