germany is a nice place, part 2

My second calendar day in Germany began auspiciously, with the sounds of drunken revelry echoing through the night into my dark and peaceful room.  Apparently, Bochum becomes a pretty wild place when the lights go out; I guess Starlight Express throws really wild after-parties.

I had a lot of trouble sleeping due to the jet lag and having slept on the plane, so I tried to let myself be lulled into slumber by the melodies of a man vomiting uproariously for fifteen minutes straight directly beneath my window.  It didn't work!  Finally, his internal organs splayed across the pavement, he relented; a few minutes later, the lilting strains of "Happy Birthday" drifted through the night, and I was able to sleep (but not before filing a copyright infringement claim with the Bundesverfassungsgericht).

So then I got to eat my FIRST GERMAN BREAKFAST!

Delicious bread, raspberry jam in a waffle cup, hardboiled eggs, various cold cuts, cheese, yogurt, MULTISAFT (that's mixed juice), and...liverwurst.

German breakfast is amazing, but don't eat liverwurst.

After breakfast, our friend Danielle came to meet us to begin our wonderful guided tour of Bochum!

We saw a lovely park:

(Photo not representative of size of entire park)

We ate some french fries with forks and flavored mayonnaise:

Mayos:  Curry, Saffron, Hot Chili, Mango
Forks:  Yellow, White

We ate bratwurst!  We went to an art museum that featured sketches of exhibits too large to fit in that museum!

After that, we pretty much ran out of things to do in Bochum, so we headed for the littler (but cooler) town of Hattingen.

Hattingen is located on the river Ruhr, which is a pretty sweet river:

I did my best not to take a picture of the naked child who was scampering on the other side of the shore.  I just wanted a pretty picture of the wife, darn it!

And where there are rivers, there are COWS!

I wanted to hang with these guys, but they were having none of it.

We also got some ice cream.  Or...was it pasta?  You decide:

And we saw a bunch of really old buildings, and a really old church with oddly-placed really old gravestones!

Then we hit Haus Kemnade, an old...house...that kind of feels like it wanted to be a fortress, but didn't have the guts:

And I tried to pick a fight with a goose, but he, too, was having none of it.

(Goose not pictured...or is it?)

Oh, and this one's for you, 57:

Love you, man

Then, Danielle cooked us a delicious dinner at her place, and her Dutch friend Berend came over and told us all the dirt on the Netherlands, and why Amsterdam is full of sucky traitors.  He also listened to me talk about Crusader Kings 2 for, like, an hour, so mad props to him.

After dinner, we played an awesome game called Anno Domini, a card game all about trying to guess what relative year certain events happened.  For example, you might get three cards:

• First record of German beer brewing
• Konrad Adenauer [first post-war chancellor of Germany, you putz] is first elected as Burgermeister [vice-mayor, you putz]
• Leopold the Mouse's show first airs after the evening news [I made that one up]

And then you have to decide the order in which they happened.  Except, other players have cards, and they're inserting their own cards as you go, and it's a giant game of chicken before somebody declares that somebody else has made an error.  And the wife and I don't understand German, so Danielle and Berend had to translate all the cards for us.  And we don't know anything about German popular culture, or the finer details of German history.  But this game has some really fine details, so it was ok.  And being able to describe our rationale for our terrible decisions was hilariously good times!

All in all, a lovely evening.  I only wish Anno Domini existed in English!  There's an America version, but...that's in German, too.  So we stole a ride on the train back to the hostel (by accident, we couldn't figure out how to pay before we arrived at our step), went to sleep, and prepared for our first real adventure the next day:  DÜSSELDORF.