The chaos in London yesterday does strike me as a bit ridiculous, although I do recognise that we can’t be expected to own as many snow-ploughs as the Russians. And I certainly don’t advocate anyone blaming Boris, who is the bestest mayor in the history of the world ever and the only guy I would dump Babel for Something which did make me smile yesterday, however, was what happened to the US audit partner who was flying in specially to review my file.

His flight was scheduled to arrive at Heathrow early yesterday morning, but Heathrow was of course closed due to the bad weather. As a brief aside, it also made me laugh on BBC News 24 last night when they interviewed someone from Heathrow explaining that the problem was not that they didn’t have enough snow-ploughs, but more that there was so much snow they had nowhere to put it! Anyway, our audit partner had his plane diverted elsewhere. Midmorning he rang the office in a state of extreme agitation, explaining that he was in Scotland. We all became rather agitated too, imagining that he’d been flown to Aberdeen and would have a 12 hour train journey to reach us, throwing us out on every deadline we had worked so hard to achieve. Fortunately the audit manager had the presence of mind to ask him whereabouts in Scotland he was.

Cardiff.

Now really, it is unfair to laugh at that, because there are a lot of American states I might struggle to mark on a map. The manager explained to him that Cardiff was in Wales, and further that Wales was not part of Scotland, when this seemed to be creating further confusion. It is really a very simple matter to get from Cardiff to Birmingham on a train, all the more so because there was actually no snow in Cardiff, but for some reason the Powers-That-Be had decided that it we couldn’t possibly ask an American to catch a train. The plan had originally been for him to take a taxi from Heathrow to Birmingham – OMG, can you imagine how much that would cost?!! He therefore made valiant efforts to find a taxi prepared to take him to Birmingham from Cardiff. He failed, miserably. Apparently Welsh taxi drivers were somewhat averse to driving into England.

In the end, he hired a car and people attempted to give him directions from this end. He managed to find the M5 but went down it in the wrong direction and ended up in Bristol Worse, he didn’t realise that Bristol wasn’t Birmingham (well, they both begin with B!) and caused great confusion when he announced his arrival at my company’s office there. By the time he finally arrived in Birmingham it was gone half four in the afternoon, which meant he had a mere hour to review my audit file – hardly enough time to make any criticism at all

He was one angry guy though, having come from Denver, Colorado where they are accustomed to an awful lot more snow that we have here!

The flight across was pleasant enough, although cloudy so there wasn’t much of a view. Lufthansa provided the obligatory cheese sandwich, although it was far too early for it to seem an appetizing prospect. By ten we were hovering above Munich, and it was with extreme astonishment that I noticed as we came in to land that the ground beneath us was covered in a beautiful blanket of white Snow was indeed what was needed to make it a perfect wintry weekend, but I don’t think any of us had reasonably expected it, especially as it hasn’t been particularly cold in England of late.

The journey from the airport into Munich proper takes about fifty minutes on the S-bahn. The journey is normally a bit dull, the surrounding countryside being utterly flat, but the snow made the fields quite delightful and it passed in no time at all The airport itself was very Christmassy, having it’s own little market, but we were there so early in the morning that it hadn’t actually opened for business yet. It struck me at this point that I had managed to get all the way to Munich in the time it would normally take me just to get out of bed and have a bath on a Saturday morning

There was something comfortingly familiar about arriving into Munich Hauptbahnhof, despite the fact that it’s been the scene of many of our past railway-travelling disasters. At least we know where the baggage lockers are, although the very existence of baggage lockers in a station which is far, far bigger than even London Euston never ceases to be a source of amazement to me. We were starving hungry by this stage, and struck out into Munich to see what sort of exciting food the markets had to offer.

It was absolutely delightful to see Munich, a city which I have only ever visited on bright sunny days, covered in Christmas decorations. Everything was so much more tasteful and discreet than in Britain, the decorations plainer and less colourful but still attractive. The Christmas markets started at Stachus, where an enormous ice rink had been built on the site of what is in summer a striking fountain, and stretched all the way down the main street, into the famous Marienplatz and beyond. It was interesting to look at the stalls and assess how different they are to those which come to the UK purporting to be authentic German markets. There was far less food than there typically is in the UK, and more craftwork. I was also surprised by the number of stalls which were simply selling fruit

Anyways, we found a man who was selling delicious little Nürnberger sausages in rolls and treated ourselves to a few before heading down to the Schrannenhalle. If you’ve never been to the Schrannenhalle, I’m not really sure how to describe it. I believe that in a former life, the building used to be an undercover grain market. It’s certainly a big hall which had some sort of industrial usage in days gone by, and has recently been converted into an attraction for the people of Munich. There are a few shops of a crafty sort of nature inside it, but the main draw is the food. There are countless numbers of little restaurant outlets dotted around the edges of the building, with large open seating areas in between. It’s a good place to go on a date with someone whose taste in food is totally dissimilar to your own, because you can sit at any of the tables and order off any of the menus. So if you want to eat Italian whilst the person next to you wants to eat Chinese, it’s perfectly possible. Actually I ought to take Babel there!

