We Endeavor to Rebuild the Berlin Wall

Ian Rinehart, being the sad and lonely individual that he is, invited John and me to come visit him in Berlin.  To protect ourselves from his almost-certain advances, we also brought along Miss Rafi Zelikowsky.  Not sure why, but it worked.  What transpired was an unforgettable and entirely alcoholic trip to one of the greatest cities in the world.

Mr. Ian Rinehart. Timestamp: 3:57 pm

We woke up bright and early at 6:30 am, so as not to miss our 8 am train.  After packing some things and probably showering (I am not a morning person), we soon found ourselves at the train station, eating some still-questionable-even-in-Germany McDonald’s breakfast items.  Some five hours of much-needed train sleep later — we had ignored reason and drank a lot the previous night — we arrived in a massive, labyrinthine train station.  After riding public transport without paying, as became our M.O. for the rest of the trip, we were shortly greeted by the tender embrace of Ian’s delicate, feminine arms.

The first night, we didn’t really do much.  We walked around the city, absorbing its grandeur, and drank for most of the day.  We meandered around a while, stopping only to eat at a Mediterranean restaurant.  Funny story: Ian, Rafi, and John ordered hummus, which with English pronunciation sounds a lot like “pommes”, which is the German word for french fries.  They went well with my sandwich.

Next we toured a Turkish flea market, taking samples of the many exotic fruits they had for sale at low-low prices, and admired the cheap, shoddy clothing they were peddling.  I nearly bought a Panama hat, until I realized I would have been an American buying a Panama hat from a Turk in Germany.

Shortly thereafter, John insisted that the spilled soil on the floor was there before we checked in.

Later, in the surprisingly-high-quality hostel room, John attacked Ian with a potted plant.

The city at night is wonderful.  Walking from bar to bar, as vagrant drunks are wont to do, I was continually struck by the magnificence of the city.  In East Berlin, where we happened to be wandering, the buildings are mostly concrete monoliths from the emotionless Soviet era.  Although this made the surroundings entirely too depressing, it was nice knowing that we were freely drinking in a place where alcohol was rationed and public drinking was certainly a no-no.  Speaking of no-nos, I’d like to share a quote said to me not long after we returned to the hostel and went to bed:

“I’ma touch you in yo’ no-no zone” – Ian, during a game we play where we try to make each other as uncomfortable as possible.  He won.

The next day, our main goal was to be as touristy as possible, a goal which was not only reached, but exceeded in every capacity of the word.  We knew it would be a great day when we were greeted in the street by a perplexing parade of motorcycle enthusiasts.  Seriously, it was ten minutes long and held solely on the one street we had to cross.  With Ian as our tour guide, we saw all the classic staples of Berlin history.  First, the war memorial, where a statue of a mother holding a dead child kneels in a big empty room underneath a circular opening in the ceiling.  When it rains, it rains only on the statue — quite poignant.

Our next stop was the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most famous symbols of Berlin, particularly the division between East and West.  It is the place where Ronald Reagan demanded “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and where John F. Kennedy declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner [translation: I am a jelly donut]“.  Walking through the gate, using the same path the emperor used to take hundreds of years ago, we encountered the solemn face of the Holocaust Memorial.  It’s located in an open block, with many stone columns made to look like graves rising from the earth.  As you walk between the columns, they become larger, and waves in the ground give the illusion of sinking into the earth and walking amongst the dead themselves.  This produced a sobering, staggering effect, which we proceeded to ruin by taking tacky photographs.

I'm sorry.

We are dumb.

Our next stop was the Reichstag, or the German equivalent of Capitol Hill.  Due to the slightly-inclement weather, the line for the free tour was only 45 minutes long.  On a normal Saturday, that number could easily be tripled.  While on line, I discovered that my camera has a feature that takes sixteen pictures in succession and stitches them all together.  A rousing game of shake-face commenced.

Only one of many shakeface pictures.

The Reichstag was, for lack of a better phrase, ball-crunchingly awesome.  At the top of the building is a giant glass-and-steel dome.  In the middle of that is a column of mirrors that curves down into the actual site of the Parliament.  The Germans are obsessed with transparency in politics; as such, the glass in the center allows a full view of the Parliament in action.  In keeping with eco-friendliness (and I guess also transparency), the glass and mirrors all serve to light up the Parliament with only sunlight.  It was an impressive building, and we learned a lot about the history of Berlin through the free audio tour.

Truly a wonderful building. Makes me think of what a tornado would look like on Cybertron.

