My First Night Out

So, now that I have time to write an actual post, I will. Stupidly, I forgot to bring my camera with me that night, so I cannot post any pictures.

Belen and I met Wilhelm, Ramon, Stephan, and some new friends at the winefest. All of us took our bikes. Ingolstadt is a smaller town, so you can get everywhere on a bike. And with easy parking, people do go everywhere with them. There must have been one-hundred outside of the wine tents. There was wine, beer, fresh pizza, and corny Italian accordion music. The german eat pizza with a fork and a knife. It's strange, ecpecially when the pizza is so thin and crispy and difficult to cut.

Our new friends were the Shopmullers, including Franz, his wife, his older daughter, and his youngest Monica. I will have an internship at Franz's factory, learning how to work metal for cars by hand. It is not going to be a paying coat-and-tie internship as my parents had anticipated for me. I will be tired at the end of the day. I am excited to start as soon as possible, after a week or two at an intensive German course.

I met Florian and his parents at the winefest with the Shopmullers. Florian will be doing the same internship that I am. I will get rides to work from him early each morning, beacuse work starts at 7:00 AM.

After eating, Florian, Ramon, Monica and I went to the town center to watch the World cup on a huge bigscreen TV. There were no big games that night, so it was not as crowded as it is usually. However, there were still groups of people dressed up for Brazil or Croatia, taking every excuse to make noise.

Soon one of Monica's friends showed up and we all split a beer. The drinking age here in germany is 16 for drinks with less alcohol like beer and wine and 18 for drinks with more alcohol, like vodka. It is quite common for teenagers to have a beer like we have soda in the US. Beer is very good here, there are local brands for every town and Ingolstadt has lots of them.

Soon enough it started to rain, so we walked back to the plaza with the winefest in it to get our bikes. This is where Florian left us to go home. He is not a party-pooper, just tired and he had school the next day. We all probably should have gone home to get some sleep. Instead we decided to ride our bikes around. I had no idea where we were going, I was just following the girls.

A minute later it was pouring rain as we flew through the emtpy streets on our bicycles. It was very fun, so I introduced to girls to the American phrase, "Yeehah!" It is very freeing to ride without a helmet. They don't have them here in Germany.

We put our bikes under an awning and went into an empty bar. There we finished watching the game and played a drinking dice game, but without drinks as it was a schoolnight, and talked in Engman (doesn't sound as good as Spanglish) until 11 o'clock. We said goonight and biked home. They invited me to a party next weekend. It'll be fun.

Original Post:
I will fill this blog in in detail tommorrow because I have to go to sleep, but basically, we went to a wine fest, met some friends, including the girl that will come back with me to the US to stay as an exchange student, and went out onj our bicycles through the town. People bike everywhere here, and not a helmet to be found. We went to go watch the world cup in the town center on a humongous television with people dressed up representing brazil or croatia. Then it started to rain, so we went back for our bikes, then it started to pour, so we went to an empty bar and hung out for about an hour, talking and watching the cup.