Dinner in Zell am See

After a long journey on trains from Munich to Salzburg and then again changing trains to get to Zell am See, the big topic of discussion, once we have checked into our hotel, was what we were going to do for dinner. 

There are many options. One option was to head out to the local bar where clearly it seemed everyone who was awake at 9pm was hanging out and there was loud music playing and the kitchen promised to be open till midnight. The second option was to go to the Basmati restaurant and savour the local version of Indian cuisine served out for Europeans by people from the Middle East. And then there was the option of going down to the local Billa convenience store and picking up a couple of bottles of wine some sandwiches, some salads and yoghurt, and heading back to the room to enjoy dinner in the lap of luxury the warmth of being  amongst friends. 

We thought about what might be expensive and what might be cheap, we thought about what might be tiring and what might be relaxing, we thought about what might be fast and what might take a long time, but most importantly we thought about what would help to get our bowels moving in the morning. And so as we sprawled on the carpet in our room sharing a salad and eating it with our hands because we couldn’t find a fork, and sipping wine from from tea cups because there were no wineglasses, we marvelled at the fact that we were enjoying Bavarian wine at Rs.500 a bottle, that roughing-it-out could be so relaxing.

As we all turned in for the night in under the fresh duvet covers we looked forward to the ride from Zell to Salzburg that promised to be “mostly downhill , and to the outcome of chewing lots of green leafy vegetables early next morning.