yesterday i fulfilled one of my most important Germany-dreams. I went to the Beck's brewery. the mothership. the holy grail. the bedrock of my dreams and the purveyor of perhaps the finest beer known to man. i was so happy.
I spent the weekend in Bremen, home of My Beer Of Choice (tm) and a lovely friend of mine, Jennifer. Jennifer was an exchange student in Australia in 2005 and i met her at the commencement of my german language studies. In an effort to cultivate some interest in the social goings-on at uni (a commitment to social participation that was limited as most of you know) i joined a couple (read: 50 million) clubs at market day and went to the welcome bbq for the UN group. While the bulk of my experience of the social side of UQ has amounted to a few hours of my life i can never get back, this particular outing was worth it - Jennifer was there, we got to talking and she suggested a language exchange, which we did in fact manage, every week or so for the duration of the semester. shocked that she still wanted to be friends with me after what must have been an intensely frustrating struggle with my fledgling german language skills, i stayed in touch with her and always hoped to be able to visit her in her home town. As she was my first german language buddy, Bremen was something of a landmark in my head before i came here (and not just for the obvious reason of the rivers of gold that run through it's centre) and to experience it in the frosty flesh was sheer delight. Jenni did a beautiful job of showing me around her lovely town; she didn't stop at enduring the Ultimate Cliche Brewery Tour, she showed me the GORGEOUS old town with streets so narrow only a fairly thin middle-ages horse without a carriage could fit through, the market, a football game in a local pub full of supporters (Bremen Weser ueber alle!) and a wander through the sights of the city. she also introduced me to the best of german confectionary AND fit in a trip to hamburg, where we stayed with her cousin and saw the Reeperbahn (because i'm a tourist and we had to). In the bar we drank in there I met a group of old english guys who bought me drinks just because they were friendly and two german girls who started chatting to me and gave me their email addresses because they were NICE - these things do not happen in australia. Hamburg was IT - the city i could live in.
