second person

Munich is the second biggest airport in Germany though Terminal 1, unmarked and anonymous, feels like Rodez or Innsbruck – gate, passport control, exit door with hardly an escalator in between and surely no lengthy moving walkway. Budget airlines don't pay for the fancy terminal, nor do they for gate access if they don't have to, dropping you off on the tarmac just out of sight of the airport facilities. A bus takes you to the terminal, and once you're there, you're out again.

It could be anywhere. There's a nameless city shuttle and countless signs giving directions to parking lots – not what you're looking for. Public transport is not advertised, nor is the direction of the main airport building. The sun shines harmlessly as you wander up and down along exit doors that open silently as you walk by. This could go on for hours, to no effect. You turn around and reenter the building.

There's a coffee shop, trying to be hip but abandoned of trade and prospects, and signs to Area B, C and F, though it wouldn't make the slightest change to you if someone came and swapped the letters. There's nothing. Inside you rises doubt whether the plane dropped you off at the right place. These things go wrong, don't they? After all, the staff had to get up earlier then you and be even tireder. More tired than it takes to make up wonky comparatives. Tired enough to mistake Munich for Nuremberg.

You wonder where you are. The words on the few existing signs aren't incomprehensible, but that's hardly reassuring. It doesn't exactly narrow down the location. Germanic or Romance writing wouldn't jar, especially in the stupor of the early morning, and maybe the writing is English, the lingua franca of our age.

Then you take the ramp to the lower level that you haven't noticed before. There's more anonymity and empty space. It feels like a mega-church where everyone knows his way or, if not, is guided by god. You discover a map, sufficiently out of place to make it's discovery an occasion. You find yourself at the periphery of the airport, not far from uncharted territories.

A few minutes on fast moving conveyors and you're in familiar surroundings. The central plaza of MUC is remarkable: drugstore, bakery, brewery, beer garden – everything the weary traveler might need. There's also a battery of ticket machines for suburban rail, sadly undersized. In front of each machine, buttons are pushed in confusion. Half a dozen people wait for progress, but that's unlikely to happen.

Munich has the world's most complicated transport system. Suburban trains, underground trains, trams and buses cut through zones and rings and spaces and areas. Tickets can be bought by any parameter. Two large files are available online, showing what looks like the same map at different levels of magnification. Either map can be zoomed to silly levels with no gain in usability. Ever more detail appears, an infinity of gradations. The grid radiates from the center, each stop and connections crisply drawn, but what ticket is optimal for a set of journeys remains forever hidden. There is no sense to any of this and no advice on what to get.

Overwhelmed by numbers and words, you take a step back, giving up your spot in the line. Lack of sleep and too much information don't go together well. You're a bit dizzy when a blond girl comes into focus. She looks at you with mild suspicion: "Do you need a ticket into Munich? I bought this day pass earlier." You strike a bargain, half-price of what a proper ticket might have cost, more or less.

You take an escalator down. The train is waiting. You find a seat and sink down, stupefied. Three quarters of an hour to go. You open The New Yorker that you've started on the plane and go back to Juno Diaz's latest exhortation that has been messing with your language so much already. Homies and sucias and second-person narration – all the gimmicks in the book, but powerful stuff nonetheless. The train starts moving noiselessly. It is half past nine in the morning. The weekend can begin.