Down, down, down, into the Berliner Unterwelt! Photo (cc) flickr user escpeapalumni

The meeting place was normal enough; if I hadn’t known what was going on beneath us and where we would spend the next hour and a half, I never would have guessed at what was just below the ground on which I stood.  Berlin’s Gesundbrunnen metro stop, both inside and outside, lacked the kind of dank, enthralling mystery that was waiting several stories beneath us in the Berliner Unterwelten.

Come on, quick! Now’s the time to get rid of players you don’t need and then go and get some new ones! Why? Because after the qualifying games for the Champions League and the European Cup, it’s clear that all the German teams involved have made it into the group phase of the continental competitions. There’s new money available, the first games are out of the way and decisions about location have been made: so now it’s a game of musical chairs, with Bremen hoping Silvestre will set down on their seat, Hannover wanting to tempt Hajnal from Dortmund, Wolfsburg grabbing Diego and Demichelis looking to sit down anywhere except at Munich – he doesn’t get along well with the trainer. Really, any team with ambitions to take the Champions’ League should be looking to sign him: after all, ex-Bayern defenders are as close as you can get to guaranteed title success (see Lucio at Inter Milan last season).

On a sunny day the view from the Hercules monument is spectacular. Photo (cc) flickr user andreasmarx

Once upon a time I had a friend, another fresh-off-the plane American ex-pat au pairing in Germany, who wanted to see the fairy tale road.  The Brothers Grimm, you see, had travelled all over Germany collecting local yarns and inspiration for the fairy tales that would make them famous worldwide.  The places where they had lived, worked, and visited comprise the fairy tale road.

The clock that, just maybe, had turned Cinderella’s coach into a pumpkin when it struck twelve and the city where the pied piper had played, she told me, were on the 600 kilometer route that runs from Hanau to Hamburg.  So one rainy Sunday morning we got up at 6 am, bought a Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket, and got on a regional train to Kassel, one of the most popular stops along the fairy tale road.

Have you ever had that kind of passive-agressive criticism packaged as praise? You know, kind of like: “So, what did you think of my game, coach?” “Well, all the goals we conceded are your fault: but apart from that, you were great!”

This kind of praising criticism is exactly the right tone for the first day of play in this new Bundesliga season. There were a lot of people looking forward to it: players, coaches, fans, all of them raring to go. Well, everywhere except at Schalke, where they were all at each other’s throats before the first whistle had been blown.

In Cologne's Qlosterstüffje, you can get a drink, a bowl of soup, and a game of nine-pin bowling in one place. Photo courtesy Qlosterstüffje

We had spent a quiet morning in Bingen, playing music to a smiling crowd of cafe goers and passersby on the Rhine.  From time to time a ship docked behind us, releasing enthusiastic groups of tourists onto the river banks to snap photos of the grape fields lining the hills across the water or of the castle perched just above them.  On a sunny day the Rhine moves, sparkling blue-green and silver in the light.  On a sunny day, this stretch of the Rhine is everything that the travel guide books promise.