Monschau or More Like Manchow: The Story Begins

There is a strong mental connection that exists between my mind and food. Whenever I come across a foreign or difficult-to-pronounce words, I associate them with similar sounding food items. The first time I came across the name of this place, I associated it with manchow soup. Sure this soup is a piece of art, but this little town is spellbinding as well. For people who don’t know what manchow soup is, any search engine is your best friend while for Monschau, I am (Alt + F4 and naruto run). I was lucky enough to be able to visit this place for two winters and a summer. Why the second winter you ask? Just to make sure Monschau is doing alright (nature has feelings too, sometimes a bit extreme).

The first time I had been to this place was three weeks before Christmas, when the Christmas markets were up and running. I went along with two of my batchmates, and that was probably the last time that I had gone on a trek with more than one batchmate (I would like to think that they don’t like to hike, and it wasn’t me). Thinking back at this particular scenario, I understand that I am an entirely different person during hikes. And the second trekking lesson that I learnt was that not to expense energy on conversations, especially load fellow hikers with personal experiences. There is a very minute chance that they would want to go on a hike with you later. Following which most of my hikes were alone or in larger groups. Now, let us get back to our little story. We took a rather comfortable bus from main bus station to Monschau Parkhaus which lasted close to one and half hours. It is advisable to keep tabs on the bus timings to return back, since they only ply about an hour once. This valuable piece of information was not known to us back then, and we had to learn it the hard way. Remember from my first blog that I repeated the same mistake of not wearing proper attire to a trek? Well it was this one. Some people just don’t learn from their mistakes.

Now take a moment and marvel at such breath-taking beauty (not my profile photo, but a bird’s view of Monschau). If this hasn’t convinced you enough, perhaps my later snaps and a little sad story will. Feel free to skip the little sad story and only see the snaps. But for the others, the little sad story starts with three guys who land in Monschau after their uneventful one and half hours travel. To truly explore a place, one needs to take an off-beaten streets, and that’s what we did. That is why I took the liberty to place this trip under a trek even though we were not exploring the woods much. We explored little alleys where residents gave us the stares and threw tantrums at us. Just kidding, these alleys were deserted, almost felt like a ghost town. And when we got to the centre of this tiny town, we were overwhelmed with people. We should have stuck with the little alleys, but then we would not be able to experience the Christmas spirit with all joyous faces chugging down their drinks.

Before heading in, we decided to reach the panoramic point before it gets dark and the vampires come out (Twilight made us lose all the respect we had for vampires). The climb looked the least challenging with well drawn out steps, which a 60 year old me would be easily able to climb. When we reached the top, we observed an abandoned fortress much above us located after a snow perched path. Being adventurers and true sons of nature, we decided to get closer to the fortress. When I started climbing, I realized that my shoes were definitely not meant for the snow. But confident me, kept climbing until we reached the fortress. Was the fortress worth the climb? Definitely not. We came to realize why it was abandoned, there was nothing in it or in its surroundings. Down slope on a snow perched path with inappropriate shoes are the closest you can get to have an one last ride. How close you ask me? I basically skid my way down, and was lucky enough to fall down and not fall off the end point. Maybe I am making it sound like I was some kind of a superhero, but it looked more like dumb ways to die commercials. But, karthigeyan, where is the sad part of this story? Well, here it is (sad violin noises), the traditional drink for Christmas by the name of “Gluhwein” contains alcohol. Remember when I told you that A1 (Beginner level) in German would not be very helpful, but here it was wein == wine (mind blown, IQ++). But there was a shimmer of hope left for me, this story does not have to end in such a melodramatic undertone, they also offered kinderpunsch, which was a non-alcoholic alternative (jumps up and down in excitement). If your beginner level in German does not help you here, you are a lost cause like me. After carefully analysing this complex word for few seconds, I finally cracked the code. One has to break this word into two smaller words, kinder + punsch which would be kid (child) and mix or punch. No, I know what you are thinking, they are not making juice mixes out of children, but rather fruit mixes meant for children. The sneakiest part about it is that, it looks almost exactly like gluhwein. So feel free to have multiple shots of kinderpunsch and act drunk, nobody is stopping you. You do you buddy!

But honestly, I liked the taste of it, and it offered the necessary warmth for the cold. After looking at endless stores of candies, woollen wear and eateries, we decided to call it a day and headed to the bus stand. If you remember my advice in the beginning, it was because we narrowly missed the bus, and had to wait for the bus for an hour. Well, the problem is, it was insanely cold, and for the whole time in Monschau, I did not wear my gloves since the photographer in me wanted to take some non-blurry photos. The result you ask me? My hands became numb, so numb that I could not open my bag to keep my camera inside. After some help from my fellow nature lovers, I was able to not freeze like an inanimate object. And there cometh the bus, and we headed back home. Since this blog went long enough, I would continue my summer adventure here in the next blog. No worries, it would not take a season for me to write it, perhaps a few days.