Finally online in my room. I'm going to post the pictures tonight hopefully, so check in the evening your time. I'm also going to be trying to catch up on everyone's blog and sending emails to some people. It will take a while to get caught up with everything. I'll post for the rest this weekend after the photos are up. Right now I need to cook dinner.

Monday 6th October (cold, rainy)
Things went ok for the first day of the language course. We mainly did some introductions and discussed what we wanted to accomplish in the 2 week class. After that we did a little studying and called it a day for class. After class I met with a group of friends for lunch, which last 2 hrs. We ended up talking in English to hear each other’s accents and discuss slang and word usage between North Ireland, Wales, Canada, New York and Chicago, definitely a well spent 2 hrs. After that we did something else I think, but can’t remember. Anyways we met up again for dinner around 7:30 at the Tia restaurant.

Disclaimer: The events occurring within the planned dinner and time at the Ratkeller, bar, and there after were not part of any sort of greater plan.

So for dinner we meet in the main town square to go to this E 6. all you can eat Tia buffet. There was 8 of us total: Sheena (N. Ireland), Nia (Wales), Raiko (Japan, spelling of her name is most likely wrong), Frida (Sweden), Giovanni (Italy), Chris (Saskatoon, Canada), James (Brooklyn, New York), and me. The food was pretty good for the price, and everyone was happy with there half liter of beer except me. I order this crazy Mai Tai mixed drink with a shot of: black and red rum, cognac, and about the same amount of orange juice in my opinion. We were there from like 8-10pm chatting up a storm in English, German, and a bit of Italian. Afterwards we headed over to the Ratkeller where we happened to run into the some of the other exchange students on a bar crawl. (Event was organized by IDEA, International Darmstadt Exchange Alumni, but started at 6:30 which was too early for us.) Now my unplanned tale begins.

Mom: If you don’t feel like writing and sending a reprimanding letter when you get to the bottom of this post I suggest not reading further.

Note: Sheena and Chris don’t drink, and when I refer to girls I mean Frida and Nia in the following tale.

So we get this nice table for 8 next to the section for the IDEA crawl, and low and behold they actually serve 1 liter, maß, beer which seems to be a rarity outside of Oktoberfest. So naturally I order a dark maß from Bayern to begin my drinking, and the girls ordered .5 and .4 liter whites respectively. Somewhere about a third of the way through mine I realize that Frida already finished her .5 and was discussing with Nia about ordering maßes. Not willing to be out done by the girls I promptly speed up my drinking and ordered 3 maßes for us. Having just quickly finished off that last third of my liter, 15min or so, the girls quickly took the lead over me again. By 11:20 the girls were finishing their last drops and I still had about a third left when we decided that we would leave with the other IDEA group to head to the last bar of the night. Seeing myself with a shortened time frame I quickly drank away to about a quarter left at which point everyone else was paying and had there coats on. So I did the only thing I could do, down a quarter liter in one really long pull. James has to catch a bus at this point so he doesn’t join us at the other bar.
When we get there Nia promptly buys a round a .5l beers for us which we casually drink over the next 2.5 hrs with two rounds of Bailey’s in there. It made for quite an interesting evening of conversations in German of which I can’t recall any particular details. The bar finally closed at 2am, so we started walking back to the dorms which took seemingly longer then in usually does even though we took the most direct route. Around 3am we arrived back at our respective rooms with out any incidents. The next day we were all exhausted for class, but nobody had gotten sick and heads were good for the most part I think.

And that concludes my tale of Monday night’s excursion. Now for some comments on the evening in reflection seeing as I’m writing this on Thursday and Saturday.

1) I never thought I would do any serious drinking on a Monday night. The only other time was last year when we celebrated Marti Gras on Monday instead of Tuesday because we had early classes on Wednesday and nothing major on Tuesday. It’s definitely not something I’d want to make a regular occurrence because you are so drained the next few days because it’s impossible to catch up on sleep till the weekend.

