New year, same old parties, lots of pfand, and Hamburg

Hello people of the future, welcome back to my blog, where we've just arrived in that long-forgotten Month of January 2011. Ahem, yes. Actually I realised that I forgot to mention Berlin Comedian Harmonists who we saw as a Christmas cultural present to ourselves. Watching 5 grown men dressed in dickie bows singing 99 Luftballons in a comedy acapella style whilst making bizarre pained facial expressions was a true cultural treat. Get a taster for the strange expressions here.

Me looking like a bit of a twat whilst dancing on a table
next to Marcos from Gran Canaria, who is topless

So yeah, the new year began pretty much as the previous year had ended, with the usual parties in Spunk (which now has completely lost it's amusing qualities, and 'gehst du heute ins Schpunk?' has become the most normal sentence in the world for me), Eastend and so on. One notable exception was the Maschinenbau (mechanical engineering, or 'machine building' in it's purest literal German form) party, simply held in the foyer Maschinenbau department, which had 6 of us at any one time dancing on two of those tables that you used to eat your school dinners on until way gone 3am. How no-one was seriously injured I'm not quite sure, but it was an awesome night all the same.

Actually, speaking of that party reminds me to mention the various strange systems around drinking in German bars, pubs, supermarkets and clubs. Anyone who's already been to Germany is probably already quite familiar with the 'Pfand' (deposit system), whereby pretty much every drink container bought in shops or kiosks has a deposit on it, which is then reimbursed when you bring the bottle back to the shop to be recycled. Cheap supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi charge 25 cent per plastic bottle of beer (yes, plastic bottle of beer), and surely make up their profit margins through disorganised foreigners tossing their bottles away, since actual recycling systems are alien to folk like us. The idea of going to a house party with X amount of beers and then rummaging around at 4am to make sure you leave with exactly the same amount of bottles as you came with is just a step too far for me.

This system also extends itself to the student bars on campus. Since they are run by students who just sell beer that they've bought in the Supermarket, they're also slaves to the pfand system. When you go in, you pay for your drink, plus one Euro extra pfand. For that you get a little marker, and as long as you keep bringing the bottle you've just drunk back, you pay no extra pfand, and get the Euro back. As open to abuse as this system is, it just doesn't get abused. On the contrary, I currently have 4 of those sodding markers in my room, so the pfand system has found out my stupid simple english ways again.

In pubs, your order is taken and you get served at your table. When the drinks are brought out, every person is simply given a beer mat, on which a couple of lines or some indecipherable symbol is written to indicate what said person has drunk. You're then simply expected to present your beer mat at the bar when leaving and pay what's on your beermat. Once again totally up for abuse (the symbols are only written in pencil after all) but it just doesn't happen.

Various pfand-markers and
a drinks card

Finally, in clubs you usually pay a cheap entry fee of 2 or 3 Euros, but am then given a card, on which you must buy at least 5 Euros or so of drinks, and pay for all the drinks on your way out. So you basically go up to the bar and have your card of numbers written on. Very strange. At the Machinenbau party you had to buy cards with values of 5, 10, or 20 Euros on (see right), sort of like buying yourself gift vouchers for a club you're already in. I haven't lost a card as of yet, but apparently what happens to you if you do doesn't bear thinking about...


So, moving swiftly on, the already-mentioned Hun-gu had his birthday on 23rd January, and where did we take him? To the city with the biggest red-light district in Europe of course - Hamburg. What a place that is. One of the biggest ports in the world, it has a red-brick canal feel like Manchester, and is chock-full of history (which I would love to tell you about, but most of it passed me by due to having to go on the spanish walking tour to make up numbers armed with only newly-learned basic french).

The Rathaus

On the evening, we gave Hun-gu his presents, which were a table football table from the sensible types, which he then had to spend the whole weekend lugging about, and from the self-styled 'cool group' of Benito, Kerem, and Radu a handy sex package containing condoms, blow up dolls and his very own copy of the karma sutra, as 'preparation' for the night ahead.

So yeah, the Reeperbahn (pronounced rape-her-bahn) was quite the experience. Amongst the ridiculous amount of sex shows, shops, cinemas, museums and everything in between there was also a few Beatles memories to be seen, such as the Star 69 bar, which was prouder to show that Alice Cooper had once played there than the godfathers of modern music, and the 'Beatles Platz', where we were swiftly moved on due to cramping Bushido's  (a rapper from Berlin) style. What an honour.

Of course there was the requisite visit to the actual red light district, which is strictly men-only. There's an old wives tale that says that any women passing through would get steaming urine poured onto their heads. Not sure it's true but none of the girls in the group decided it was worth the risk to find out. To be honest I just felt really uncomfortable going through it - the girls were all quite good looking but if you looked at any of them for longer than a split-second the window would open and you'd be beckoned over and begged for money. The only men I actually saw talking to the women were all at least 40 years old, grey and balding, so it's not exactly the glamourous life that it could be thought to be.

After that we just kept it safe and found clubs playing all the classic euro-pop that we all know and love, and were all the happier for it.

Living the dream at 'Beatles Platz'