We stopped for some delicious make-your-own pasta at a nearby restaurant, but, heeding the call of tourism, soon resumed our quest.  We went to Checkpoint Charlie, another famous symbol of the Cold War, and set our eyes upon the last remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall.  I wondered absentmindedly whether it was the same stretch that David Hasselhof performed on in 1989 during the destruction of the wall.

I think we were on the east side, judging by the overwhelming feeling of communism. I think I even called Ian my "comrade".

Our day sufficiently touristy, we then set our minds towards the delight and frivolity of drink.  We happened upon a little Indian restaurant that serves €3.50 Long Island Iced Teas, and proceeded to order enough of them to make the owner wonder if it really was an effective profit-making strategy.  Later, in the uncommonly-comfortable hostel room, John did not attack Ian, and we quietly passed out in our respective beds as tired, drunken slumps.

The last day of our visit, we decided to keep low-key, and mostly ate ice cream and laid down on the grass in a quad between two old buildings, watching dogs do dog things in a fountain.  After riding the train illegally for the last time in Berlin, John and I bid a heartfelt farewell to Ian and Rafi, who were staying another day before setting off for their study abroad programs, and boarded a six-hour train back to Bayreuth, completely satisfied with our experience.

Food and Drink

Germany has an unusually high rate of vegetarianism.  10% of the population refuses to eat meat, which is more than three times the rate of the US (3.2%).  Despite this fact, it is incredibly difficult to find food without meat in it (this may be due to the region we’re in, and not indicative of the country as a whole).  Not that I’m complaining, though.  As a staunch fan of eating animals, I must say that the Germans certainly do know how to cook their meat.

One of my favorite dishes here is Schnitzel.  It’s kind of like a hamsteak, only fried and served with a lemon slice and some french fries.  It’s simple and delicious, and generally pretty cheap.  Jägerschnitzel is the same, only covered in a mushroom sauce.  I’m not sure how adding mushrooms makes it a “Jäger”, or a hunter, but it definitely improves the flavor.

I can barely eat one of them, let alone seven.

Another popular dish is Bratwurst, which is served with Sauerkraut and a thing called “Klöße”.  Klöße is this strange potato dumpling sort of concoction.  It’s served in a big sphere, has the consistency of Jello, and tastes basically like a potato.  I’m not sure why it needs to be served in this manner, since they generally don’t stuff it with anything, but nonetheless it’s a traditional food around these parts.  It’s nothing special, I guess.

Now on to drink.  It’s probably obvious by now, but beer is the drink of choice around these parts.  A type of beer called Hefeweizen is particularly popular.  “Hefe” means that there’s yeast in it, which demands a special way to pour the beer.  It’s exclusively served in a tall, bell-shaped glass, and you must pour along the side until you’re almost to the end.  At that point, you stop pouring, give the remainder of the beer in the bottle a swirl or two, and then dump the contents into the glass.  This mixes the yeast back into the beer, and gives just the right amount of foam at the top.  By this point I’ve had enough practice to perform this delicate procedure no matter how slurred my speech is.

Delicious yeast. I like my beer to have living things in it.

Germans are pioneers in the exploration of flavor and investigating new and delicious ways to mix drinks together.  “Spezi” is a soft drink that mixes cola and orange flavors; to imagine the taste, think about what would happen if Coke and Fanta had a baby out of wedlock.  “Cola-Weizen” is a mix of the aforementioned wheat beer and Coke, which I haven’t tried yet, but imagine to be tasty.  My favorite, and the most popular overall, is a drink called “Radler”, which mixes beer and lemonade.  I like to think that this drink came about when a German drank an Arnold Palmer, decided that iced tea wasn’t manly enough, and replaced it with beer.  The real story, or at least what it’s rumored to be, is just as hardcore, though.  Some guy wanted to drink while riding his bicycle, but didn’t want to get too drunk, so he poured lemonade into his beer.  “Radler” of course means “bike-rider”, so I’m inclined to believe this story.  Either way, it’s a fine drink, and I’ll be sure to enjoy many more of them in the four short weeks I have left.

The Bierwanderung

This week, the fraternity is having a convention of sorts, where brothers from many singing fraternities from across the country all get together and drink for a week straight.  They’ve been having events all weekend, including what’s called a “Bierwanderung” (literally “beer wandering”, but known to English speakers as a bar crawl).  John and I were graciously invited to come along.

Between the breweries, we were a formidable platoon of drunkards.

