A funny thing happened on the way to Munich.
The story starts some 42 years ago, I guess, when I was supposed to go there on a family holiday in December 1981, except I went for surgery instead. The trip never happened.
Then I nearly ended up in Munich by accident in July 2012. I had been covering Oscar Pistorius running his final 400m race ahead of the London Olympics in the Italian town of Lignano, on the Adriatic coast.
From there I had to get to Monaco where the South African swimmers were camped and where Caster Semenya was competing in a Diamond League meet.
I was travelling by rail and I went to the ticket office to arrange my trip, which entailed several train switches.
The unsmiling lady behind the counter looked at me blankly when I told her my destination, Monaco.
I wasn’t sure why she didn’t understand me so I pronounced it differently, enunciating the A like I would in “cat”, and then I used the ol’ schwa “uh” sound and even tried the “fart” variation.
Her befuddlement continued and my panic grew. Was I actually going to get out of here?
“Monte Carlo! Prince Albert, Princess Charlene,” I offered. Still nothing.
I tried Monaco again and her eyes dimly flashed something that resembled recognition and she set about working out my trip and printing out tickets.
Several minutes later she handed me a clump of tickets, still refusing to offer even a hint of a smile. My relief quickly turned to dread as I flipped through them, realising that she had booked me to München, the German name for Munich.
I was momentarily tempted to keep quiet and just go 800km off-course rather than engage this autocratic bureaucrat again.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to seem as sincere as I could. “Not München, I’m going to Monaco.”
She glared at me as if I were a turd that had been flung onto her counter.
“It’s not Monaco,” she spat at me. “It’s Monaco.”
Her two pronunciations were almost identical, and not much different to the way I had said it, leaving me even more astounded as to how she confused that for Munich. I reckon even Henry Higgins would have been stumped.
Luckily she deigned to print out another set of tickets and I eventually got to Monaco.
Fast forward another 11 years and I finally arrived in Munich last week for the BMW International Open golf tournament. The sponsor arranged one of its luxury cars to drive us to our hotel.
On the ride I recounted the story of my mysterious Monaco misunderstanding to my colleague from SuperSport, OG Molefe, and, by pure coincidence it turned out that the driver happened to come from Lignano.
“In Lignano,” he explained, “we call Munich Monaco di Bavaria. But it is only there that it is called that.”
And so ended my long-standing Monaco mystery of why the ticket lady got confused.
But then a funny thing happened in Munich.
I must point out that the cars we were ferried in between the hotel and the golf course were electric. A fully charged battery travels more than 500km and the engine still packs plenty of punch. For petrol heads feeling lost in the silence of the new technology, there’s an option to add various modes of vroom vroom.
This is German engineering at its finest.
On the first day of the tournament a thunderstorm rolled in and the media liaison told us we had 10 minutes to vacate the media centre, a double-storey temporary structure erected solely for the event. Apparently it wasn’t safe in there during an electrical storm.
Now that was a surprise to me.
I’ve covered golf tournaments at Sun City, sitting in similar looking temporary structures while lightning bolts rain down around us, without a care in the world.
Journalists aren’t tossed out like wilted cabbage leaves.
I guess it’s possible that local organisers aren’t worried if we hacks get fried to a cinder, but I suspect the unthinkable is the more likely scenario — that when it comes to the engineering of temporary structures, South African tops German.
Who woulda thunk?
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