Omnibus

Last night (Saturday) I went out to my first proper European club. On a Saturday night. In Berlin. The music the DJ played was called dubstep, which is apparently some sort of techno. Maarten, the Dutch guy I went with, was absolutely crazy about it.

I found the whole experience rather underwhelming, as when I've done it in North America. Clubbing really just isn't for me.

On Friday I had the most delightful dinner with Lisa, Lisa's mother, and Marty's parents. It was a superb evening. And I heard all sorts of embarrassing stories about Marty from his childhood.

Friday morning I had breakfast with a girl from Montreal who has been living in Paris and Tel Aviv for the past eight months. Apparently the Jews are profoundly racist against the Arabs, and vice versa. There is an enormous amount of hatred. The guy she was staying with in Jerusalem carried a gun around with him all the time, even slept with it under his pillow. The lack of peace in Isreal and Palestine makes much more sense to me now.

I made reference a long, long time ago to "inflaming" North-South German rivalries. What I meant was that most of the people I know from Germany grew up in Bavaria. (Marty, Messi, Jesse, Christine, Daniel.) Bavaria was described to me as the Texas of Germany. It's independent-minded and has a lot of state pride.

So a fun conversation starter with non-Bavarian Germans (almost every German I meet in Berlin) is to say something rather provocative about how "When foreigners think of Germany, everything they think of comes from Bavaria." (Wurst, Bier, Liederhosen, Oktoberfest.) Then we get into a lively discussion about the relative merits of different parts of Germany. It is quite fun.

Oh yes, a completely-unrelated but funny story from a while ago:

I got profoundly fucking drunk on the most amazing combination of apple juice and vodka. It was 60% apple juice and 40% vodka, yet it was so very smooth. The Austrian who gave it to me made me get out my notepad so she could write down its name. She must have realized that I was too far gone to remember a specific brand of vodka. (To be honest, it took less than Sherlock-Holmes-level investigatory powers to figure that out at that point.)

And she was right. I have completely forgotten everything about it, except that it was delicious and German. A few days after I remembered and took out my notepad to get the name: "Büffelgras-wodka."

These same Austrians were going to Amsterdam the next day. They were going there to compete in a hot-air balloon race. I assumed this was some complicated marijuana metaphor. But no. They were literally going to compete in a hot-air balloon competition. Something about landing on a certain spot with the most exactness.