Time Warp

Went to the local Irish pub last night to play the weekly trivia contest.

Incidently (or do I mean "coincidently"?) the Irish pub looks exactly like the Turkish restaurant, our erstwhile meeting place of choice when I was in Konstanz.

Thanks in part to some old-fashioned crosscultural teamwork (old-fashioned in sense that everyone was using everyone else and communication was sketchy at best), and largely to Arno's girlfriend Tanja, who supplied her BH for a crucial action question, our team won.

Tanja's dad, also present, treated his seventeen-year-old daughter and her friends to a celebratory round, confirming my belief that Germany is completely whack in a wonderful way.

He and I discussed the overabundance of handicapped-parking spaces in America. I vented in broken German about one of my pet peeves: people with handicapped license plates who park in good nonhandicapped spots. He vented in fluent (but still unmistakably non-native) English about his pet topic: fat Americans.

On the way home, we ran into some punks straight out of the mid-80s. A few of Arno's friends talked to them while the rest of us laughed covertly. I haven't seen Germans who dressed like that anywhere else, with the possible exception of my high school German textbook.