As you may have read, day 6 was a busy one, full of walking around historic towns before ending up in a lovely hotel after a few beers in Mannheim on a Friday night. It probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise that we all managed to get a terrific sleep and woke up feeling fresh and full of beans. As you can see below, it left me plenty of time to contemplate the journey while lounging on our balcony!
The more detailed readers may have spotted that we got no evening meal yesterday and so maybe this was the early stages of insanity caused by hunger kicking in! So we made our way about two minutes up the road to the Edgar Seitz Bakery where we were spoiled by the range of cakes and pastries on offer. I sat in the window seat and watched the world go by and enjoyed listening to the locals pop in for a chat and their morning bread. That’s a tradition I love about European types.
It was about 11 o’clock when we got back to the car and I was happy with the lazy pace — it was a Saturday after all. The first and only shock of the day in terms of driving was at the exit of the car park. Someone had placed a sticker over the little button that you needed to press to get out and the image on it was a close up of a sphincter muscle, so in order to get out and onto the open road, I had to push an arsehole. Smashing.
It was a three hour drive up to Aachen from Mannheim, our chosen stop off point for the day, leaving us perfectly placed on Sunday to go anywhere we fancied in Belgium, Germany or Holland for our last full day.
When we arrived in Aachen, it felt like a proper town and by that I mean that it had the proper number of people in the centre to make it look and feel alive. We made our way to the underground car park, just over the road from the hotel, and we struck lucky with the parking space number.
We grabbed our bags and made the short walk over to the hotel, right through the middle of a Palestine march which was interesting to say the least! I have never had a police escort to my hotel before!
The hotel was a chain, B&B Hotels, and smack in the centre of town. It had the feel of a hotel that was built for weekends away in a party town and it was perfect for us. It was clean, modern and functional and had lots of vending machines for midnight snacks, forgotten toiletries and ‘extras’ for those that had got a bonus on the night out.
We didn’t hang around in there long enough as we had a mission on! It was the first day of the English Premier League season and Sunderland were back. We couldn’t miss that!
We had a little walk through town and it was not the prettiest of town centres, but we picked our way through the shops looking for gifts to take home while keeping an eye on suitable pubs or sports bars that might be able to feed our football addiction.
Boy child was looking for a coffee grinder — 18-year-old kids have changed a little since I was a lad — and so we made our way to a coffee shop that looked like it might be able to help him out. As we came out, without a coffee grinder, we spotted a bar with TV screens showing sports. We couldn’t work out what it was exactly, but we headed over like a moth to a light.
And so we found ourselves at the door of a bar called Poststübchen and we bumped into a guy at the door who asked what we were looking for as we craned our necks to check out the screens on the wall. Boy child asked if there was any chance of showing the English football and he looked us up and down, checking us out, and said “€30 a head.”
I laughed and said, “I’d pay double that.” Bargaining has never been a strong point of mine, but he could sense we were decent folks, not football louts, so he relaxed massively.
He smiled and asked which team we wanted to see and boy child told him that we were Sunderland fans. He thought for a minute and just said, “Granit Xhaka?” “Yes,” said the boy and made the double-eagle hand gesture that Granit is known for, representing the Albanian flag, his home country.
That was us set for the day. We were lucky enough to have found a bar, showing football, owned by an Albanian football fan living in Aachen. Some say we are lucky…..I say we make our own luck! So there we were, perched on a table, with beers flowing while we watched the game on the big screen as the locals watched their local team compete in the German equivalent of the early rounds of the FA cup.
It’s not a sports blog so let me keep it simple. My expectation was that Sunderland would fail heroically, that is what we are famous for, but we managed to win 3-0 against long-established Premier League side West Ham United.. Safe to say, our mood was buoyant.
The owner was great company throughout the game, loving how involved in the game we were and, as the beers sank, the mood lifted, inhibitions dropped and I started to sing songs of happiness. The locals initially thought I was mad and I realised that I was imposing on their afternoon and so I bought a round of drinks for the locals and for the bar staff. THAT was how happy I was.
We chatted with a guy who had visited England a number of times and he seemed delighted for us to have had such a good day and certainly seemed to appreciate the drinks we had stood him for. The only issue was that he decided to return the compliment and so, on top of too many beers, we had another beer.
Such a great bar with great people. It is a memory that will stay with us for a long time. But we physically couldn’t take any more alcohol and so we said our goodbyes and made our way back to the hotel.
The effects of that ‘one beer too many’ hit me in the fresh air of the street and I was singing loudly while trying to walk straight down the street. Daughter child had to grab me by the arm at this point and warn me that I was a) being a tit and b) scaring the locals. This sobered me up a little, being the responsible adult and that, and so I said we should aim for food as soon as possible to soak up the worst of the beer.
We ended up in a place called Blond Et Döner Kebab. I have checked on Google Maps since and it was in a straight line from pub to hotel. That is the only reason we would have picked this place. It was the sort of place that you should only really go into after 2am and I felt like by going mid afternoon we missed out on a decent fight.
In the time it took between ordering and the food arriving, it could have been two minutes, it could have been two hours, the full effect of all that beer on an empty stomach had kicked in. I was struggling, to the point that I missed the excitement of daughter child watching a mouse/rat run across the shop floor and underneath the seats. I was glad I did as I was not going to be put off my food.
I couldn’t tell you if it was good or bad, I could hardly tell which way up was at this stage to be honest. The last memory I have was the boy child singing a football chant in the middle of the street, recording himself on his phone with a police car and two Dutch policemen laughing at him in the background. No harm, no foul.
We walked, more like stumbled, back to the hotel and said we would have a quick rest before going out for the night. Not a chance. We woke up just before midnight and the only thing we could do is get our teeth brushed and back to bed.
Not a tourist day, but an unforgettable day.
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