Willst du mich verarschen?

On Thursday, I went to Germany.  It looked a lot like the 123 basement.

The German Embassy (there is a house attached behind this, which is where we were)

One Thursday every month, the German Embassy has a Happy Hour, which a bunch of the German WSP students found out when they went looking for a decent Oktoberfest substitute.  Anyway, Katharina's friend Timo (who's 27 and looks very much like a grown man, but is also one of the nicest guys I've met here) took her last month.  This week was the last time the Germans plan to drink it out for a while because their embassy is moving locations, so it seemed like an awesome time to take up the opportunity.  This worked out nicely also because Katharina's friend Alex came to visit/travel around the US, so he was staying with us and looking for things to do in DC.  Anyhow, all of our names got put on a list, so we took a cab and headed out (the cab driver, world-traveler that he was, was extremely unimpressed by my nationality, so he ignored me mostly).

Anyway, we got there, rang a doorbell, gave our names, bought drink tickets (in Germany, the drinking age is 18, chuh), and walked downstairs.

I wish I had photos of this.  If Zeta tried even remotely to clean up their basement, and if they kept the lights up (this would also prevent unwanted groping, but also probably cockblock a lot of boys because they'd have to show at least some social skill to get girls), and if the music were a little classier, this basement would be exactly the same. There was a built-in bar whipping out beers to people crowded around the bar (told you, samesies), except the beer came in bottles, and there was no Natty present.  They had three options for beer:  Becks, Pilsner-something-German-that-was-not-delicious, and Corona. Tons of Corona.  Turns out Germans love Corona.  Mexcellent.

Anyway, it was a pretty interesting experience.  There were people of pretty much all ages present.  Also, they did have a really beautiful garden and an equally beautiful patio, where people were crammed together smoking cigarettes as fast as possible. This chubby man standing behind us was red-faced because he'd been laughing so boisterously (if there were any word more applicable then "boisterous," I'd use it). There was, in fact, a man who looked a lot like Hitler (sans mustache).  I told Katharina, who rolled her eyes because Hitler jokes probably get old, but then I showed her this man, and it got too real.

About an hour after we get there, rumor spreads that they're going to close the bar soon.  Between the three of us, we have 2 $10 tickets, and beers are $2, and having had only one beer, we panic about potentially having wasted $14.  So we go back to the bar, and collect our remaining seven beers, which they give us all at once without question. These all go in Katharina's bag.  We are mature.

It's 2º outside, but we go out to this patio again, and crowd around this space heater.  Somehow, we meet these other kids, who are American grad students from California, and we start talking.  A girl named Michelle Chen is also from LA, so we start talking, and she takes some pictures of the rest of the night (which I would have if I could find her on Facebook, which I've thus far been unable to do.  Turns out that Michelle Chen is a popular name). A 20 foot Asian guy named Danny whips out a deck of cards and tries to initiate some sort of drinking game, which brings scorn from on-looking Germans.  Instead, he shows us magic tricks.  Alex and Michelle are blown away. The rest of us think that organizing the deck for 20 minutes before a trick is a little sketchy. 

I just realized that this post has neither pictures nor parallel grammar structure.  I thought about putting in a picture of Corona and a picture of Hitler, but come on, way too obvious.

Anyway, that was most of the night.  Our American grad students went to Dupont to a real people bar, but in America I'm still a minor, so I had to pass. We struggled to get a cab back, but eventually one drove by and he drove us home, where we played this drinking game where you need to maintain rhythm to finish the one beer we had left.  I lost. And that's my German Embassy story.