The full path of the Wandering was 16 kilometers long, or about 10 miles, and was dotted with 6 local breweries.  We walked through fields and forests, sometimes carrying cases of beer, which proved to be just as entertaining as the breweries themselves.  Walking 10 miles spread out over 10 hours isn’t bad, but this happened to be the hottest day of the year in Europe, and we were exclusively drinking the least hydrating liquid possible.  It was incredibly hot.  But in the midday sun, walking for a mile with a cold beer in hand, everything finally seems perfect.  Try it sometime.

This region of Germany has the most breweries per capita in the world.  Oberfranken, which has about 1

A bit lost, we blazed our own trail through a field of hay.

million inhabitants, has about 104 breweries, all connected by a trail called the “Brauereistraße”.  My next goal in life, I think, is to walk this whole trail and get fantastically hammered.  Six out of 104 isn’t bad.

After the first brewery, the basic goal was to drink at least 2 beers at every brewery.  “At least” is never my goal, though.  With so many different delicious types of beer, how could I limit myself to just two?  This golden rule worked out fairly well, though, allowing me to maintain a healthy stupor the whole day.

A new friend from Bochum (not Berlin).

Very friendly.

You may notice the brothers wearing all sorts of sashes over their shoulders.  These are sort of like the way our fraternities wear badges or pins at official events.  However, since every fraternity is different (there are no national organizations; everything is local), these sashes say where the brother is from.  There were dudes from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and a few other places, all coming together to walk through the woods and get drunk.

If it was a bad idea to drink in the sun on such a hot day, it was probably worse to play soccer.  In one town there was an overgrown and unmaintained soccer field, and the brothers decided to play a quick pickup game.  Being untalented at the sport even when sober, I decided to sit on the side with some of the other and practice my true calling: drinking and laughing at people falling down.  In this regard I was highly successful.

True hooligans.

As the day went on, and our faculties began to deteriorate, the fun only grew.  On one of the trails we found a herd of friendly deer, and tried to feed them grass covered in beer (they didn’t like it).  Carrying a case of 20 beers with one of the brothers, I joked that it would be easier to carry if there wasn’t so much beer in the bottles.  This would be my undoing, as we both finished off about 4 of them in 20 or 30 minutes.  That’s 2 liters, or a half gallon, right before the final bar, where I drank two more, of course.  It’s at this point that I don’t remember much.

Somehow, we made it home.  I’m told we were driven by a sober brother.  I woke up the next day, bright and early at 7:30, with a king-sized hangover.  Looking about my room, I found my camera, which helped explain a bit about how I got home.  The last picture I took was at 9:20 pm, and was just about as blurry and confused as I’m sure all of my senses were at that point.  In my pockets were two bottle caps and 6 coasters – I guess I like to collect things when trashed.  My legs were covered with dozens of mysterious cuts, and my left wrist inexplicably hurt – I think I must have fallen at some point and broken the fall with my hand.  There was also a circular cut on my hand from when I tried, unsuccessfully, to open a non-twist-off bottle with my bare hands.  These red badges of bro-age I take on with pride; they mean that I have experienced the true German drinking tradition.

It was a good day.

I think it can be said that, despite my best efforts, Germany has ruined me.

Würzburg

Every Saturday, the University holds an excursion to a different city, providing something entertaining and educational to do on the weekends besides getting drunk and reading the encyclopedia.  Last Saturday was Würzburg, a nearby city renowned for being really fucking old and for being nearly completely destroyed during WWII.

After a long night of schnell trinken, John and I woke up at 6AM and hot-footed it to the bus stop.  The ride to Würzburg was about an hour and a half, which we relished as highly-valuable sleep/hangover recovery time.  A short while later we were on top of an 800-year-old castle overlooking the entire city.  The weather was absolutely perfect, and one could see for miles at the edges of the castle.

John greets the city with a friendly "hello!"

After learning some history, which I mostly didn’t understand since the tour was in German, we ventured on down into the city itself.  We crossed a bridge built in the 1200s, which displayed both badass old statues of kings holding claymores above their heads and incredibly creepy street performers, and explored the downtown area.  From what I could understand, there was a fountain that used to flow with wine.  Awesome.

John makes use of a scale model of the city, intended as a map for the blind.

The tour ended in a giant cathedral about 200 years or so older than America.  Then began an excruciatingly boring tour concerning the reconstruction of Würzburg after it was nearly destroyed in WWII.  Interestingly, the tour didn’t mention the Marshall Plan; most of the “Wirtschaftswunder”, or “economic miracle”, was attributed to the Germans’ can-do attitude.  Next, we toured a wine cellar.

