Stereotypes

Rrrring! Rrring!

It is 11pm on Saturday night and I am sitting in one of Frankfurt's most popular Apfelwirtschafts, or cider pubs. The room is packed to the rafters as students, tourists and locals cosily share communal benches, all equally contributing to the genial atmosphere and consuming the potent local apple brew poured freely from traditional oversized ceramic jugs.

Let's get fruity, Fräulein...

By this stage of the proceedings, my Czech customers and I have consumed the fruit of enough apples' labour to have ditched sales forecasts and credit crunches in favour of football and bad jokes. The business meeting is going well.

Rrrring! Rrrrring!

I am the first to spot the source of the shrill noise, although my mind struggles to compute the strange data relayed by my eyes. A man has just walked into the pub. He is wearing a white cloth cap, baker's apron and a pair of wonderfully snug lederhosen. Perched on his upper lip, a spectacular handlebar moustache with the wingspan of an adult albatross nearly takes out an old lady's eye as he ventures further inside the venue. I suspect this gentleman may be German.

Over his right arm, he is proudly carrying a large wicker basket that is clearly heavy. A pretty white lace tablecloth hides the contents from view, but his vigorous thumbing of the bicycle bell strapped to the handle tells me that this mystery will be short-lived.

Rrring! Rrrrring!

'Warm pretzels, sesame loaves, poppyseed rolls! Fresh bread, get your fresh bread here! Pretzels, fresh pretzels!', he shouts to the room menacingly.

This is truly mindblowing.

The Czechs have never seen anything like this either, and the three of us sit in stunned silence for half a minute before I realise that my jaw appears to have relocated to the floor. The scene is so painfully German that I half expect a band of singing bratwursts to jump onto our table and burst into an almighty rendition of 'Deutschland Überalles'. I pause to think of the reaction this most stereotypical Helmut, Wolfgang or Dietmar would get at the Dog & Pheasant in downtown Scunthorpe, and quicky stop. The images are too painful.

My initial laughter and disbelief swiftly transform into respectful admiration as one eager and hungry customer after another stands up around the room like a family of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.

Ein Pretzel, bitte schön!

He bounds jauntily from table to table, selling his doughy wares with great enjoyment. One third of his goods is sold in less time than it takes to invade Poland and he makes for the door, departing with a hearty 'Guten Abend!' bellowed at the room. This is both insane and hilarious.

This is Europe.

From the morning espresso rituals taking place in bars across Milan to the so-very-French baguette-wielding mothers walking their children to school in Paris, such wonderful scenes of everyday European life are the very essence of this astonishing continent. Through my much-maligned job, I am lucky to be in a position to witness and appreciate on a regular basis how intricately woven these rich and varied cultures are.

I walk out of the pub with a smile on my face and enough vitamin C in me to ward off scurvy until Judgement Day itself.

This Saturday, my business travels take me to Amsterdam and Utrecht in the Netherlands, where I fully expect clog-wearing prostitutes in bright orange dungarees to offer me a joint and an edam sandwich on every street corner. One can but hope...