5 Smurfs vs. A Viking: A Summary of Karneval Weekend

If you have ever seen 5 smurfs take down a viking, you may have been to the most recent celebration of Karneval in Germany. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of Karneval weekend (Carnival in Brazil or Mardi Gras in N'Orleans), let me just say that this is definitely one of the most insane celebrations in all of Germany and I am surprised that it does not get as much coverage as Octoberfest. Then again, I am sure the Brazilian version (which gets way more hype than the German version) is far more ridiculous with its warm weather and notoriously beautiful Brazilian women. Now, let the stories begin (this post may be a long one).

So on Friday we were invited by Ivan, our coach, and one of the guys who takes care of all things TV Werne to go to this Karneval celebration. We knew NOTHING about what this weekend was for or what we were getting ourselves into besides the fact that it was only men, but we went nonetheless. I guess Friday is like "Man Day" of Karneval weekend and Thursday is "Woman Day" because on each day there are parties which can only be attended by one gender or the other. I thought it was strange sounding going in, but I now think it is great.

When we arrived at the party, our host told us to simply, laugh, be loud, and drink beer. We all happily obliged, helped along by an 11 liter mini keg of Krombacher for the 5 of us. Throughout the night, they had comedians on stage and good looking women in funny outfits doing dances and such for the crowd. Between every act, a girl would come out holding the number of the round we were on (similar to a boxing fight), with 11 rounds in all. This lasted from 7 to 11. This night was more similar to a boxing fight than you may imagine, as one of the fine German gentleman sitting near us was KO'ed by a deadly combination of Krombacher, beautiful women, and dancing on our table (which he smoothly fell right off in mid-cheer).

After arriving back at the house, we decided that the only logical course of action would be to continue this wonderful evening at a local bar. On Friday nights, it is 99 cents for any mixed drink at a bar right here in Werne, and we took full advantage of our Saturday day off by abusing this bar's specials. In addition, Marko pulled some black-market-Serbian-sweet-talk to get us into the bar without having to pay a cover charge. A fun night for a small fee: Glorious.

When the house finally awoke on Saturday we were not a very energetic bunch. We relaxed mostly and stayed in for the night, teaching a few drinking games to Marko throughout the evening and going to bed a bit earlier than the night before. Uneventful to say the least. Since I had to work on Monday, I did not plan on going out Sunday night but Marko, Junior, and Trevor supposedly had an amazing evening at a famous local pajama party in Waltrop. Sounds good to this guy... but now, we shall proceed to the really good stuff.

I awoke Monday like any other Monday: sleepy and upset that it was only Monday. I had little to no expectations for the day. I was very excited, however, that we got to leave work early to attend the local parade / party / Karneval celebration. I had heard rumors that Karneval was a good time but we live in Werne and how good could a silly parade in a small town be?

ANSWER: AMAZZZZZZZZZING

First off, Karneval is similar to Halloween in the US - everyone is dressed in costume (or mostly everyone), and the people on the parade floats fire candies in the crowd the entire day and you know I love me some German gummy bears - 1 point Karneval... In addition, there are no laws prohibiting open containers and such and Germans encourage everyone to drink at the earliest hour possible: in this case - we were drinking by 1 PM on the streets of Werne, patiently waiting for the parade to begin - tack on another punta for Karneval.. Cheap Vodka = point, Good Orange Juice = point, Even better screwdrivers = multiple points - you get the drift. I think I can stop officially awarding points now and let the reader come to his or her own verdict after hearing the story of the rest of the day...

So, while drinking our screwdrivers and hanging out on the streets of Werne all day, we witnessed many hilarious events. One of my personal favorites was the old, drunk German lady who walked up to Junior, licked her thumb, and proceeded to try to rub the blackness off of his face. I guess she had black make-up on her face (I sure as hell didn't see it) and was curious as to whether Junior, T, and Junior's friend Jemell were wearing the same black make-up she had on. Much to her dismay, they were going all natural for the day.

Throughout the day, Junior's friend Jemell attempted to contribute to the liveness of the parade as much as possible. I don't know how it was in other parts of Germany, but our parade had no barriers and therefore, it was quite easy to join in and participate in any number of ways. For instance, Jemell used the old Dave Chappelle robot move and followed a few unsuspecting Germans along their parade route. He then grabbed a toy rifle so that he could lead a march through the streets of Werne. Oh yea, and 5 smurfs supposedly beat up a viking... You get the point, hilarious stuff to say the least.

