Neumarkt and Old Age

Our thin-façade of luxury and detached upper-class living has come to a close. We crawl from the Hotel Tatra. It takes a haranguing to get James to pay for the beer he helped himself to from the minibar. I don’t think I would have made him pay for it if he’d just drunk it, but he went so far as to fill up his empty bottle with water, put the cap back on, and hide it back in the fridge. Somehow, we’re going to make James a man yet.

We point our car towards Neumarkt and hit the gas. And as soon as we're on the road, the calls for Burger King begin. I've refrained from mentioning the burger behemoth yet, but it's hard to keep doing so. Somehow, the name has insidiously wormed its way into both James' and Zach's minds, and they cry out for it constantly, as if they're freshly hatched chicks in a nest. Seriously, they're BK obsessed, and it's not just because they like the paper crowns. It's a common reststop option in Germany, but there is absolutely no BK in France, which was great but left them deprived. And now with Germany back on our itinerary, there would be a small riot in the back seat if I didn't stop. I don't normally partake in these "feeding" frenzies, but this menu item was just too intriguing to pass up:

That's right, a Chicken Nugget burger. It wasn't quite as exciting under the bun. The nuggets were smothered in a spicy take on Chinese sweet and sour sauce. Can't say I'll ever be ingesting another one of these. But hey, at least now I know, even if I do feel a little less human for it.

We roll into Neumarkt with the plan to spend a couple days with friends. Aliza, Simon, Harry, Nahuel, and Aukha take us in, and make sure we're better fed than eating BK. They let us do some laundry too. A little bit or normalcy sneaks into our lives for a day as we find ourselves wearing and BBE have band practice.

Our second night in town, we end up at a 18^th birthday on the Beach. With Neumarkt land-locked, they engage in the very Midwest ritual of building beaches around lakes. Here they've taken it a step further, and the lake is man-made as well. It's owned by some large corporation, and during the day, there’s a large pump that runs, sucking up sand from the lake’s bottom and slinging it into trucks. Apparently it creates quite the vacuum, and several people have met their maker by getting slurped down into the sand. And so, that part of the beach is off limits. Which of course means that is where the the 18^th birthday is being held (the machine doesn’t run during the night, so I’ve got to guess, aside from the 30 foot sheer drop into the water, the danger is significantly reduced. Then again, wasted people seem to find ways to make everything from kittens to spoons dangerous).

The Wooderson character from Dazed and Confused pops into my head while I'm sitting in a circle of partying teenagers. Sure, no one knows I’m ten years older than everyone else here, but I know. It’s not that cool of a feeling. And I'm no Wooderson. Which I'm totally fine with.