Weekend, Ghetto Jager Bombs, and of course the Castle

So first things first, lets do a quick review of two basic concepts. The first and easier concept is that Europeans like electronic music. And when I say like, I mean love. Way more than we do in the states. It all sounds the same to me, but between house, techno, elektronica, drum and bass, and the other hundred names for the same thing, they can't get enough of it. I'll elaborate on this later.

Second, a Jagerbomb is when you mix Jager:

Delicious.

With RedBull:

Also delicious.

Most anyone who has been in college/has watched the "My New Haircut" video knows this, but I figured I'd explain for anyone who may not be familiar (Mom <3).>

Anyways, its Friday evening and I'm with Nelsen, Anton, and good ole Mike. We're planning our evening and Nelsen mentions a techno dance party over in the University area. Mike and Anton are very excited about the idea and I'm curious to go to my first techno party so everyone's happy. We decide to have a few beers before going over in Mike's room and go to the local Supermarkt to purchase said materials. While there we see Jagermeister (see above) and we think "Oh cool thats right. Jagermeister is German." Then we look next to the bottles and see this:

Jager's Cheap 2nd cousin

Its basically the same thing, but about half the price. We think it's funny, but continue to make our way to the beverage section. We pass the cokes and juice but then find an energy drink that none of us had ever heard of before. The wonderful, shameless, Redbull copycat, Rhino's energy drink:

Look familiar?

We find this hilarious and decide that we are doing Jagerbombs. Of course, instead of the normal ingredients, we spend about $20 (14 Euros :-/) less and decide to have what we call "Rhino Missiles". It tastes exactly the same and has just as awesome, if not better, of a name.

We have a few and walk over to the other side of the main street in Heidelberg where the Techo dance party concert bananza is. (I honestly don't know what you call it). It was pretty fun, but it definitely took a little bit for me to figure out how it works. In American clubs, it is basically just a bunch of people in nice clothes grinding on each other and you can't hear anything. This was nice though because people just wear t-shirts or normal clothes and theres a little bit more space (still can't hear anything though besides this :40 in). Mike and Nelsen were there til 6am while Anton and I were "lame" and went home at 4am. Overall, I would say techno concert dance things are pretty cool and I would do it again.

The next day we decided to go see the infamous castle. It was the bomb dot com for me. For Anton, he didn't seem to be as excited since I guess castles are as common as grocery stores or something. Either way, all four of us went but were taken off guard when we learned that Heidelberg castle is home to one of the worlds largest wine barrels:

A picture I drew/didn't steal from google. (To scale)

The friggin thing is gigantic. We had a great time taking stupid pictures that I'm sure 1 in 3 tourists take. Regardless, it was cool. Being higher up on the mountain, it allowed us to take some sweet scenic shots and walk around the gardens in the surrounding area. See the background image for this blog? Basically we saw that.

I feel like this post has a lot of booze related topics, but I swear that I'm doing more here than just "sampling the local wares". Speaking of which! Saturday evening we found a brew pub that made their own beers and I must say they were tasty. We each got a liter of beer which are the ones you always see pictures of when people show you pictures from Germany:

Go Germany.

We chilled there for awhile, grabbed a drink at some mega trendy cocktail joint and then just practiced German for a good 4 hours. Woo!

So the weekend was pretty fun and so far this week has gone by pretty fast. Been pretty good at sticking to my routine of morning classes, afternoon homework/speaking practice with Nelsen and Mike, working out and sleep. Today is St. Patricks day so who knows what to expect for celebrations in Germany. Hopefully a lot of green.

Lastly, food. Food is good. Germans love carbs. I think they have bakeries here like we have Starbucks back home. Literally, you can't walk more than 2 minutes in any direction without finding a bakery. And not only are there tons of bakeries, but more importantly, they have some beautiful looking pastries.

Awww yeaaahh.

It has been really hard not to gorge myself on pounds of this stuff. Luckily I've been too busy eating my weight in pork products.

Thats whats new. Will try to update again soon. I leave you with the German version of coke. It has the same volume as normal coke cans but it taller and skinnier.

Shoop da woop