After the parade finished, we headed over to our favorite local bar to continue the party. It was a ridiculous 4 or 5 in the afternoon and we ended up staying there until it felt like it was 6 am (it was actually only 8:30 PM or so but who's counting?). The day ended with some of us looking a bit different than we normally do...

I dunno about you, but when I can get my Serbian roommate to wear something like this, I call the day a success.

Overall Rating: Karneval gets an A+ for pure liveness..

Hope you enjoyed it!

- MFG

Exciting Stuff..

Not to go all B Jones on you, but, man, yesterday was an exciting day for the ENTIRE world. We got to watch Obama's inauguration speech here in Germany, and I am not going to lie, I am very excited to see how these next four years go. Not only can he speak ridiculously well, but he definitely has that old man game (you know he just threw up a pump fake or two against this guy). The local paper wants to interview all of us yet again to see how Americans feel about Obama and the future of our country. On another great note, out here in Europe, the anti-American sentiment has definitely calmed down, at least for the time being.

As I was surfing the pages of facebook yesterday, I noticed that everyone's status somehow had to do with Obama and the inauguration. I think it is great that this election got so many young people involved in politics and caring about our country. It is a great sign for our generation when more and more people start to care about the U.S. and our government, instead of just those Amherst nerds with their pocket protectors and political science majors.

On another exciting note, I drove to work again today and did not stall once AND I made a bomb-ass bacon, egg, and cheese this morning for breakfast that reminded me of home like woah. I also made a serious asian style grilled chicken salad last night for dinner. My chef skills are getting serious.. Watch out!

- MFG

Christmas Comes Early...

It looks as though my Christmas break has come a bit early. I am going back to New Jersey tomorrow until the first week of January when I come back to dominate zee Germans once again. I think I am going to continue blogging while I am home. Hopefully, I am going to help out at Delbarton with the basketball team and maybe get a part-time job to have some cash available (if anyone knows a good part-time job I could have, please contact me).

Honestly, I am SO PSYCHED to watch the NFL, college basketball, and engorge myself non-stop on Thanksgiving. I wanted a picture to show my love for America so I google imaged "quintessentially American," and this is what it gave me, hahahahaha. I am sure one Mr. Reale will be extremely satisfied with this.


I had already decided Thanksgiving would probably be the most depressing day here in Germany and now I get to be home for it! Glorious. Again, I have to give Ivan love for showing me loyalty and wanting me to come back in January.. Awesome stuff.


So, on a side note, we lost last Saturday. I met with the Dr. prior to the game, and here is essentially what he told me, "I have seen your Xrays and your MRI and from what I can see here, you have a very bad bone bruise. Basically, the bone in your foot is bending and if you continue to play, it will inevitably break, BUT if you want to play today you can." Great doc... Ivan is sitting next to me when the Dr tells me this and clearly he wants me to play. So I turn to him and say, lets just play it by ear Coach. Clearly, he did not understand that phrase but that was part of the reason I went with it.


The game starts and we are quickly getting demolished, 21 - 6 or so. Ivan turns to me and says, "Can you go?" and I respond, "Just quick spurts coach, nothing too long." So, I go in the game. I pull the best Larry Legend impersonation of my life. Go in, within the first 5 posessions hit back-to-back threes and we cut the lead to 4. No big deal, except for the fact that I was strictly jogging from 3-point line to 3-point line and slowly starting to cringe on each step. We went into halftime down around 5 or so I think.


During halftime though, I told Ivan I just could not play on it anymore and we ended up losing by 22. Trevor fouled out and the refs hated T all day. It was a rough one to watch to say the least.


On another side note, I was quoted in my first politically motivated newspaper article ever on Saturday! Haha.... A woman from our local paper interviewed Trevor and I about Obama's victory and we did our best CNN international impersonations. Everyone here is extremely excited about Obama getting the W. Maybe, the rest of the world will stop hating us.. woo hoo! We have no idea what the article says, but it is hilarious to say the least. Good times. Can't wait to see a bunch of you soon!


America, here I come.


