Mulled Wine, Board Games and München.

Hello there eveyone (well I presume someone is reading this). It's been a while, ain't it?

The past two weeks have offered me that bit more of an insight into this strange and contradictory land. Last time we spoke I was mildly shitting myself about a statistics trip we were heading on, about which the only information I had was "well we're just going to this holiday park in the middle of nowhere to play board games and drink beer, but it'll be FUN, honestly." Getting an email the night before from the guy driving me and two others there, to tell me that they'd bought a crate of beer for the 2 hour journey "but I won't be drinking any!" was also a test of nerve, but I came through it thanks to regular 15 minute 'Pinkelpause'. As a result of this I don't remember much of Friday apart from being happy that Dortmund won the football and sad that I was taken to bed around 1.30am.

The rest of the weekend we really did just sit around, eat lots of ham and cheese, play board games and drink. But it was fun. Everything was very (sorry) efficiently organised, with exactly the right amount of food and alcohol bought, and our bungalow of 8 sat around a table for a meal every evening, which I found particularly sweet. I was also introduced to the world of binge Glühwein (mulled wine, or literally 'glow wine', which is a nice description) drinking, which requires 2 shots of amaretto in every cup, and 7 hour german sober karaoke marathons - Sexy by Westernhagen, Wie Es Geht by Die Ärzte and Kleiner Satellit (Piep Piep) were particular favourites. I even beat the Germans at this one.

Lecker

Arrived back on Monday, and just about caught up on enough sleep before heading off to München on Friday (19th November). Even by my standards it was pretty stupid to set my alarm for 6.50 when needing to catch a 6.40 train, but dispite that (slight) issue, I made it, and was able to spend a very interesting car journey from Köln to München. This trip was my first time using the website www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de, which is very popular in Germany and allows you to arrange lifts to places with random strangers. This was certainly an eye-opening introduction to it - I was in a car with a guy and two girls, and we spent most of the journey playing truth or dare. Now, I knew the Germans are filthy, but even so some of the answers were quite shocking. This is a family blog so I won't go into too much detail, but one of the girls thought it was normal that she'd been with three different guys in the same day, and I got taken the piss out of for having never made a sex video. Of course that same girl had some kind of chronological library of videos of past conquests as some sort of sick possible nostalgia trip - apparently she'd never not done a sex tape with an ex-boyfriend.

Having survived that disturbing journey, it was down to business. The culinary side of the weekend was spent sampling wheat beer from steins, 1/2 a duck, and Weißwurst, which has to be peeled out of it's skin and eaten with a large dollops of sweet mustard and one large pretzel per sausage. Sounds disgusting, tastes amazing.

Basically any of the hollywood stereotypes of Germans originate from Munich and Bavaria, and presumably most of those were formed by american tourists at Oktoberfest. So if you want to go where Fräuleins with blonde pigtails serve litres of wheat beer to moustachioed men wearing Lederhosen, whilst oom-pah music plays in the background, then go to Munich. When Oktoberfest is on. Otherwise I fear you may be disappointed. People do those things in Bavaria, but only on special occasions (its like asking an englishman if they always put bells on their shoes and do weird skipping dances with sticks).

The rest of us quite happily distance ourselves from all that. Give me Currywurst, industry and tiny beer glasses any day.