I notice this especially in train stations. When I arrived at the Hannover airport, I was instructed to take the train downtown and meet up with the blog team. I got to the terminal and found a huge shopping center with an unbelievable number of shops. And of course, it was the food stands that made me pause: the pastries, breads and sandwiches. Compared to our nightly Burger King, this was heaven.
But there seemed to be a stigma against these places. Nobody on the team ever wanted to eat at these places. We would always eat at a nice restaurant, like Maredo, a steak house, or the Block House, another fantastic steak house. Even in IFA, we spent most of our time eating at nicer restaurants, or at the hot dog stands. Same here, except instead of nice restaurants we would eat at the Burger King next door. At least in IFA we had a bar.
I wish someone had told me earlier that our CeBIT pass was also an unlimited ticket to use all public transportation in the city during the fair. One of the days I decided to take the train back to the hotel, instead of getting a ride from Bert. The whole time I'd seen nothing but highways. So I hopped on the number 8 train and headed downtown. It was nice to see the city itself. The train wasn't crowded, just filled with people heading to their hotels. The weather wasn't so great, however. Cold and drizzly.
I arrived at the main terminal in about 20 minutes and started too look around. I started off with a hot dog, and a beer (I still can't believe I can get a beer at a hot dog stand). Then I just walked around the city for a little while. Sadly, the cold and my upcoming sickness cut my visit short and I went back to the hotel.
Later that week, when I got to Berlin, I really tried some food. Lot's of food just seem to be bread with cheese. So I had that. Then there was a bread-with-cheese item that also had a hamburger in the middle of it. Very German, I thought. I walked around Berlin, and when I returned to the terminal I had a cappuccino with a Marzipan croissant. Beat that, Starbucks. I think my favorite food was this simple lump of cake, with cherry topping on it. It looked like a funnel cake, but completely solid.
Aside from these little shops, the few actual German meals I had were quite good. Surprisingly, they came from the cafeteria below the booth. We'd have noodles covered in a beef stew, or one time we had Schnitzel with potatoes and coleslaw. The best was some kind of meat in a crème sauce and a baked potato on the side. There was a strange sauce, something like sour cream, but much thicker and with a stronger taste, that was used to top the potato, and this was amazing.
So I guess I did eat more German food than I thought. That's the funny thing about traveling. Sometimes you want to experience another culture, but we've become so global that often that culture is my own. It takes some effort, and going out of the way, but you can find the local fare quite easily. After all, how many ways could you possibly eat a potato?
