By the time you read this I will be a wiener.
That's right, "Ich bin ein Frankfurter".
You are what you eat after all, and I'm flying into sausage central.
Frankfurt.
After five months of vegetarianism, I'm gagging for meat.
Desperate.
I don't care how it comes: steak, patty, kebab, salami, schnitzel, bratwurst, just gimme.
Hot and steaming, straight off the cow.
I am a failed vegetarian.
The economist could quite happily never eat meat again.
Not me.
Earlier this year, some of the tigers in Bannerghatta National park got salmonella from the chicken carcasses they are fed.
Even tigers can't eat cow here.
I know just how they feel.
Ravenous.
Annoyed.
Nobody eats the cows of India.
Pushing them out of the way, trying to buy a newspaper, groaning "Moooove", you start to develop a fellow feeling.
Sort of a "don't tread on me, I won't eat you" mentality.
Yet murder lurks in my heart.
Waking from dreams of golden arches, I fantasise about food I wouldn't normally consume at home: mustard-smeared hotdogs, greasy burgers.
I look at pictures of meat online.
The word "steakhouse" makes me salivate.
I'm a carnivore, there's just no getting way from it.
Why not eat chicken? You haven't seen the chickens I have.
After two weeks of Deutsche gluttony ("Hardly," said the economist. "We'll be lucky if we can afford to eat once a day."), I'll return to India to face haughty, holy, bovine stares.
Remorse? I'm just eating anonymous German cattle, they probably don't even have names.
They certainly won't be blessed every morning with a swipe of sandlewood paste on their foreheads.
Drinking will hopefully assuage any feelings of guilt.
Which brings me to beer.
While we have been away, the economist has gone right off beer, and I have begun to love it.
He prefers a nice vodka and cranberry.
It's like that movie Freaky Friday.
We've switched bodies.
He's lost 10kg and developed a taste for swishy drinks, I've become a beer-swilling chauvinist with a taste for barbeque.
The economist looks Aryan.
Blonde, blue-eyed. Tall, stern.
Now that he's had Lasik and doesn't wear glasses, he's a dead ringer for the handsome, heartless German commandant of WW2 movies.
Subduing the populace with his frosty stare and relieving society of the mentally incompetent by teaching them managerial economics.
"I can see right through women's clothing," he boasts.
He is Aryan, Danish in fact, the Danes and the Germans being kissing cousins.
The Danish are the happiest people in the world because their expectations are so low.
Despite this, Germany managed to disappoint them from 1940-1945.
Do you know any German? I asked the economist.
"Raus! Schnell! Gott in Himmel! Messerschmitt! Achtung! Englisher dogs!" he shouted.
Read a lot of war comics as a boy scout, apparently.
Fortunately, I did languages at school, though all I really need to know is, "Als Hauptspeise, habe ich steak" (for the main, I'll have steak).
So picture me, a foaming stein in one paw, massive sausage in the other.
Squiffy and replete.
Frankfurt's culinary specialties are: Frankfurter sausage, Frankfurter rindswurts, Frankfurter kranz and handkas mit musik (not meat with music, but marinated cheese and onions).
Even writing this, my mouth is watering so much, I'm dribbling.
Believe me, I'm going to eat it all.
Roll me home in an empty Hefeweissbier barrel.
The economist is always astounded when I behave in a less than ladylike manner (strange really, given how many times I have).
Conversation might go a little like this:"What are you doing?" he will ask, flabbergasted, as I gorge myself.
Bits of flensed hock decorating my cheeks.
Fingers blood-pink.
Hunched over my food like a cannibal eating Cook.
Gesticulating with a ragged shank, talking with my mouth full, I'll reply, "I'm eating myself stupid."
Why Germany? Let's face it, if you're not in New Zealand to begin with, nowhere in the world is very far away.
There was something about a seminar.
The economics of ... well, something terribly interesting, no doubt.
The point is that there will be meat, and lots of it.
Museums and art galleries too, but I may need to be wheeled into them.
Forget Eat, Pray, Love.
The movie about my Frankfurt experience will just be called Eat - One Woman's Search for Nourishment.