- MFG

Amsterdam.. Check Please

First off, I am in absolute awe that the things that are legal in Amsterdam are legal in Amsterdam. The place is absurd. Saying that, I will go over the weekend's events with as much details as I can, but to truly understand what it is like in Amsterdam, you have to go there at some point in your life. I highly recommend it. It is not only a city with great history and friendly people, but those damn Dutch know how to chill out with the best of them....

As the long-time readers (haha) may already know, I absolutely love European cities with rivers going through them. In comes Amsterdam, the city with the most bridges in all of Europe and with canals all over the damn place. I was in river-through-the-city heaven. It is most definitely a beautiful place. This is especially impressive due to the fact that it straight poured throughout our visit without putting the slightest damper on our weekend events.

After some issues at the airport, my mum finally arrived Friday in the early AM. When I say early, I mean early, like 6 in the morning. We hit copious amounts of traffic on the way to Holland but finally arrived at the hotel and settled in. Trevor, T, and Marko went to their hotel, which was hilariously dirty, and my mom and I took a nap before venturing out into the city. For some strange reason, we were very motivated that Friday and saw both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum before dinner. It was intense to say the least. The Rijks was an art museum but also had alot of information on the history of the Netherlands as a whole which I was digging. As soon as we walked in, there was a serious replica of a Dutch East India Trading Company ship that was made a long time ago. Of course, my immediate thoughts went straight to Captain Jack Sparrow and the glorious crew of the Black Pearl.

Don't get me wrong, I love museums and history and such (wow, I am a nerd.. damn you Amherst!) but, I feel like there is no place in the world which induces daydreaming about weird ass stuff more than a museum. You walk through checking out famous paintings, punching in numbers so that you can listen to your audio tour, and immediatley upon seeing a large famous painting such as my favorite from the Rijksmuseum and their most famous piece, "The Night Watch," I wondered how the hell Rembrandt got all those people to pose for long enough to paint that ish. I imagined the little girl in the painting getting antsy and Rembrandt attempting a million different ways to make her stand still like when a 4 year old gets his/her photo taken for the family christmas card. Or, maybe he did it from memory and all my rambling daydreams were for nothing. Whatever the case may be, my daydreams can make any museum a little bit more interesting. I found myself secretly wishing my mom had made a scavenger hunt for the museum like she did when I was a youngster. A tactic I most definitely will use with my future fam, not only to keep the young ones interested, but because I am a large child inside a large man's body.

I definitely dug the Van Gogh museum too. It kind of went through his life like a biography which made it more interesting to me than just looking at his paintings. It also turned into a bar during our visit which never hurts the cause. That night, momma G hit the hay early and I ventured into the streets of Amsterdam to meet the other roomies. We went out, and it was great. We made friends with a Dutch bartender and drank some local brews and met some crazy Englishmen having a bachelor's party. In addition, many a prostitue tapped on their red-lit window and said, "Hey, big fella, you want a good time?" in broken, Russian-accented English. I tried to get a picture of some of the red lights, but every time I took one it would inexplicably go a bit blurry. It is like the prostitutes have power over the weather a la Storm from X-Men. Here is my best shot, however. Surprisingly, alot of them were quite good-looking (must have been because it was the Friday graveyard shift cuz I heard some horror stories about the old day shifters), but they scared me. Nevertheless, I am glad I have a beautiful girlfriend (shout-out one time!).

At the end of the evening, I walked back with the guys to their hotel before beginning the solo mission back to my own hotel. The walk from their hostel to my hotel was essentially a straight walk following a single canal. In my state, in the wee hours of the morning with a rainstorm coming down, I found it extremely difficult to follow my soggy hotel map and got severely lost. This journey reminded me of my famous walk towards UMass (I was not trying to walk towards UMass) in the early weeks of Sophomore year at Amherst, except, I could not call Andrew and ask him to pick me up on Lincoln Ave. I finally found a place I recognized and got home safe.

Saturday was a day of Touristy events. Me mum and I went on a bus tour of Amsterdam with a stop at a diamond factory followed by a lovely canal tour. It was a great way to see all of Amsterdam and I took maybe a million pictures. You can see all (most) of the pictures from the weekend here.

