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.