This time we weren’t going for a full meal, of course, but rather just for coffee and I was very excited to be served my first latte macchiatto of the weekend. It may be that no one who reads this is entirely sure what a latte macchiatto is, because England seems to be peculiarly devoid of them. It’s not the same thing as a normal latte… I think the difference is something to do with the fact that the milk is steamed and then a small shot of espresso added to the top, and less espresso is used than in a typical latte so it would probably be good for strange people like Babel who don’t actually like coffee. The key feature for me is that you get it served in a beaker type glass without a handle and drink it out of a black straw. Some people are not a fan of drinking hot, vaguely coffee-like milk via a straw, but I find it quite addictive and sincerely lament the fact that it is not possible to such a think in Costas, or even my adored Caffe Nero Happily, latte macchiato is commonplace all over Germany, and so I have to make the most of my weekends abroad to drink as much as I can

Suitably fortified with caffeine, we walked back up to the vicinity of the Hauptbahnhof in order to find our hotel. I hadn’t been involved at all in the choosing of this, but I know my family had put a lot of thought into it because whilst the area around the station is certainly home to the cheaper hotels, there are a few dodgy streets and we once stayed in a hotel which contained artwork that would have been better suited to a brothel. Not that it bothered me, but some people have standards The Hotel Mark turned out to be the best hotel I have ever stayed in. The rooms were an adequate size, the bathrooms were clean, and the breakfast the next morning was plentiful. I have, however, stayed in many hotels with an adequately sized bedroom, a clean bathroom and plentiful breakfast, and that is not the reason this turned out to be my dream hotel. Oh no! You will have to wait to find out the reason later when I have got round to taking a photo of it

Having dumped our stuff at the hotel, we headed out once more to make the most of the rapidly diminishing daylight hours. Munich is fortunate enough to have an enormous public park called the Englischer Garten within easy walking distance of the city centre, and we were keen to see it in the snow. To call the Englischer Garten a park actually seems a travesty if you consider the scrubby bits of grass which go by the same name in this country. It’s a huge landscape garden, bigger than Central Park in New York, which has a river, waterfalls, areas for nude sunbathing and all kinds of weird and wonderful monuments including a Chinese Tower which in summer is home to a public beer garden. The most striking thing about the place in summer is the atmosphere; that is to say, it’s generally full of hundreds of very drunk Germans sitting in close proximity… and not glassing each other.

In winter it was something else entirely. The Germans don’t seem to share our paranoia about gritting pavements, so the walkways were all rather slippery, but it was worth the little frissons of tension when you thought you were going to fall flat on your face in a patch of ice for the excitement of seeing the garden covered in snow. Once we finally got to the centre we found a delighted Christmas market, very family orientated and nowhere near as hectic as the main market in the city centre. We managed to buy some authentic Lebkuchen which were thoroughly delicious and not at all like the things they flog in Aldi

By now darkness was falling. My mother was loathe to walk the whole way we had come back across the park, so my sister devised a clever route out the other side and round the outskirts. It was somewhat longer than the direct route though, and by this time I was really starting to feel the cold. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold in my life as I was this weekend, and that includes time I’ve spent in Switzerland walking in the snow! It was mostly definitely subzero, by virtue of the fact that the snow wasn’t melting, and despite the fact that I was not only wearing a jumper and two coats, but also a hat and gloves, I spent most of the weekend shaking in a somewhat uncontrollable manner. So it was that we decided we needed to go inside somewhere to get a proper meal and a blast of central heating

Fortunately we remembered an Italian restaurant which we’d eaten in during a prior visit to Munich and which does very good pizza. The waitress there was very friendly and complimented us all on our German We lingered as long as we could in the warmth before setting out once more; this time our mission was to visit a Mediaeval market which my mother had read about on the internet. It took a bit of finding but we got there in the end and it was worth it because it was so totally different to any of the other markets we had seen. I wasn’t so interested in the various crafty things which were on display, but there was a really cool atmosphere; in one corner there was a hog roast, in another there was a gluehwein tent selling the drink in mugs which wouldn’t have looked amiss during a banquet at the Round Table, and right at the end were a couple who put on a spectacular display of dancing with and eating fire

We took the opportunity to drink some gluehwein while we were there, and that definitely helped to warm me up. The markets actually don’t stay open too late, so we were back in the hotel and thinking about going to bed by ten. It wasn’t the best night’s sleep we’d ever had because there seemed to be a coach party of tourists making a lot of noise in the hotel bar until the early hours, but I was so tired after the early start that I was able to doze through most of it and felt almost refreshed when the alarm started going off at 7 am the next morning…