When in Austria, do not leave without eating at least one serving of Tiroler Gröstl (approximate pronunciation help: GRR-ESH-TL, helps if you go all guttural on the "RRR"). You should receive an individual cast-iron pan filled with crusty fried potatoes, big chunks of bacon and ham, topped with the most perfectly fried egg you ever did see, the yolk still runny, the edges laced just so. If you are physically able to finish this all in one go, you will probably not need to eat again all day or perhaps the next day, too. Sharing it will leave room for dessert.
Dessert, after all, could be as delicious and essential as one puffy, gorgeous Germknödel, which I know, I know, does not sound like much to Anglophone ears ("what do they mean, GERMS?"), but is one of the greatest contributions to world cuisine. (Germ is Austrian for yeast.) What you get is a large, steamed, yeasted dumpling (similar, I suppose, to char siu bao) filled with a generous helping of plum jam (remember?), topped with a small mountain of ground poppyseeds and powdered sugar, swimming in a pool of melted butter and more poppyseeds. I, frankly, could do without all the butter, but the dumpling itself, yielding and chewy, and that plum jam, slightly sour and spiced, is seriously wonderful. You will be happy you left room for it.
The week in the Austrian mountains was wonderful. Concentrating on not breaking a leg or humiliating myself on the slopes was an excellent way to detach from regular life. Oh, and no access to the Internet seemed to help, too. What is it with snow-covered trees and their enchanting ability to seem like a gathering of silent and wise old men?
We stayed in a cozy little guesthouse run by a family that also runs one of the restaurants on the top of the nearby mountain, providing hungry skiers with plenty of fried potatoes and steamed dumplings and other Austrian comforts. There were delicious meals every night (each dinner started with a different soup, made with homemade stock cooked fresh every day, beef bones and turnips a-bobbing), adorable little girls who poked their heads into the dining room and ran off giggling when spotted and the sound of a rushing brook next to the nearby road at night.
I didn't realize until we left how deeply soothed I felt. The mountains and the sky and the crrrsh crrrsh crrrsh of skis slicing through fresh snow reordered how my mind worked.
But coming home was good, too. I saw Berlin, with its cement gray skies and damp earth air, with eyes wide-open. People! Graffiti! Signs! Traffic! Buildings!
Lovely in its unloveliness. Gilded and sooty alike.
You can walk through some parts of Berlin and see a whole new city unfold in front of you. New streets, new bridges, a new identity entirely. And in other parts it looks like nothing has changed in thirty years, like there is still a Wall and melancholy swirling around empty fields underneath that metallic sky.
But you keep moving, because you must, there's more to see just around that corner and there are subways to take and dinner to cook and before you know it, it's snowing again. Great big fat snowflakes, gathering wetly on your sleeve. You pass Tiergarten, seemingly unchanged in a hundred years, and there they are, those wise old trees, bewhiskered with white, standing like sentries in the midst of this strange, interesting city. Silently watching us as we go.
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