The glorious indifference of the Dutch was in full flight on Saturday, with a number of train cancellations/ cows getting hit by trains wreaking havoc on my voyage. I wouldn’t have had too many problems, had the information stand at which I enquired actually given me some information. However, in the true spirit of Dutch ‘helpfulness’, I was not informed about errant cows or inefficient tradesmen (MEW) performing trackwork until it was too late. Thus, my trip went from looking something like this:
To something like this:
It really sucked. However, by the time I arrived in the German industrial hub of Düsseldorf, it was well and truly beer o’clock, and my cousin was already waiting at the pub.
Düsseldorf is certainly a somewhat depressing city to take the train into. At first glance, it is dirty, smelly, and highly industrial. There is graffiti everywhere as you approach the station. The graffiti is not even particularly nice. I don’t understand why people feel the need to ‘tag’ walls, especially when that wall requires a ladder to reach it. I’m fine with interesting pieces of artwork, but tagging a wall with a scrawled signature really gets my goat. Go and endorse your dole cheques if you want to sign something, you rank hippies. Nobody cares if your tag is ‘original’. Celine Dion writes ‘original’ music, but it sucks, and so do you.
The city itself is certainly much more pleasant, if a little boring. However, in my experience, the most boring cities are often the best ones to party in. After all, if there’s nothing to look at, one might as well drink a beer, or seven. As a counter-example, consider Sydney. It is certainly a beautiful place with plenty of terrific things to see and do. However, I rate going out in Sydney on the same level of enjoyment level as a) cleaning the toilet; b) listening to the first and only Chumbawumba album; and c) fanning my balls like a proboscis monkey. I’m not looking forward to returning to the city where bouncers at pubs like the Three Wise Monkeys touch your genitalia to check for hidden knives. I’m not looking forward to returning to crowds of moronic, musclebound dopes and mean, stupid girls drinking mojitos and discussing how great John Howard was for interest rates.
In Düsseldorf, they might well be discussing such things, but I don’t speak German so it doesn’t irritate me. It is home to the world’s “longest bar”: an enormous pub district and all-round party empire. Nobody has told the Germans that techno blows goats, so they fumf and farf and singen alongen endlessly, which is actually quite cool.
After numerous tasty beers, I managed to work myself into a mightily spastic state, lose my cousin and spew with reckless abandon, bolstering my resolve to continue drinking with my knowledge of the German beer purity law. As one esteemed professor has suggested, it is only the preservatives in commercial beer that gives you a hangover (S Auld et al, 1982 – ). Ergo, no preservatives in German beer = no hangover.
I can unequivocally tell you that Professor Auld’s thesis, with all respect, is entirely incorrect. It is now Monday, and almost 48 hours after the event I am enjoying a monstrous headache and an all-round feeling of queasiness. Maybe I am just getting old.
There is only one cure – to the pub for a couple of tasty belgian ales! After all, everyone knows that when you drink a German beer and a Belgian beer in succession, they cancel each other out (S Auld et al, A Random Night On the Lager, c. 2005).
Tschüss!
The Wombat