My kingdom for a wine opener

June 2, Thursday. The International Women’s Club had an outing to the Bavaria Film Studio. I decided to go pretty last minute but there was room for me to join along. The Film Studio is in the lovely town of Grunwald, coincidently where Bruce & Barbara live. It is bordered by the Isar river, and seems to be equivalent to Los Altos Hills, by the looks of the houses.

So getting there involved yet another bit of the great public transportation, the Tram. I took the S-Bahn to Rosenheimer Platz, then the 25 Tram to Grunwald. (That’s the reason I meet Barbara at Rosenheimer Platz when we’re heading out together, it’s where she first gets to the S-bahn system.) It’s fun to ride the tram, which does run on tracks up the middle of the street. You get to see a lot – I passed the Pauliner Brewery and some great looking restaurants that I will explore later.

There was a group of 10 from IWC taking the tour. We were early, so I got to meet a new set of folks – the only person who’d been at the cooking event that week was Barbara. One of the great things about IWC is that the membership is truly international. 2 of the women on the Film Studio tour were German, a couple from the UK, one from Italy.

The studio is pretty big. It seems they mostly do TV now, but they did film ‘Enemy Mine’, ‘Das Boot’ and ‘Neverending Story’ there. We got to tour bits of sets from all three. The submarine set from Das Boot was so small & cramped I don’t know how they got cast and crew into it.

The tour ended at about 1:00, and we all dispersed back to our public transit. That was rough, coming back to the empty apartment and realizing that my friends are all thousands of miles away. (I think I curled up & sucked my thumb for a bit.) I did talk with Barbara again by phone that afternoon; she had been planning to go into Munich to renew her & Bruce’s residence permit; but she didn’t have his passport so she couldn’t. Everyone living in Germany registers with their local city; non-Germans also get residence permits. We are just starting this process, and I wanted to follow along as she renewed theirs so I got a better idea of what to do for us. But that will have to wait.

I really wanted some wine, and there’s a tempting bottle of Prosecco in the fridge BUT our stuff isn’t here yet. The apartment is furnished and has some kitchen things, but the wine opener is this tiny little corkscrew in the shape of an old fashioned key. The top of it, where you hold to pull out the cork, is about the size of a quarter. I need more leverage than that! I just couldn’t make it work. I looked around for something to poke the wine cork down into the bottle, even picked up a knife but decided that was a really bad idea when I don’t yet know the words for “I’m bleeding, send an ambulance!” Back to sucking my thumb.