Annual Return Of The Expat: Enter ‘The Village’

Every summer, I migrate back to my point of origin for the duration of around 10 days. This is the optimum time span (and it took me almost a decade to figure this out) to enjoy gorging myself on ice cream servings whose dimensions are roughly equal to a child’s tricycle and gaze at panoramic mountain views without wanting to throw myself under a tractor. Once, I did a three-week-stint… bad mistake. I won’t elaborate.

Anyway, yesterday, after an 11 hour schlepp (lots of waiting time due to inopportune connections), I had made my way ‘home’. The airport put on a five-star welcoming ceremony:

Below, I give you a first glimpse of The Village at dusk:

View from my mum’s balcony – yes, there’s a maypole and, to the left of it, you can see my granny’s little yellow house

As you’ll have tweaked by now, The Village and I have a fraught relationship. It sure was great while I was a kid. My friends and I roamed the fields and meadows and we ruled the farmers’ barns – nothing more fun than climbing high up onto the rafters and leaping off into a fresh pile of fragrant hey, petting new born calves’ slimy pink noses and being chased up plum trees by vicious gaggles of geese.  OK, the latter wasn’t all that much fun, but you get the picture.

As a teenager, though, being trapped in The Village was hell. Its not much more than a hamlet, really, home to just over 600 souls. NOTHING to do, a bus every couple of hours until the lock-down at 7pm…

In order to stay vaguely sane, I read a couple of thousand books until, aged 19, my escape plan came to fruition and I leapt onto a plane bound for London. I didn’t return to The Village for three years. We needed a stand off.

My friends have heard me talk about The Village, and finally, courtesy of this blogging shenanigans, they’ll get the chance to see it for themselves.

Apart from being so very small, it’s a typical Bavarian village – not of spectacular bucolic beauty, but not terribly ugly either. I just want all of you to bear in mind that, no matter what you see in the pictures I’ll be uploading over the coming days, somewhere in my heart, it actually looks like this:

[This is a ‘real’ dungeon in Toledo 🙂 No longer in operation, though.]

If you’d like to see some more photos from The Village, click here.