2) Holy cow these European girls can drink. I would never have imagined that a girl could keep up with me for pace and near quantity. I’m not one of the big heavy weights, but I’m definitely no lackey middle weight. These girls can handle there drinks impressively well, and I have yet to meet an American girl that could compete and not get sick, but I don’t hang with big drinking girls back home. Though I do have to hand it to Burt for that night at Matt’s place, you did a respectable job. Anyways, by the end of our evening at the bars they were only a .5l behind me, though a bit more gone then me.
I must mention thought that the drinking age everywhere over here is 18, and they can manage to get drinks in a bar occasionally at 16.


Tuesday 7th & Wednesday 8th October (cold, cloudy, rainy)
First off, it seems my grandmother was right. All it ever seems to do is rain around here, and it’s the same type of rain that I experienced in Seattle. It rains for and hour or so then remains cloudy the rest of the day with the sun coming out occasionally, except I remember more sun in Seattle. From what the other European students tell me it this way across most of northern Europe all went longer. No wonder they drink so much here.

The two days have been nothing but attending the language course till 12:30, grabbing lunch with my friends, and running around town to finish necessary paperwork for studying here: insurance, bank, registering with the town, etc. Both days have been exhausting and full of walking. Wednesday evening wasn’t so bad though. The exchange students did a scavenger hunt in the city for the afternoon, and I got together with two friends and cooked some pizzas and chatted for a while. After that I finally had a serious 2 hr conversation with one of my roommates completely in German. It was great practice for me and a good cultural exchange. We talked about health/car insurance, school systems, and life in general. The other good thing is I can finally understand his accent. Before I could barely understand what he was saying, and now it’s not a problem.


Thursday 9th October (a bit warmer then yesterday, still cloudy)
Half of the European students went to Heidelberg today, and the rest tomorrow so us non-Euros had breakfast together and then played Taboo in German. It was a fun morning to meet people from the other classes. I find myself speaking a lot of English with the other students though because a lot of them know English better then German and prefer taking the easy route out to have conversations. I imagine things will change once classes start up in a week.
So as I’m walking back to my room around 3:30 I pass by the apartment window next to me and here some excited girl’s voice. I’m just thinking that it’s the girls that live there chatting with each other so I keep going. As I’m unlocking the door to my apartment I hear Sheena call my name from behind me. Low and behold she’s my new neighbor after a week of moving from place to place while looking for a permanent residence. The two of us chat for a while and plan to go to the weekly bar outing on Thursday nights. I head back to my room and keep myself busy for six hours by showering, cooking a brat that I bought at the butcher that was absolutely amazing, playing my clarinet for like 2hrs and chatting and listening to music with Chris on my comp. till 9:15. At that point I wrote part of Friday’s journal till Sheena came over. The rest of the evening was casual talking with some French girls over a .5l dark heffaweiss that I didn’t like.

Friday 10th October (same as usual)
Today in class my teacher brought in some magazines and newspapers that we were supposed to find a hypothetical event to do this weekend and practice telephone conversation styles with them. The magazine I grabbed happened to have an article on Darmstadt clubs. I found two could techno clubs in town for Saturday night with my friends. At lunch someone jokingly said that we would all come to my place and I would cook dinner for them because I’ve done that a couple of times now. But James said we should go to his host family house with a real kitchen. So we did some shopping: 6 frozen pizzas, salad stuff, orange juice, 4 bottles of wine, and a bottle of vodka. We got to James’s place around 8pm and started cooking. We had a very good dinner in my opinion with some good wine, and fun discussions. Afterwards we sat around chatting and drinking more wine. On the bus ride to his place I had mentioned the club idea to the others so we decided on it and plan on doing that tonight (sat). While there we also made plans for some traveling. We’re all going to Prag from Nov 1-4 for like E 160, and then Paris the following weekend for 2 days for like E 60. Amazingly those prices include bus, hotel, a tour, and breakfast each day. James and Nia have both been to Prag so they can provide some additional touristy/historical information, and Nia knows a good club there. Here as in the states Poland and Czech Republic have a reputation for having the best clubs. Prag is also said to be a beautiful city to visit so hopefully we have decent weather.