Pretzel Fest, and Crappy Tasting Booze

Ok, so an update since last thursday. We ended up going to the end of
semester party for UniMannheim. I also figure this is the time to do a
quick bio of these people.

Alex - my suitemate and a student in stuttgart
Marianna - a biology+german student from wellselyan, lives at guesthouse
Kamila - A girl from poland who is now studying in france and will
soon be in Finland on some erasmus scholarship, lives at guesthouse
Stephanie - a mechanical engineer grad student from USC, lives at guesthouse
Rob - a biology student from alberta, canada, lives at guesthouse
Nadja - a german girl who studied in scottland (has a perfect scottish
accent) and now lives in belgium
Lea - a french girl studying physical chemistry (maybe?) at a school
in Strasbourg, did an internship before at L'Oreal Paris
Charlotte - another french girl also studying physical chemistry at a
school in Strasbourg, did an internship before at Agfa
Jim - A biology/bioinformatics/engineering student from Maine in a PhD
program, used to work as a technician at MIT, lives at guesthouse
thats probably plenty for now


So we went to the party with everyone except Jim and Rob. The party
itself was a slight disappointment, plenty of people turned out, but
the drinks we got for free tasted quite awful. The cups were pretty
cool though, they say crazy on them in german. Also the DJ was for the
most part terrible, playing way too much weird, old, or rock music
none of which is too fitting for a dance party. However, the superbly
redeeming fact was that everyone there was german or at least mostly
german. It was a dance party filled to the brim with lame white guy
dance moves. Neither Jack Black or Tommy Boy would not have looked out
of place there at all.This gave me tons of dancing confidence because
while I am not a good dancer, I was not embarassing myself nearly as
much as some of these other guys. The one problem was that I lacked a
role model. Usually I like to find a moderately better dancer than
myself and really just emulate them, this of course was not even close
to being possible. The bad tasting booze company managed to get a snap of me on their website (aperol.de under mannheim pictures for july)
So after a rather late friday night (we left at 2 or so, the party
apparently continued until 4), we (Alex, Mar, Kam, Step, Rob) went to
heidelberg. This is now my third time there but it is still a really
nice city, with lots of enjoyable cafes. After we got back we relaxed
for awhile and then (Alex, Mar, Kam, Nadja, Lea, Char) decided to go
out to an irish pub called Murphys Law. This place was pretty cool
with live music (who covered songs like someone who had just found the
lyrics and guess how the tune must go, certainly different and not
exactly my style, the artists for the most part knew what they were
doing, he did not). They had a Grand Marinier + Hot chocolate drink +
whip cream (which after my whole semester of french I managed to
pronounce like a dumb american instead of saying Graan Marinay). It
was delightful although chocolate doesnt mask alcohol very well. We
then started to drink wine, which I am developing a taste for, I
think. Alex, Mar, and Kam left which is where the story gets a bit
more interesting. Now our table was only half full and thus random
people would sit down next to us. The first was this guy with these
rather trampy ladies (I had a thong in my face for more seconds than I
wish to remember) they were smoking and almost intentionally blowing
it in our faces. but they were quickly replaced by this austrialian
guy who was like hey you guys are speaking english whats up. He was a
tennis coach here for the summer to play some tournament. He had
hitchhiked all around europe and was quite entertaining to talk to. We
stayed again until 2 or so. Then tried to get home but of course all
the trains were taking their 2am nap and wouldnt be out again till 3,
so we took a taxi (way too expensive here).
Sunday we (everyone) went to the Pretzel Festival in Speyer,
apparently where the pretzel might come from. The city dates back to
roman times and has quite a few exciting pieces of architechture in
it, including of course a bronze unicorn. They also, unbeknownst to
me, had a 10k race that morning that looked like it would have been
pretty fun to do. After briefly walking through the town they had a
fairground which looked exactly like a fairground anywhere else in the
world except for instead of footlong hotdogs they had 1/2 meter long
brats. Also the rides looked a tiny bit sketchier one of which looked
quite terrifying (a swing ride that went way too high and only had a
tiny bar go across your lap) After we explored here for a little while
and got some enormous pretzels. We went to go watch the Pretzel
Parade. This I could not have been less prepared for. The parade was
over 2 hours long with 101 floats. The first floats gave out candy and
other simple little things, the later floats started to throw out
pretzels. Slowly moving up to carrots, bundles of radishes, and
finally, beer and wine samples. The wine float had guys sitting on the
edge of it with bottles of wine and you bring your own container and
they put a sample in. Since I was the only one who had an easily
accessible container I brought mine and the man seeing we were all
together filled my cycling waterbottle with a nice white wine. The
floats were pretty impressive, but the wine was the definite
highlight.
I have uploaded the pictures of the parade to my flickr
Flickr Photos

So you can see that I am not making this up.