A room for enjoying a glass of fine wine.

Würzburg is known for its production of a wine called “Frankenwein”, the name of which most people here do not find funny.  “Franken” is the region of Bavaria we’re located in, and not, to my disappointment, the favorite wine of a mad scientist.  It’s a white wine, and has been brewed there in the same way for centuries.  In fact, there was a cask of wine that had been there since 1689 or so.  It was only tapped once, and the resulting bottle was recently sold for €500,000.  I hope for the buyer’s sake that it hasn’t degenerated into vinegar in those 400 years.

Let's get trashed.

At the end of the tour we were offered a glass of Riesling, and the guy explained how to correctly taste a glass of wine.  I ignored the directions do to my brutish New Jersey nature and simply drank it like an uncivilized person.

We left, and on the way home John snorted in his sleep.

Umweltfreundlichkeit

One of the first few things I noticed about Germany after stepping foot off the plane was how damn eco-friendly they are.  Walking around in Frankfurt, we’d occasionally see these monstrosities of recycling bins, and they’d always come in threes.  Stopping to look at them, I realized that they separate their glass recycling by color.  Green, brown, and clear glass all get their own bin.  There are no bins for aluminum cans, though that’s understandable because no one drinks out of them.  Asking the dudes in our house, I found out that the government gives a rebate of 40 or so eurocents with every bottle.  That is about 10 times the money you’d get in the US, at 5 pitiful cents.  The homeless must live like kings here.

At bars, when you bring back a bottle, along with a little piece of paper that says you paid for it, you usually get 50 cents back.  This worked to my advantage last night, when the bar was having a special “2€ Rebate”.  Every bottle brought back 2€, but I found out that one of the bartenders thought the bottles cost 2€.  Buying from him and then returning it to the other bartender meant that I was drinking free beers all night.

The cars here are all small, and fairly silent.  The bus makes almost no noise, and is a pleasure to ride.  So is the train.  I don’t know why, but I feel like the fuel burns cleaner and more efficiently.  Not that everyone drives cars, that is.  There are bikes everywhere.  It’s a much more popular form of transport, which becomes clear once you realize that nearly every road has an exclusive bike lane, and sometimes turning lanes explicitly meant for bikes.  And unlike the assholes at Northwestern who ride their bikes all over the road and sidewalk without a care in the world, everyone knows how to operate the bike properly.  Which makes sense, since you need a special endorsement on your driver’s license for it.

They don’t even offer shopping bags in supermarkets; you have to use one you’ve brought yourself.  It doesn’t really bother me, though, since my diet of peanut butter sandwiches and milk isn’t too hard to fit into a backpack.

Finally, the windows.  Most windows open on two different hinges.  They either come out and down like a mailbox, or out and to the side like a door.  There isn’t much air conditioning here, which makes the windows necessarily open all the time.  There are no screens on the windows; apparently they’ve never heard “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton.  So, there are usually about 5 flies zooming around my room.  They aren’t really much of a problem, though.  After watching them for a while, I found that they’re territorial.  They’ll fly in circles in the same spot until another fly comes, and then chase the new fly out of their area.  Then, they resume flying around like idiots, repeating the process ad nauseum.  My tactic is to swing my towel around frantically, to let them know that this is my area and it’s fucking dangerous so get out.  They leave me alone for a while when I do this, presumably because I’m also naked and just out of the shower.

John Cacharani Quote #2

“I feel like the sky is going to open up and take a leak on me… but it isn’t.”

-on the impending rain.

Language

I mentioned this before, but it’s so uncanny that I’ll mention it again: everyone here speaks English.  Even the guy who delivered a not-quite-a-pizza-but-I’ll-still-pay-for-it pizza knew what I meant when I stumbled through thanking him for it.  It’s the fall-back language for everyone.  Russians, Japanese, South African, Israelian and all other sorts of students speak English when they don’t know how to say something.  All this, while maybe 10 of those 250+ students are from English-speaking countries.

Still, there are some things I can correct or enlighten the Germans about.  For instance, the sentence “Tonight we will make a party”.  In German, the verb “Party machen” is natural.  “Party” is not a verb, so it needs one next to it in order to make sense.  So, I felt like a hero of English grammar, telling them that “make party” is hilarious and that they should say it again to make me laugh.

