I have never been so relieved to see a railway station in my life, and that includes the time I fell asleep on the last train to Clapham and woke up in Brighton. The journey to Bayerisch Eisenstein had been straightforward enough on paper: Munich, then a regional train south towards the Czech border, watching the Bavarian Forest thicken and darken through the window like a pint of stout being poured. But somewhere between Regensburg and Zwiesel, I made the classic British error of assuming my phone charger would work with a simple adaptor. It did not. By the time I pulled into Bayerisch Eisenstein, I had twelve percent battery, no offline map, and the growing suspicion that I had packed three novels but no actual food for the evening.

The property, when I found it, was one of those solid wooden houses that look like they have been there since before gravity was properly invented. My host had left the key in a small metal box that required a code, which would have been simple enough had I not been trying to read it by the light of a dying iPhone while a very patient local cat watched me fail repeatedly. I got in eventually, and the first thing I did was not admire the view or unpack sensibly. I opened the fridge, found it empty but cold, and felt something close to love.

The kitchen, I discovered over the next hour, was properly equipped in that slightly overconfident German way. There was a hob that looked like it had once been part of a spacecraft, a coffee machine with more buttons than my television remote, and a set of knives that actually cut things rather than merely bruising them. I had planned, in that vague way one does on trains, to cook something impressive and local for my first evening. The reality was that the nearest open shop was now shut, and my supplies consisted of a squashed cereal bar, some mints, and a small bottle of hand sanitiser I had mistaken for olive oil in Munich. I ate the cereal bar standing up, staring out at the darkened forest, and decided that tomorrow would be different.

It was, though not immediately in the way I intended. I woke early, still on British time, and walked down into the village proper as the mist was lifting off the railway tracks. Bayerisch Eisenstein sits right on the border, and there is something quietly thrilling about wandering past houses where the architecture shifts almost imperceptibly from Bavarian to Bohemian. I found a bakery that was already warm and busy, the kind where the woman behind the counter speaks to you in a way that assumes you understand more German than you actually do. I pointed, smiled, and emerged with a pretzel the size of a steering wheel and something involving poppy seeds that I still cannot properly name.

The local pub, or Gasthaus as they properly call it, became my base of operations over the following days. There was one in particular, family-run and slightly crooked, where the landlord seemed to find my attempts at ordering in German more endearing than accurate. I ate Schweinshaxe there on my second evening, the pork knuckle crackling and enormous, served with dumplings that I initially mistook for potatoes and a cabbage preparation that cleared my sinuses with the efficiency of a medical procedure. The beer was dark and local, from a brewery I could have walked to had I not been so comprehensively full.

I did try to cook properly, eventually. There is a small market that sets up near the station on certain mornings, and I became slightly obsessed with it. The sausage selection alone required multiple visits and a small notebook. I bought Speck that was more fat than meat and rendered it slowly, feeling unreasonably proud of myself, then attempted Knodel from a recipe I found in a charity shop book that used measurements like "a good handful." They dissolved slightly in the water, becoming more soup than dumpling, but I ate them anyway, sat at the wooden kitchen table with the forest pressing against the windows, feeling genuinely content in a way that only holidays seem to allow.

The local supermarket, when I swallowed my pride and went there for supplies, was a revelation in efficiency. I bought eggs with orange yolks that stood up in the pan like small suns, butter that actually tasted of something, and bread that went stale properly rather than simply becoming slightly older plastic. I made terrible attempts at Kaiserschmarrn, the shredded pancake, which I burned on one side and undercooked on the other. I ate it with plum compote from a jar and told myself it was rustic.

On my last evening, I returned to the same Gasthaus and ate more simply: sausages, mustard, bread. The landlord remembered me, or at least pretended to, and we managed a conversation about football that consisted mainly of names of players we both half-recognised and much gesturing. I thought about my failed dumplings, my successful pretzel acquisitions, the way this small border village had slowly become familiar through its food and its patient tolerance of my attempts to participate in it.

I left the next morning with a bag of market biscuits and the certain knowledge that I would return, possibly with a better charger and definitely with more realistic cooking ambitions.