Eins, Zwei, Polizei

Last weekend was an adventure, yes it was.  It all started when a new friend of mine invited me over to her floor's kitchen so that we could have a little pre-game party before we all went to the ERASMUS party.  So I and my fellow Denisonian walked to the pre-game party.  It took us a long time to get there because we didn't know about the shortcut.  We went up to the party, did a lot of talking with the group of friends gathered around there before we all went to the ERASMUS party.  The whole night, I and my friend were trying to escape from the crazy guys who were practically trying to dry-rape us on the dance floor. =P  I eventually decided to go back to my room at around 3 or 3:30 after having been followed by one of them, despite my repeated protests that "no, it's fine, I don't need you to walk me back to my room; I live close anyway"...creepy.  At least nothing bad happened...but I really need to think up some better exit strategies.

So after getting to my room at around 3 or 3:30, I got some sleep.  But not much.  I had told my friends that I would meet them at 10 the next morning so we could take a trip to some other cities in Hessen, since we can travel for free within this state with our student IDs.  Saturday morning I got to their dorm at around 10, but as I had predicted, no one was up or ready.  We didn't leave until around 11 or 11:30.  And when we got to Frankfurt, we decided to just stay there the rest of the day there instead of going on to any other cities.  We went to a store to buy some lunch and ate our lunch on the Main River.  After eating lunch, we walked around the city a little more.  At one point, a couple members of our group wanted to get some things at the grocery store, Lidl, so the rest of us went to go sit on a bench outside a store across the street, since it's too crowded in the Lidl for everyone to go in, and since we didn't need to buy anything, why would we go in?  But an angry-looking woman came out of the store and told us --first in German-- that we were not permitted to sit on that bench.  We pretended that we didn't understand, and so she said, in English, "This is our bank.  You are not permitted to sit on our bank!"  (The German word for "bench" is "Bank," but she must have not realized that "bank" was a false cognate. :) ) Eventually we got on a train back to Giessen.  Once we were nearing Giessen, however, we decided it would be fun to stay on the train and go to Marburg instead.

I have heard that Marburg has the most bars per capita in Germany.  After being there, I can believe it.  We found an interesting bar called "Spock" which didn't have any entry fee.  So we went there and we stayed there for a few hours.  At around 2 am we left to go to the train station.  We planned to find some club to go to, but instead we wound up staying at the station, waiting for the first train to Giessen in the morning.  We were sitting in the train station when two young men came up to us, yelling at us to show them our Personalausweise (ID cards), asking us questions about our age and what we were doing in the train station, and saying that they were some sort of police-in-training.  The one guy showed us his so-called ID card that supposedly proved he was some kind of trainee cop, but I really doubt it was any real ID, as he didn't even show it to us fully; it was mostly covered by some other card.  We told them to leave us alone, that we weren't showing them anything since they weren't in uniform or had any badge or anything like that.  But they kept yelling at us and telling us that they were going to call the police, while pulling out a cell phone and pretending they were calling the police.  We told them we were just waiting for out train, and once our train came, we were going to get on it and go home.  But they kept telling us that we won't be getting on that train because we would have to wait for the Polizei to show up.  And we just kept telling them to leave us alone.  Then two other men who had been sitting across the station came up and tried to get those "cops" to calm down and leave us alone.  Then those guys and the "cops" started shoving each other and had to be held back by these other guys who came walking into the station right then.  I gotta say, it was pretty cool.   Definitely the most exciting night of my time in Germany.

In the end, the police never showed up, and at 4 am, we were back on a train to Giessen.  And that's the story of my big night-out.