#adamantium

...So where were we?

I got into Munich last night half an hour earlier than expected, because a wind from the west shouldered its way up to the butt of the plane and provided us with a serious tailwind (though gratefully no turbulence). Everybody was pleased.

After forty minutes or so on the S-bahn, I fetched up in my hotel room (at the Le Meridien, which is right across from the main station in Munich) kinda sore and aching, in various parts of me, but generally functional. Took one look at myself in the mirror, reflected that I looked even more like a duck than usual (because the swelling wasn't really that much better than earlier: it's too soon...) and took some more ibuprofen. There was no point in trying to eat, as my mouth hurt too much. I went down to the bar, had a glass of wine, and then (as it was now bedtime and my thoughts were on @petermorwood, since we'd last been here together) I asked the Bar Guy what Irish whiskeys they had behind the bar. ...They had Bushmills, which was acceptable, but nothing else. I talked to Bar Guy for a bit about Jamesons and Redbreast and Teelings (because that's what Peter would have done) and correctly described Tullamore Dew (as P. often did) as "Coca-Cola whiskey for tourists, the clueless, and those whose taste is in their mouths." (One of those Bored of the Rings moments he occasionally revived.) Then I knocked my single measure of Bush back and went to bed.

...Nearly eight hours of sleep without a (middle-of-the-night unsolicited) break. Nearly the best I've had since early May.

That said, as for the next morning:

Physical condition: mouth: OW. Knee that saved my nose from being broken: OW OW. ...Not seriously damaged in any way, but it's going to take gentle handling over the next week or so to avoid getting in further trouble. And just when I'm hoicking luggage around! Yay.

Why do the Powers that expect writers to make a serious difference in people's lives give us such fecking fragile hardware to deal with? I ask you. Dammit, we oughta be made of adamantium! Yet here we are—wait, y'all made us out of MEAT? (And it's not even sirloin!)

(eyeroll)

...My diagnosis is that the whole inside of the knee is outraged/inflamed due to the falling-down-on-it trauma, and—though by itself that's plainly not all that terrible—it's going to require time and coddling to recover. (eyeroll) Yeah, just what I've got available for it just now. (This is exactly what it was like when I fell down on a snowy incline in Leukerbad, that one time I was up there writing a Spider-Man novel—being careful to spare the laptop I was carrying as I went down—and the nice doctor at the sports medicine facility said to me, about my ankle, "So you need to stay off this for six weeks or so..." BWAHAHAHAHA: like that's realistically going to happen.

(sigh) Anyway. Got out of the hotel, headed over to the Big Station (which looks like hell during the current construction. Normally this would have been a broad panorama of shops and cafes and bars and whatnot, with tables outside them where you could watch ten or twelve tracks' worth of trains slide in and out. (@petermorwood loved this area dearly. One of his very favorite things in the world was getting a Cold Glass Of Whatever and perching himself behind a stand-up table here, and gazing at the Faraway Places With Strange-Sounding Names as they flipped up, one after another, on the big departures board... and as the trains going to them slid in and out.)

Right now, though, Münich Hbf looks like this. (I took the photo this morning.)

(I invite you to imagine what it looked like last night around 22:00, when I got in, with no other human beings in it: just a long sweep of grey concrete, grey hoardings, and vague distant industrial groaning noises from someplace or other. I didn't take a picture. What I saw depressed me too much—remembering the normal busy daytime conviviality of the place—and anyway, I was going to be somewhere more cheerful within seconds.)

Anyway: this morning, back into the big station, downstairs, and onto the S-Bahn over to München Ost station, where I had never been (but I knew in a vague way where it was). Got the wrong platform once (but that happens: stuff changes, and Deutsche Bahn has an app that alerts you to such things, And since I'd done my ticketing through the app, all that was fine). Went to the right place. Got on the right train. Had a bite of lunch. (Tomato soup and a roll. The roll was nice when I remembered to chew correctly. The soup was fine when I didn't get it into the not-yet-healed lip wound. OW OW OW OW mmmf ow.)

Headed for Innsbruck. Got there. Found the hotel (not hard, it's right across from the station) ...It is, to say it gently, a shoebox: and a kinda barren one. Some Ibis hotels over this way are lively. Maybe I've caught these guys on a bad weekend, but this does not appear to be one of the lively ones. (sigh) Doesn't matter: I'll be gone early.

Then went to a pizza-and-wine bar down in the station, and spent some time there making notes on something and otherwise watching people do what they do.

(sighing) Feeling a bit tired, as humoring the Temporarily Bum Knee has sapped a lot of energy that might've been useful for other things. Maybe an early night isn't a terrible idea. Tomorrow will mean getting out of here at 9:30ish, and a busy day thereafter as I start reporting on the Sterzing Dumpling Festival...)

We'll see how things go.

Texts From Superheroes