Back in August of 1991 I was a nineteen year old young man with a sense of adventure in me. I had been working all summer in construction, had been reading a lot of literature and trained in fencing for competition. On August 18th of 1991 I went to Germany with my sister, and her friend Anna. We did an interrail trip, which means to travel around a country in Europe using cheap railway.
The purpose of our trip was also meet up with my friend Andre, who had been staying in the city of Göttingen. We flew from Iceland and landed in Hamburg. Next we traveled from there to Kassel where we stayed the night in a youth hostel, meeting young people from all over the world. The main attraction in Kassel was a museum about the Grimm brothers and their fairy tales, since the brothers Grimm came from Kassel. The Castle on the hill above the town wasn’t bad either.
From Kassel we took the train to Heidelberg, where my sister Hekla and I had lived and gone to school a decade prior. On the way there we would stop in Göttingen and my friend Andre would get on the train. I contacted him about this the night prior, using a payphone at a bar someplace, calling the home phone number of the people where he was staying. No mobile phones or internet existed back in those days. When our train stopped in Göttingen my friend got on the train with no problems, but hey! this was Germany and you could trust them to be on time back in those days.
We all sat in a old style restaurant train cabin and drank Fanta. Finally we got to Heidelberg in the evening, and got in line to check into the Heidelberg youth hostel. Sitting outside in the twilight and waiting with our luggage for our turn to check into the hostel, we saw a dog walking very slowly towards us and he was taking his time, stopping often to look at us. Finally the animal came closer to us and then we saw that this was no god damn dog, but a huge brown rat, the size of a dog walking straight to us. We jumped up and made a lot of noise to try and scare it off, which did not work and then we got the hell out of there.
When we finally got in the hostel the sexes were divided into rooms, the men in certain rooms and women in certain rooms. My friend Andre and I went into a 6 bed room, where there were 3 bunkbeds on each side of the room and a window in the middle. The room was almost full, some of the guys in the room looked like middle eastern criminals or at least their energy was that of someone that was up to no good. Two of these guys looked like cutthroats and we chose a bunkbed as far away from those guys as possible, right next to the window.
I took my valuables in a small bag and slept with it in my arms, because this was a dodgy situation. I eventually fell asleep but then in the middle of the night there was a loud noise so I woke up. I saw a big fat German man trying to find a bed to sleep in and he was drunk as hell. After a good while of rumbling around he took the last bed remaining and feel asleep, and then all the rest of us got to go back to sleep.
After 5 minutes I suddenly woke up in a flash to the loudest snoring ever made in human history. The big fat German sounded like a thunderstorm, and everybody had woken up. Some of the guys tried to poke him and get him to stop, but nothing woke this man up and the thunderous noise only increased. He even farted in his sleep and it sounded loud and depressing, and the smell in the room became horrible. We tried to sleep and put my pillow over my ears but that did not help much.
Finally morning came and the air in the room was hot, stuffy, smelly and damp. A guy got up and opened the window to get fresh air for everybody, but the second he did a terrible smell of shit entered the room and the heat outside came in with the smell. It appeared that out room was right next to the elephant cages at the Heidelberg Zoo, where the elephant like to shit.
There was no winning in this place, so my friend and I quickly got out of there, brushed our teeth and got downstairs to the breakfast cafeteria to get something to eat, after the horrible night of no sleep, drunk German snoring and farting, and smell of hot elephant shit.
The breakfast cafeteria was not air conditioned or the AC was not working, the bread in the place was old, the cheese smelled off, the bananas were brown and the orange juice was warm. This fucking place literally could not get any worse.
They did have coffee though, so I tried drinking coffee for the first time. It was ok and it did fill my belly with comfort, after all the ridiculous bullshit of the night before.
I have liked coffee ever since.
A.G. Munson
