Everything was exactly as I remembered it—except I’d never been there.
It was a Friday evening, and I was in a suburb of Munich that took a whopping hour to reach, long by Munich commuting standards. I was meeting two friends who’d graduated high school with me and now happened to live in the wider Munich area as well. As it turned out, they had picked the perfect place: a pub with a bowling alley straight out of the year 2004.
For a dimly lit basement, it was one hell of a sporting arena. Multiple lanes, seating areas, and of course the obligatory bowling shoe rack with the typically blue-and-red, goofy footwear in a plethora of sizes. My friends waved at me from our table, each a beer in hand. After I sat down, I had to look around and take it all in.
“Dude, this is amazing!” I said. “It looks exactly like the places we used to go bowling at some 20 years ago!” Apparently, even a few decades could not wear down this German countryside establishment.
The tables and bar had the classic Bavarian look: Bright wood, ornately carved chairs, and cardboard coasters to go with every jug. The bowling lanes used the clattering ball return system that wheels used balls back up to the rack. The balls themselves were as colorful as ever and ranged from weight classes of six all the way to 15 or so. Even the animations on the scoreboard screens had not changed one bit. A pin bending out of reach Matrix-style to indicate you didn’t hit a spare. A vacuum cleaner hoovering up all pins to signal that you did. The music was the icing on the cake: All songs they played could have been straight out of our high school graduation playlist. There was nothing older than 2005 and nothing younger than 2015.
The whole place felt as if I had walked straight into a memory, and, for the next four hours, it was heaven. We drank beer, bowled, caught up, reminisced, and talked about future plans. Even my scores had nostalgia: After several dismal, some mediocre, and some decent rounds, I got 144 points on the last run—the same as my all-time high from many years ago, and a record for the night too. A man needs his small wins. Never mind the muscle he pulls in the process.
Growing up, I didn’t really understand why all these people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond hung out at some of the bars we frequented in our small town. Nor why those bars kept playing music from the 70s and 80s. On our bowling night, I got it: Every now and then, you want to swim in nostalgia for a few hours, and what better place to do so than a pub frozen in time? “I hope they’ll still play the 2010 songs 30 years from now,” I said. “That way, we’ll get our own nostalgia dens, too.”
Everyday life is not made for the past. But some Friday nights can be. Enjoy the next time you walk into a memory.
