I need to talk about the food.

When I touched down in Germany, Kathrin met me at the airport. I think I saw her first, and we hugged for a good long time. She was so good to me. She helped me let my parents know I was with her and safe, and insisted on carrying my backpack for me, and guided my sleep-deprived, travel-weary self through the airport halls and train stations and buses and dark, rainy streets of Münster and up the many flights of stairs to home.

She also gave me food.

The first thing I ate when I got there was a homemade Snickers bar from one of her roommates. It was sticky and gooey and nothing like a Snickers bar, and it was perfect.

Then there was a plain joghurt (yogurt) drink, and a Turkish pastry wrapped in paper with sheep’s cheese and spinach and pine nuts on the inside. I’d been living on coffee and cheap snacks for too many hours, and it was soo good. Everything was.

Her apartment smelled like someone had just finished cooking with spices, and other smells that I liked but couldn’t identify. I later gathered that I was probably picking up on a mixture of scented candle smoke and possibly hops and weed.

On my first night there, close to midnight, I sat at the kitchen table while Kathrin stood at the stove and minded a frying pan, with her hair tied up in a floppy bun.

Kathrin had just gotten back from her own adventures in Italy, and had brought back peppers and greens and garlic that grew there. She mixed them with chickpeas – she told me they’re called “giggling peas,” in German.

Kathrin loves cooking the way my brother-in-law loves beer, the way my little sister appreciates anything that can be loosely interpreted as even a little gay.

That was the first warm, home-cooked food since shepherd’s pie at the kitchen table with my mom, dad and little sister. The vegetables from Italy were a wonderful beginning, and afterwards I went to bed and slept for hours.

That was the first night.

In the following days, no small part of experiencing Münster was trying the food.

Several days a week, there is a food market in the cobblestone square by the Dom – the church in the center of Old Town, Münster. It’s crowded, and colorful, and smells amazing – like fish and bread and cake and cheese and meat and strawberries and fresh orange juice and street food. That first morning, with Kathrin, I tried sausage and saur kraut and fried potatoes. Later, there would be cheese and apple cider and sausages and ham. She ran into a friend she knew on the other side of a vegetable stall, and they exchanged hugs. Later, that friend ran over and brought us a paper dish of pistachio ice cream.

Kathrin works in the kitchen at the Hafenkäserei, the harbor cheese factory. I first visited during a party after the whole crew met to discuss the menu for the fall. She stood up at the end of the table and said “this is my cousin from America,” and I sat in a corner and tried to blend into a wall for awhile until the shyness thawed.

I’d never had Pizza & Beer before and I immediately understood why that is a thing.

Specifically, I tried a radler, which I found out is essentially like bubbly fruit juice with a bitter aftertaste and a roughly 2% alcohol content.

A few days later, I found my way back to the cheese factory

(left out of the apartment, left and then another left onto the promenade, left at the statue of a giraffe, through the intersection, under the bridge, right at the apothecary with the rainbow over the door, left towards the golden tree at the intersection with the pizza place on the corner, straight past the water, left into the driveway and you’re there)

and I sat at the bar and I tried a fried cheese ball and cheesy soup and bread and a salad with lemon dressing and a mango sorbet for dessert. I think there was peppermint tea, afterwards, and then I biked home and went to sleep.

The first phrase I learned how to say out of necessity was “Ich hätte gern ein Kaffee mit mich, bitte.” (I would like a coffee with milk, please.) At first I was shy and quiet and most people couldn’t hear me, much less understand my broken German. I became more confident with time.

I’d eaten sort-of-gluten-free for years and years, because for various reasons that’s how my family eats, at home. I’d decided that in Germany I would experiment with not worrying and just trying things. For one thing, in most of Europe the growing of wheat crops is done without some of the methods practiced in America that make my mother worried.

And so it was here that I re-discovered bread.

Not just the pre-sliced, whole wheat bread of my childhood, or the crumbly homemade gluten-free alternatives we sometimes make at home. Round rolls that were crusty on the outside and covered in seeds. Thick, triangular wedges, layered like pastries, that melted like butter in your mouth. I went to town in the bakeries, for a while there, and I don’t regret a thing.

Grocery shopping in another language, much less with a different currency, was fascinating for me.

When I met Kathrin’s mother, I fell asleep on the couch while mother and daughter cooked greens and squash and lamb chops for dinner. We talked about astrology over quark with applesauce for dessert.

When I left Münster and visited other places, I found that each city had its own signature dish. Amsterdam offered waffles, sandwiched together with syrup inside. Hamburg’s tradition is called Lobskaus, fried eggs and pickled herring served with a mash of beets and potatoes and arugula. Allegedly, sailors used to eat this dish to cure hangovers. Prague served a cylindrical fry-bread called Trdeník. In Kraków, street vendors on every corner solid a pretzel-like bread twisted into the shape of a ring the size of a dinner plate.

At almost every hostel, I made myself a frying pan of vegetables – peppers, onions, mushrooms, greens. Cooking helped me feel at home, and centered, and I think it was probably good for me.

At every hostel that served breakfast, I would stuff rolls and fruit and hard-boiled eggs in my pockets, while the staff looked the other way.

In Oświęcim, after visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau, I needed a little chocolate. I threw a small piece into the woods, to say thank you to the company that walked with me and got me through that day.

In the train stations on the way back to Kathrin, I slipped into a pattern of Starbucks and McDonalds that had never been a lifestyle of mine before then. It got me through for a little while, but I missed the good stuff, the things that don’t taste the same every time you eat them.

I’ve just landed back in Münster. Today I got coffee with Kathrin, and she was surprised at the confidence with which I ordered my coffee and orange juice. Apparently I also agreed to try oat milk by mistake, but that’s okay with me. We also split a bagel with onions and cream cheese, and she told me she’ll eat that whenever she’s feeling homesick for the states.

I’m feeling homesick for the states.

Right now I’m sitting at a small Lebanese grill called Karamna – it’s close to the cheese factory, across from a movie theater. I can confidently say that they serve the best cheeseburgers anywhere I’ve been in the world. I found this place in my first week away from home – I tried to order in German but kept tripping up, and this was the first place where someone I didn’t know switched the conversation to English for my sake. It’s happened to me many times since, and it’s a simple thing, but it counts.

I think that we all speak the language of food.