Party Girl

I haven't had the pleasure of blogging while drunk for quite a while. I cut back on the old alcohol consumption to stop the cycle of euphoria and desperation. Tonight I agreed to a juggling appearance for the culture office of Bochum university. I did a little 3-ball juggle to Party Girl by Elvis Costello, and it went down very well. This has been one of my forays into perfectionism. I've been trying to cut down on them, and to allow myself little mistakes, but the plan was to juggle perfectly to every beat and lyric of the song.

I know that I can drive myself crazy looking trying to do things perfectly, so I spent the last five minutes before the show convincing myself that it is fine to drop a ball. I picked out two members of the front row to throw the ball back to me if it fell off the stage. I convinced myself that it would be fine to make some mistakes, and that it would be done and finished in 3 minutes and 23 seconds.

It was finished in this time, and I had time to get quite drunk, which is enough for me to load up a picture that is somewhat amusing, but which wouldn't pass my sober blogging threshold. Maybe you can do better in convincing the world to follow your beliefs.

Borussia Mönchengladbach 2 - Alemania Aachen 1

Well I got my mobile back. I still don't know whether to thank or curse the guy who took my phone on a round trip from Bochum to Mönchengladbach via Dortmund, but at least he was honest and gave me my phone back, so I probably was a bit harsh in the last post.

After leaving the grotty internet cafe (see post below) I needed to pee. As their toilet was broken, I went into the pub next door. Peeing there cost 50 cents for non-customers, so I ordered a beer. After a few minutes, some Mönchengladbach fans had returned from the stadium and joined me to celebrate their victory. I left and found the guy who had acquired my phone, got it back, and went for another beer to celebrate, inwardly singing

Ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus, ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus. [1]

I returned to the pub and bought a round of drinks, and the Mönchengladbach fans said that they would get me home, seeing that a couple of them lived in Essen, which isn't far from Bochum. We drank the way to Düsseldorf, visited a pub next to the station in Düsseldorf (a guy said he knew the landlord, Pedro), and then drank the way to Essen and Bochum. Right now I'm back in Bochum and drunk. Borussia Mönchengladbach are top of the league and aiming for promotion.

[1] Translation: I will not aboard the train to Bochum without my mobile phone.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan.

I keep coming to Erlangen with the intention of moving out of my old room, but as soon as I arrive I get drunk and am then too hungover to go and get some packing cases and move my stuff out. This time the drunkenness was predictable: my housemates had organized a big garden party with 40 crates of beer, three large punch bowls and a chili-con-carne so large that it could only be stirred by a length of 2" by 1" wood.

After several hours of partying, I decided it would be a good idea to bake a cake, so I went to the market to buy the ingredients at 5am, thinking that this would allow me a nice lie in. When I woke up I found that I had acquired a punnet of strawberries, a bag of cherries and half a watermelon. This evening I finally got round to baking a cake with the ingredients.

Strawberry, Cherry, Cream and Custard flan

(There is no real need to buy the ingredients while drunk, but it won't hurt).

Base: Shortcrust Pastry, about 5mm thick. Find a suitable recipe and make enough to fill the base of your container. Bake at 200 deg. Celsius until done.

First Layer: Custard, I used Bird's custard powder, which thickens nicely when cooled. Pour the custard on the base, and place in the fridge.

Second Layer: Strawberries and cherries. It is OK if they sink into the custard, but they don't have to.

Top Layer: Whipped cream. I used just enough to cover the top of the fruit.

This recipe is rather vague, but is based on the hope that anything involving strawberries, cherries, cream and custard is going to taste good, even if it ends up as a collapsed mush in your fridge. By some miracle, my flan had a good shape at the end, and was swiftly devoured by my flatmates, who were admittedly quite hungry.

It is impossible to stand on one leg.

I'm in Erlangen again, and drunk again. The most telling signs of irresponsible use of alcohol and other intoxicating substances so far:

1/ The two bottles of exploded beer in our freezer. Someone put them in to chill, but now the beer can only be consumed as an ice slush. Maybe someone will drink it soon, as we have even run out of Oettinger and are getting desperate.

2/ My flatmate Timo playing the theme from the A team whilst drinking a beer and smoking something or other for breakfast.

3/ My housemate Katja using the scaffolding on the building site next door as the most convenient path between first and second floor balconies.

4/ Me walking straight into a set of traffic lights at 4am without a shirt on.

The beer festival in Erlangen has another week to go, but I only have to stick it out for 2 days.

Things you may not wish to know.

1/ I have one black toe nail and one white toe nail which is about to fall off. I would go to the doctor, but he/she would tell me to stop playing football, so I won't.

2/ I headed a goal from a free kick for Torpedo Entenhausen this week. I saw the ball at the last second, tried to stick my head in the way and nearly missed it. The result was a most professional-looking glancing header just inside the far post. We lost the game, but only just. Here is a completely unrelated piece of footballing commentary, in German.

3/ When sober, I can juggle 3 balls with my eyes shut for quite a while. The first requirement is to throw accurately. If the first ball thrown doesn't land in the other hand then it's a nonstarter. No matter how well you throw, though, the pattern will slowly drift away unless there is some feedback of how things are going wrong. Usually when juggling this feedback comes from the eyes, but provided the corrections are small it can come from the hands, by feeling exactly where the ball lands, and correcting the trajectory of the next ball.

