Mainz, Germany

Bbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaagh!

Not even during my time in Thailand had I been woken up by the sound of an elephant trumpeting. Elephants? In Heidelberg? I wandered bleary-eyed over to the window and opened it to let the cool morning air clear the stuffy eau de dorm. And sure enough, there it was – a real life elephant, flicking a bucket suspended on a high wire with its trunk so that it made a pinging noise. Realisation dawned that I was looking out over the back of the zoo, which I had completely missed in the dark yesterday, and I sat there for a while to take in the view of the wildlife – zebras, deer, peacocks, storks and houses upon houses of chirping birds.

I spent an unremarkably functional day in Heidelberg, visiting a launderette (no elephants there, unfortunately), checking internet and finally heading on to the train station for my next destination further north, about which I was very excited. I had really wanted to arrive there by bicycle, but I was still feeling groggy, and I wanted to recover as quickly as possible for my planned journey northwards along the river Rhein.

The train pulled into the familiar Rheinland-Pfalz town of Mainz, where I had studied for two semesters way back in 1999/2000 at the Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet as part of my Physics degree. Unashamedly filled with nostalgia, I was looking forward to seeing how much the place had changed.

The train station, which they had been renovating back in 2000, had been transformed, with a big glass facade and more shops than you could shake a frankfurter at. I pedalled past still gliding Number 50 and 51 trams that used to ferry me to and from my student digs, wide-eyed down towards Schillerplatz, but was disheartened to find my favourite kebab shop had taken a turn for the worse and was now a “trendy clothes boutique”. Meeting the bank of the dirty Rhein river, I followed it along for quite a while until I hit the turnoff for the Mainz YHA.

Although I wasn’t wearing a small, studious-looking pair of glasses and chequered shirt like everyone else in the lobby, they still let me check-in. My dorm was empty; for the third night in a row, I was in no danger of socialising with Germans. I made myself at home and struck out again at dusk with only one thing on my mind: to visit the pub that brewed The Best Beer in the World…Ever.

After embarrassingly taking a short unintentional detour and having to ask a couple of locals to gently remind me where it was, I finally found my feet at the door of Eisgrub pub and stepped onto its hallowed turf. It was before 7pm on a weekday and yet its tables were either packed or labelled with “Reserved” signs. Near the back on the left I found a single table available, signalled a waiter and ordered a helles Bier.

I had been struck at how little Mainz had changed during the last ten years. The Plus supermarket was still a grubby little affair full of crates piled high of meat of suspect shape and origin as well as cheese you could re-sole your trainers with, and you still had to pay to go for a wee in the McDonald’s whether you were a paying customer or not. I wasn’t sure whether to be comforted by its familiarity or disturbed by the lack of development.

One thing I certainly was glad hadn’t changed was the taste of the beer I had before me. Ten years and it hadn’t changed a bit. And with good reason: how can you improve upon perfection?

To round the evening off I wandered a few doors down to the Irish Pub, a place I had occasionally frequented with some of the other Erasmus students at Mainz, but more to complete some great travelling circle rather than out of nostalgic reasons. On my last trip I had wandered into a random Irish bar in Manhattan only to find out the chap serving up the beer was the landlord of this very Irish Pub in Mainz when I had studied here. I relayed this story over a few Guinesses to the friendly chap now running the bar, Ciaran, who had taken the job and settled here after gigging here year-on-year as part of a band. Just as one travelling circle had closed, I felt another had opened – and I expect to randomly bump into Ciaran in an Irish Bar somewhere else in the world a few years down the line!