Monday 25 July 2016

Frühstück before breakfast? No fear!


So we come down to the breakfast room in Frieburg, Germany, and we all have hangovers. As usual, Mick's is the worst hangover.

If we have a minor head-cold - a common event in a three month tour - then Mick's, of course, has to be worse than ours. It is worse than ours by a factor of about ten, and worse than influenza by a factor of about three. He is a professional actor.

The waiter asks us all individually if we would like tea or coffee, and we answer in the same language as asked. It's not V2 Rocket science - tee oder kaffee?. Then he comes to Mick.

Mick just says, "I would like some breakfast, please" - in English - in a reasonably polite manner. The waiter repeats the question, and Mick repeats his answer, but this time a little more curtly.

German breakfasts in hotels such as ours usually involve a choice of cereal, some bread, processed ham, processed cheese plus a croissant with a sachet of jam if you are lucky, and all can be  - must be - collected by hand at a table somewhere in the room. They were world leaders in the concept of personal breakfast rubbish bins, though. The waiter's only job is to ask you if you want tea or coffee.

So the waiter asked the question again as us two Brits looked on in mute amusment, to see what would happen next. This is when Mick had a major melt-down.

"I JUST WANT SOME FUCKING BREAKFAST, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? VIER STÜCKE! VIER STÜCKE, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! VIER STÜCKE!"

The waiter gave up, and walked back to the kitchen.

Corrine looked at me as Mick put his aching head in his hands and smiled conspiritorially.

"You do realise that you have just asked the waiter for 'four pieces', don't you?"

19 comments:

  1. Foreign hotel breakfasts are always fascinating. In Morocco I was once confronted by a table piled high with boiled eggs in their shells; there must have been five hundred of them. As I was almost the only guest, I always wondered what happened to the remaining four hundred and ninety nine.

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  2. I'm not much of a breakfast person but, when on holiday, I love it. When we were in Sorrento, we had a ' Basil Fawlty ' waiter who insisted that the mould on the bread was seeds then he flounced out and could be heard smashing crockery in the kitchen. XXXX

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    1. I was the witness and cause of a kinfe-fight between two waiters in a hotel in Egypt. These things stick in one's mind.

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    2. I love the sound of Jacqueline's waiter. I once went to quite a posh nearby restaurant where the chef was going nuts in the kitchen throughout the meal. The food was very good, and it made for a very memorable evening. The restaurant closed soon after.

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    3. I went to one where the chef just stormed out, leaving the underlings to cook. Tasted fine to me.

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  3. So he got his comeuppance to some extent - folk like him need it regularly tokeep them in their place.

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    1. No chance with him. Hope you feel better soon, Weave.

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  4. Did Mick ever learn to adjust his hangover to his circumstances?

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  5. When I was living in Keuutzberg for two months in the '70s I only had schnapps for breakfast

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  6. Oh, mein Gott. 'Vier Stücke' cracks me up.

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  7. In Freiburg with their heavy dialect they might not understand when I order breakfast :-) - and if he had said "Vier Rund-Stücke" in Hamburg they would have given him four rolls (in Berlin they would have drunk Rachel's Schnaps themselves; here you say "Schrippen")

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    1. There wasn't much scope for nuance in this situation!

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