Dedicated to the Victims of the Alcoholocaust

It's been a bit since the last post, and much has happened since then. I quickly learned that the night I spent out until the sun came up was not the only one. Berlin is more of a party town than I ever imagined, and at least 2 nights a week are spent long into the wee hours of the morning. Swedish people especially know how to party. Our most recent early morning involved Stammtisch, which is a program every monday to greet the new students at a bar at the school. It comes from the German words "tisch," meaning table, and "stamm," meaning "get amazingly drunk and pass out on the." We managed to remain mobile enough to get ourselves to a ping-pong bar, then to a very cool East Berlin dance club built inside an old apartment. It's called "Kaffee Burger" even though they have neither coffee nor burgers.

We've continued going on weekend trips, because they provide valuable education benefit and cultural immersion or whatever, but mostly they allow our teachers to visit their families using goverment funds (no one said they were scrupulous). The weekend before last, we rode a train for several hours into the German countryside, which features rain and nothing else, to visit the castle/farm owned by our instructor's family. We stayed in cabins heated by wood and coal furnaces (i.e. not heated). Lacking anything else to do, the night quickly degenerated into aggressive drinking, breeding aggressive people, leading to the intercollegiate athletes in the group loudly claiming how much better they are than everyone else while picking a fight. A drunken brawl was narrowly avoided.

Oh, yeah. I guess there was a castle of something, too. I dunno, I was hungover.

This past weekend, we were herded off to the tiny and boring small town of Hitzacker. Hitzacker is on the Elbe river, and therefore their primary pasttime is flooding. Seriously, the town floods at least every two years. Instead of taking that as a fine excuse to not live in goddamn Hitzacker already, they take it as a point of pride. I know this because our pockets were picked for 2 Euro for a museum about it.

But the main event in Hitzacker was that of their Guild. A guild, from what I gather, is a men's club like the Elks or the Moose Lodge in the US, except about 600 years older. We were all shepherded to their lodge, greeted enthusiastically, and presented trays of smoked eels and raw trout. They were all preparing for their annual event, in which they choose a new King of Town via a shooting competition. I am not making this up.

In any case, this requires absolutely massive amounts of alcohol, and just 5 Euro got us all the excellent German beer we could fit into our expanding guts. We got to see their initiation of new members, which was a lot of shouting in German and forcing the newbies to down an entire bottle of schnapps tied to their fake rifles.

They then crowned the new king and gathered up the entire retinue to march into the town proper. This was eloquently described as the "best formation ever" as us severely drunk cadets struggled to keep step. This open bar would prove to be our undoing, as every time a beer glass fell empty, a new one took its place. This was before we reached the halfway point of the march, a quaint hometown patio diner, and they rolled out a tray of shots filled with "feuerwasser" (firewater). The last defeat of this magnitude America suffered from the Germans was Market Garden. By the time we got to the town, it was a disaster. One guy pissed on a doorway while another threw a cigarette-butt can filled with sand on it, another girl stole several traditional guild hats, all of us descended on the poor gelato shop like a pack of rabid dogs, and our mortified teachers attempted to shoo us back to the hotel. I was surprisingly (though nowhere near completely) sober for this whole ordeal, and spent most of this time running around apologizing and trying to prevent serious injury.

One girl proved to be quite an ordeal. She tripped over a guy who passed out in front of her (really) and had to be carried back (really) during which she spent most of the time sobbing, though occassionally laughing hysterically. Once they got her back and we threw her into bed, we sat down to catch our breath when her roommate threw the door open and said, "guys, she went out the window!" (really). We bolted out of the wide-open window after her and combed the surrounding woods looking for her, before one guy tackled her in the street (no, really). We got her back in bed, and I turned in for the night. The next morning I discovered that she had a panic attack later on and was hauled to the Krankenhaus. Other mayhem included the guy in the next room shitting his pants and puking in our instructors room (I don't know how, and neither does he) and other guys getting cut and bruised from chasing deer around the nearby deer pen. God, it was a miracle we survived.

Sunday was the first of several mandatory trips for my group, this one to Dresden. Dresden is historically significant mostly because the allies bombed the ever-loving shit out of it in WWII. The buildings there are gorgeous, like Disneyland except actually real, and all are sort of this patchwork between creme-brulee colored stone, and charred-black bricks. The black bricks come from the structures original material, scorched black by the incendiary bombs, and the prettier blocks are the places they needed to fill in the gaps. We were given a short tour and then left to our own devices, which as a direct result caused myself, Jon, and Jeff to be surrounded by a group of German guys (one of which wearing an "Ayran Brotherhood" shirt, another wearing a pink bunny costume) who were trying to raise money by selling what appeared to be the contents of a junk drawer, with condoms, tiny bottles of booze, and a porn mag all to be had for just a Euro each. Their sales tactics were aggressive to say the last, as after a long and excited sales pitch (in German) they all began chanting "KAUFEN! KAUFEN! KAUFEN! KAUFEN!" (buy). I negotiated a bright red bottle of vodka out of them for just 80 Euro cents, mostly to make them go away. Dresden was a 3-hour train ride away though, and despite having a dirty glass of cheap wine with some Israeli backpackers, I wasn't so thrilled about it.

On Monday we had the day off and visited the massive Kulturkarneval going on in Berlin. "Culture" mostly means "Africa." A few guys in the group dropped some coin on some African souvenirs  (from... Germany) and we tried some Banana Beer, but other than that, it was roughly equivalent to a state fair in the States. We have found, however, that much of the time beer is actually cheaper than water (as restaurants will not bring you anything other than bottled water).

I have found in my travels that a sincere effort at even extremely poor and stilted German makes German girls find you just adorable. Meeting girls here in this way is like fishing with dynamite. Suddenly I regret not working harder all those semesters in German class, because there's a gorgeous, blonde-haired blue-eyed girl nearly everywhere you look.

We're planning on heading to a pool that's built on a boat floating on the Elbe river, and last night I saw a very cool performance at a place called Bang Bang Club, a dive bar built under a bridge. Jeff, Sophie, and I expected a band but were instead treated to an hour and a half of one man, with a computer and a mixer, creating a techno song as he went. If you had told me what it would be beforehand I'd have written it off as the dumbest thing ever, but having seen it, I'm glad I didn't. The talent this guy must have to memorize what all these tracks sound like without headphones to sample them moments before, which ones work together and which ones don't, and how to blend it all seamlessly to take us from one completely different sound to another with no perception of the change must be enormous. And, it just sounded cool.

Tonight, we're all getting drunk and going salsa dancing. Veil spass.