Mushrooms in the Market, Pilgrims in the Pub

On our way out of Kempten this morn­ing we noticed a local mar­ket in the square, so we took a turn to see what was on offer. For me the most excit­ing dis­cov­ery was the heaps of local fall mush­rooms, Pfif­fer­linge (chanterelles) and Stein­pilze (porcini). They’ve been adver­tised on menus and restau­rant signs but I’d never actu­ally found them for sale before. Our cook­ing options are lim­ited to a lit­tle butane stove and some non­stick cook­ware, but mush­rooms don’t take much work. The guy at the mar­ket booth even cut me a good deal on the price.

From there we passed through the long sub­urbs on our way out of town and ever closer to the loom­ing Alps. We went a fair bit up (not quite as far down) today, though it was mostly grad­ual. Vil­lages are some­times as tiny as one or two houses, or one big farm. The corn and other crops have van­ished; only cows with their tin­kling bells grow here. We cir­cum­am­bu­lated a sub-sub-alpine lake, enjoy­ing the mild sunshine.

Around 1:30 we finally came into a town large enough to have a Gasthof and looked for­ward to a hearty lunch—only to find out that Wednes­day is Ruhetag, the restaurant’s day off. This is one of those cul­ture shock things that is prob­a­bly most griev­ous to Amer­i­cans, who can’t help but expect every­thing to be open always except, per­haps, on Sun­day morn­ings. Our mush­rooms needed a thor­ough wash­ing so that wasn’t an option, so we made do on bread and cheese and more choco­late than was ulti­mately appe­tiz­ing, which over 27 km and up 400 m was far from ideal. The weather also turned cold and ter­ri­bly windy. We were extremely relieved to find an open restau­rant on our arrival in Mis­sen this evening and enjoyed a lot of meat and veg­eta­bles to coun­ter­bal­ance all that bread and cheese. (Mush­rooms will be on the menu tomorrow.)

One charm­ing thing about your lit­tle neigh­bor­hood Gasthof in Ger­many is that every­body who comes through the door greets the din­ers already there with a “Grüss Gott!” and every­body who leaves issues a gen­eral “Tschüss!” on the way out. The peo­ple next to us inquired whether we were hik­ers and we told them about our pil­grim­age, and pretty soon the whole Gasthof was lis­ten­ing in, so we had a nice gen­eral con­ver­sa­tion going about it—amazed once again both by the fact that all Ger­mans know who Mar­tin Luther is, and that none of them seem alarmed by the fact that we’re doing some­thing reli­gious. It was indeed a cheery Tschüss to and by all when we left.

Paul Hinlicky says:
September 15, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Enjoy those mush­rooms tomor­row! Stein­pilz is the equiv­a­lent, I believe, of the King Bolete in the USA, of which I found three per­fect spec­i­mens thus far this sea­son. Love, DAD
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Steve Godsall-Myers says:
September 15, 2010 at 11:07 pm
It’s great to hear another tale of Gast­fre­undlichkeit! and to see another pic­ture of the Alps — really stun­ning! “Ich hebe meine Augen auf zu den Bergen — woher kommt mir Hilfe?” Luther’s trans­la­tion of Ps 121, a Song of Ascents. God bless you as you make your ascents in the next days. Steve Godsall-Myers
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