(So if your blind and reeding this why not try and learn teh juggling)

I can't do the whole thing anything like this well, though.

4/ When drunk, I can't juggle two half-filled half-litre plastic bottles. I found this out whilst travelling with the U-Bahn. The moment of inertia of a half-filled bottle is a very funny thing indeed, and the bottle seems very reluctant to go round in a circle. Trying to compensate for this I gave the bottle an extra twirl, causing it to fly through the carriage and nearly hit someone on the head. He was surprisingly understanding.

5/ Australia won the cricket world cup. For some reason the final of this tournament which has, in the best traditions of cricket, been going on for ages, had to be settled in one day. And it rained. So they shortened the match and finished up playing in the dark.

Tumblers and other old stuff.

I decided to make use of my excess leisure time and look round the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

I only saw less than half of the stuff as it is a big museum and I have a limited attention span for historical relicts. After a while I got a bit depressed by the exhibits: it seemed that the extent of human achievement over the millennia has been finding new ways to kill each other (axe, dagger, sword etc.) and finding new ways to depict the death and torture of Jesus. My favourite was one which had the crucifixion in the foreground and a lovely harbour scene in the background. Most picturesque, although it is a shame that Jesus was looking the other way, probably at something much less soothing.

For me, the "I wonder if I could steal this" exhibit was a 7th century franconian drinking pot. The great thing is that it had a rounded bottom so that it wouldn't stand up and you had to down the contents. I just looked around the internet to see if you can buy such a thing, but I can't find any. I did however learn the following quite interesting fact: a tumbler is, according to the Merriam-Websters dictionary, "a drinking glass without foot or stem, and originally with pointed or convex base". At some point people must have gone all puritanical, and designed the flat-bottomed tumbler which no longer tumbled. For years I've drunk out of these things, and never asked why we called the most stable of all glasses a tumbler. For some reason the name has stuck, though, so here's to franconian drunkards. Cheers.



For comparison, a raucous 7th century tumbler (top) and a sober 20th century tumbler (bottom). The tumbler in the picture is not the one in the museum, I just borrowed the image from wikipedia

Walking on Broken Glass, Mud and Sangria.

If the success of a party can be determined by the mess created, then last night's was a definitely a good party. After cleaning the flat from broken bottles, fag ends and a bucket filled with urine right next to the toilet we found that the floor has a few cigarette burns and a lingering stickiness you get in bad discos, so that each footstep is accompanied by a faint "squelch".

During the party I made plans to learn to speak italian, to visit some village festival (Kerwa) near Ansbach and to go cycling to remove the hangover. These are the things I can remember agreeing to, and I did actually manage to go cycling today whilst wearing my new "skeleton" jersey and red polka dot "King of the mountains" socks.

It's strange how alcohol can solve major personality deficits. I spend most of my time when sober thinking of how things can go wrong, and why it would be bad or pointless to do something. When drunk, all plans seem like great ideas which can't fail, even plans like "Let's go piss in a bucket".

So if you were here, or weren't here but helped buy a present (one of which deserves its own blog entry and is way too good for just a passing mention), thankyou very much.

Why half of Erlangen will have a headache tomorrow.

Today is the day of the big party in our house. We are making the nastiest Sangria I have ever seen.

Recipe:

Ingredients: 10 litres of tetra-pak red wine, 1 bottle of Aldi Vodka, 1 bottle of rum, 5 litres of fanta-like orange stuff, some half-fermented fruit, sugar.

Take a 25 litre pot filled with mud, cement and rain water, make a half-hearted attempt at washing it. Remember that mud, cement and rain water are the most nutricious part of this drink.

Chop the fruit, throw everything in the pot, get all your guests drunk on something else slightly more expensive and serve in plastic cups. Cheers!

Hello world.

I'm really drunk (Burp!). Wahey!. Germany 0 Italy 2. I did my best supporting Germany, but they lost, and I don't know if I mentioned that I'm very drunk.

Yours, drunkenly, Phil.

Deutschland 1 Polska 0

Germany beat Poland with an injury-time winner this evening. Almost the whole flat here and the flat below turned up in Berto's pub afterwards to celebrate/commiserate. In total we comprised five poles and three germans, plus the odd englishman.

Germany deservedly won the football match, but the Poles remain undefeated when it comes to drinking Vodka. They also won the best chant competition (in my eyes) for "We're going to steal your cars". The Germans seem to be rather chuffed at beating Poland for some reason. This whole business is probably quite important in terms of new europe, and the increasing importance of Germany's neighbours to the east, but I'm drunk and I'm going to go to sleep, so I'll leave that as a point for you to ponder over.

Bergkirchweih

The Erlangen beer festival has come to town. I can't take my beer, and need a day off after each visit. It's not as though I get roaring drunk, I just feel hung over the next day, and need an early night with a cup of cocoa.

Anyway, "beer leads to hangover shock" is probably not worth writing about. The beer festival here attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world (the good thing about being hung over is that you can make up random facts without feeling guilty about it), and this year it brought Wouter and Uli, who may or may not be reading this. In a supreme example of inhospitality I invited them for a curry at my place. The trouble was that they only got to eat the curry after bringing the missing ingredients, chopping everything up and (this is the good bit) unblocking our bathroom sink.

I may make this a regular deal. In our flat we have quite a few things to fix, so if you are feeling hungry and have some kind of plumbing/floor laying/painting qualifications just send me a comment, and I will see what can be done.