Careful What You Wish For

My reputation for gluttony has been bolstered yet again recently.

Whilst on business in Berlin, the light lunch that Ed was expecting turned out to be mash, sauerkraut and a pork hock which was about the size of small whale. In an e-mail to us a few days later, he told us that he'd wished I'd been there to help polish off this gargantuan feast! After briefly feeling affronted at this totally unwarranted attack on my lack of restraint, I mused that he might have given me a call at the time; I could have easily made it over there by closing time!

This reminds me of a similar incident when we were in Warsaw a few years ago. What seemed like a sensible way to spend half an hour, turned into a rollercoaster of emotions: embarrassment and fear through to vengeance and relief.

We were wasting time in the evening, waiting for our train to St. Petersburg (as one does), when we noticed an Irish pub. We marched in, sat down and ordered two large Guinnesses from the waitress. Replacing the word 'Guinness' with whatever variety of beer is on sale is normally sufficient for the Englishman abroad, but not on this occasion. As the waitress returned, we realised that we were about to become the cabaret, our turn being the ritual humiliation of the unwitting tourist. We should have noticed the evil glint in her eye as she left us: two more lambs to the slaughter.

What arrived at our table were two frankly colossal vats of Guinness and not of the highest quality either! The glasses must have contained at least two pints each; I'd like to say that Catherine could hardly pick hers up but that implies that I was doing better than she was. Other customers hid smirks behind their hands as they sipped their delicate little pints!

It then occurred to us that we might not be in a position to pay for this ocean of 'orrible Guinness. We were leaving the country in a couple of hours and had been diligently spending what zlotys we had left all afternoon. After a brief spell of reassuring ourselves that we might just be OK, followed by the ridiculous idea of doing a runner (along with full-to-busting backpacks), reality kicked in and I went in search of a cash machine.

On my return with the smallest amount of cash that I thought would cover the bill, Catherine informed me that the waitress had been getting a bit twitchy ever since I left, a few minutes earlier. Anyway, we got ready to leave and Catherine went to the toilet, leaving me to settle up. This whole European thing of being served at the table has never sat comfortably with me, so I lugged two backpacks to the bar and waited to pay.

At this point, the payoff for our mildly traumatic time in this fine establishment made it all kind of worthwhile. Catherine returned and stood by me at the bar, just as the waitress came back in and noticed that we were gone. The look on her face combined panic and anger, as her head spun round looking for us. After a dash to the door to see if she could catch us, she noticed us and adopted a casual 'I knew you were there all the time' air. Schadenfreude!

The wait at Warsaw's main station and the trip through Poland, Belarus, Russia and onto our hotel in St. Petersburg allowed us to witness eastern European state apparatus (both good and bad), extreme generosity, disgraceful acts of drunkenness and a vaguely menacing car journey. I'll leave all of this for another day; I bet you can't wait.

To finish off where we came in, Ed brought us back a couple of bottles of beer from Berlin on his return. One of them, Berliner Kindl, can only be described as a Martian green fluid. Astonishing, alarming even, though it was, it didn't go to waste. An acquired taste perhaps?