Saturday night was basically the same as Friday minus the whole getting lost thing. Sunday, I showed ma the Red Light District cuz she just had to see it. I quickly realized the difference between Friday / Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. After viewing a small sampling of the Sunday morning shift, I had a bad taste in my mouth that finally went away around Wednesday. In addition, my eyes stung for a couple days, but I have finally recovered from the horror that is Sunday morning in the Red Light District. I am now doing my best to black out those Sunday memories, but, alas, luck is not on my side and those visions have been seared into my memory until the end of time. So, now, I'm praying for the end of time (Meatloaf fo' life). Haha, no, Amsterdam was great and a visitor must take the good memories with the bad. In my opinion, this weekend's great memories far outweigh any of the nasty/ugly ones because all the nasty ones were absolutely hil-arious.

Final opinion: I recommend a visit to Amsterdam to anyone in the area. It is absolutely worth it and will definitely be a trip you will never forget, whether you want to or not. Much love.

- MFG

Last weekend..

So, with the weekend off from basketball, I was able to finally get some quality time with Andrew, Fletch, and Kevin here in Germany. I got a ride into Dortmund on Friday night with my teammate J, but actually never managed to meet up with any of the Amherst crew that night. Instead J took me to a friends house who was having a party and from there, we proceeded to a bar to hang out a bit before calling it quits for the night.

As I sat in the basement of J's friend's house, I had an epiphany. No matter where you are in the world, what the laws are, or who you're with, most kids our age do the same stuff. As I looked around the basement (first point, no parents let you throw parties anywhere but the semi-finished basement), some of these Germans were playing their drinking games with dice (see photo, the game we played is called Mexian and involves a complex web of rolling dice and lying about what you have similar to the card game BS) while others were having a grand old time socializing with one another. While I had no clue what they were talking about, I could easily imagine. They were sitting there, making fun of each other and laughing about stupid things they had done in the past together, making plans for the idiotic events of the future, or catching up with old friends. Maybe, they were even making plans to create a business together and live the good life like my roommates and I have done so many times in the past. Even though I have discovered that zee German culture and way of life is extremely different than the one I am used to in the States, I have realized that people have far more universal characteristics and behaviors than I have ever imagined in the past.

OK, enough with the philosophizing. The next afternoon, I was dropped off at Andrew's apartment in Hagen. Kevin had already gotten there the night before, and we all got right back into the flow of things. Kevin watched entourage online while Andrew and myself had the pleasure of watching College Gameday on his computer. We may not have had 4 tv's in the house, but we still found a way to watch multiple things at the same time just as we had done ever since we hand-crafted the massive entertainment center during our sophomore year at Amherst. Later that night, we got to see Fletcher play a game against Dortmund. Clearly, Fletch has had the same issue with the refs here that I have had, as he was in foul trouble throughout the game. When he was in though, he scored at a consistent clip and looked to me like he was definitely their first option. Great work swappies, I'm proud of ya.


After the game, Kevin, Andrew, Fletcher, and myself all went back to Fletcher's apartment to hang out a bit before going out. It was a glorious plan as Fletcher and myself got to witness the Michigan Wolverines come back from a 19 point defecit and take down the hated Wisconsin Badgers. We were happy to say the least.

We than proceeded to a party hosted by a radio station called 1Live. I know what you are thinking, "A radio station party?!?" Yea, so what? It doesn't make me less of a man and more of a teenage girl (well, I mean...). It was pretty funny to attend, considering all I could think about was that we were at the German version of Z100's Jingle Ball, except without actual musicians (guys go to that too, right?).

1Live is a radio station that we have all grown to love because it consistently plays music with English lyrics and hearing words in English makes all of us much happier, even if they are the catchiest and most annoying I can't-ever-get-this-song-out-of-my-head songs in the history of Euro Pop. The choice in music makes you look like this on the left - happy to be chilling with the fellas of course, but, as you can tell by the faces, clearly thinking how we wish DJ BJ (Brandon Jones for those of you not in the know) was behind the turntables. Nevertheless, it was definitely a quality weekend..

Next weekend, however, Momma G is flying into Germany and we are going to go hit Amsterdam in style. Yes, I am going to Amsterdam for the first time with my mother. Check back next week and I am sure there will be some entertaining tidbits to read and hopefully, some quality pics to view.

- MFG

Oh and I Forgot...

Check out this amazing collage that our old coach Mike Rejniak put together for the Class of '08. He has done so much for us, including helping all of us get these jobs in Germany with our highlight tapes. Big shout out to Mike for just being Mikey and helping all of us out so much. Thanks Mike! Make sure your apartment is ready for some visitors soon...


- MFG