Other things they don’t know are American slang words.  John and I spent some time teaching them the various connotations of the adjective “frat”.  When someone chugs a can of beer and throws it at a nerd, that’s pretty frat.  When someone does a kegstand for 2 minutes and then pumps his fists on his chest like a mighty gorilla, that’s pretty frat.  When someone gets into a fight at a bar and then passes out in a dumpster, that’s pretty frat.  Although the Germans couldn’t really understand why there was such a word, and why we would willingly attach it to an institution that’s supposed to be thought of with honor and respect, I’m pretty sure they understood that everything they do here – swordfighting in particular – is frattier than most.

Also explained was the verb “chug” as a direct translation of the previously-mentioned game “schnell trinken”.  Although they laughed at the inherent silliness of the way the word sounds, we eventually came up with a German version, “chugen”.  We wrote it on the blackboard, and for a solid 10 minutes the bar was filled with phrases like “Ich chuge ein bier”, and “er chugt schnell”, and “wir mussen jetzt chugen”.  After that, the novelty wore off, but at least I can say I influenced a language for a brief moment in time.

Finally, a note about our pronunciation of the “ü”.  This sound, which is sort of like the sound a plane makes halfway between losing power to its engines and slamming into the ground, is very difficult for English speakers to master.  This makes distinguishing between “schwül” and “schwul” an important task.  If I have said “Das Wetter ist schwül”, I have succeeded in describing the cloudy nature of the weather.  However, if I drop the ü down to a u, and say “Das Wetter ist schwul”, I have only succeeded in calling the weather a fag.

That’s it for now.  Next up: today’s trip to Würzburg.

Some Silly Things about Germany

1. The Euro coins are annoying.  I had about 13€ in change the other day, because they give 1 and 2€ coins for everything.  John and I are just about the only Americans here, so carrying 14 fucking coins all the time is not something we’re used to.  When I show people the simplicity of the American dollar bill, their eyes tear up in the presence of such staggering beauty.
2. Pieces of paper are about an inch longer.  This pretty much condemns any handout put into my inferior American notebook to an existence of constant ripping and crumpling.
3. You need a license to ride a bicycle.
4. You don’t have to tip in restaurants – they just expect you to round up.  So paying for a 19.50€ meal with a 20€ bill is perfectly fine.  Perfect for a cheap jerk like me.
5. Beer vending machines.
6. The dining halls are cheap (3€ max for a meal), and are just as good quality as Northwestern’s.  No meal plans, you just pay for what you eat.

That’s it for now.  I can’t stand this keyboard, where z is where y should be, and I have to shift for quotation marks and most other punctuation.  At least I can make ö and ü and ä easily.

The next time I get access to a computer, I promise I’ll talk about some funny things about the language gap.

Fraternities

I haven’t been updating this much, because we don’t have Internet in our rooms yet.  The only guy who can set it up is visiting his family for the next week.  So, I’ll try to summarize my recent experiences in the next few posts.

In what could be the most fortuitous of circumstances, John and I got placed in some empty rooms in a local German fraternity (“Verbindung”).  Apparently they have them here, but they are very different and much more frat than any American fraternity, by far.  Let me count the ways:

1. When John and I described American-style drinking games, they only laughed at us.  You see, they have only one drinking game here that they ever play.  It’s called “schnell trinken”, which translates roughly to “drink fast”.  I’d liken it to Flip Cup, without all that pointless flipping of cups.
2. They have no light beer.  Everything we drink is out of a keg (did I mention they have a fully-outfitted bar?) or a bottle of good weizbier poured into a mug.  The only American beer they’ve heard of is Miller High Life, which they scoff at.  In fact, I scoff at it sometimes.  Fun fact: McDonald’s sells fine imported Miller Light for 2€.
3. They have a toasting book.  Every time someone proposes a toast, it gets written down.  First the toaster signs it and writes down the reason for the toast (this time it was for “cool summer subletters”), and then everyone who partakes signs.  Then they fill a horn – think Horn of Gondor – with beer and pass it around, everyone taking a sip, until it reaches the guy who started the toast, who has to finish.
4. And the frattiest for last: whenever they have a dispute with a member of another frat, they settle it with a swordfight.  They stand a meter apart, wearing armor everywhere except the mouth, cheeks, and scalp, and take swipes at eachother until someone hits four times.  The swords are sharp and dangerous – one guy, Markus, has a scar running from the corner of his mouth to his jaw.  One rule, among many, is that you can only attack the face.  Naturally John and I are going to fight each other one of these days.

So yeah, we got a pretty lucky room assignment.  Some people live an hour away.  Class starts at 9; sucks to be them.

John Cacharani Quote #1

“It’s too hard.”

-After being asked why he wanted to leave a restaurant without ordering anything.