Brent's karaoke extravaganza, and football-crazy Germans

A Canadian friend of ours here in Germany, Brent, ran into some bad luck. The hose that drained out of the back of his washing machine came disconnected while he was taking his turn washing the gear of the rugby team for which he and Jer play, and the water drained all over the floor, soaking through into the storage room below and through the walls into the bathroom of the mattress store next door. (Luckily it didn't soak into any mattresses, as I think that would have been even more expensive.)

Now everyone in Germany has personal liability insurance (Haftpflichtversicherung), which I was thankfully advised to buy by the woman at the bank when I opened my account. I thought she was just trying to get the stupid foreigner to spend money on something useless (who needs liability insurance if they don't have a car???), but she wrote it down on a paper and told me to ask my colleagues. It turns out that everyone has it here, and they recommended coverage up to 10 million euros. The worst-case scenario that everyone gave me was that I hit someone while riding my bike, and they were injured in such a way that they could never work again. This way, my insurance would pay for their living costs for the rest of their life. I have to admit that I never really thought about what would happen in this situation in Canada. I just think it doesn't come up all that often.

But, I think partly because everyone here has this insurance, it was fully expected that Brent pay the full cost of the damages. This includes the rental of drying machines that were run for several days (at a cost of a few hundred euros in electricity alone), and repainting/refinishing of all the affected areas. His landlord was nice enough to let him do the work himself, which saves some of the costs of professional labour, but it's still a fair bit of money. Being a PhD student, he hasn't got tonnes to spare, so he's been looking for innovative ways to raise some.

I suggested a karaoke night where people could make Brent sing whatever song they liked for money, which happened last Thursday. It started a bit late as Germany was playing Romania, and every German was watching the game. When I went to meet people at the arranged spot, I went by several large outdoor viewing areas. This is a really terrible picture, but it's more for Jeremi to see where they've set up a big screen by the remaining section of the city wall (at the left) at the Johannesturm. The area was packed, as were all the bars, cafes, and ice cream shops downtown. There was even a crowd gathered outside looking in the window at Lieders coffee shop because it was too packed inside. (Again, this likely only means anything to Jeremi - sorry.)
And then Germany won! And suddenly there were people everywhere, drinking, singing near-tuneless cheers, wearing German flags as capes... There really have been an awful lot of German flags everywhere. I was told that until the World Cup was held here two years ago it wasn't so common to have big displays of nationalism in Germany, as that hasn't ended well in the past, but that it's become okay again. Personally, I think they're taking it a little too far, but they may be overcompensating for feeling guilty about being German for so long, and the pendulum will take a while to find a reasonable level.

This picture shows the middle of the road at the mouth of Wagnergasse, and though it's hard to tell, there's a firetruck parked in the middle of the crowd. I thought at first that it was there for crowd control, but it was also covered with flags, and from time to time someone would climb on top to wave some more flags, and everyone would cheer.
And then, on to the karaoke. It's a bit of a funny set-up at Havana Bar where they have it - they project the video with the words onto the wall so that you have to face the wall rather than the crowd when you sing, which everyone does as if that's perfectly normal. Brent was doing his best to sing to the audience, only looking back to get the words, but the DJ was even telling him to turn around. Weird.

Here he is singing my first selection, some good Canadian fare: Shania Twain's "Man! I feel like a woman!"
Other highlights from the evening include Cindi Lauper's "Girls just want to have fun", and Whitney Houston's "I want to dance with somebody". Good times all around. The pictures don't really do him justice either, he was dancing too. He's a pretty good sport, really.

In more recent football news, tonight Germany is playing Turkey in the semi-final, and there are some concerns that this could lead to violence. There's a large Turkish population here as West Germany invited a lot of guest workers from Turkey here after the war, and while some have been here for decades, and even more born here, only very recently (since 2003) has it become possible for people born here from foreign parents to become citizens, and even that's not automatic. Since they could never become German, there's almost an entire subculture, which it seems sometimes only meets at the donair stand. There's some animosity between the two cultures, and there are some fears that thousands of drunken football fans might not behave so well. Here's a BBC article about the situation in Berlin, where half a million people are expected to watch the game at the Brandenburg Gate. I liked it too because it begins by interviewing people at the restaurant that we ate at back in November when we were in Berlin with Calin, Susanne, Brandy, and Bruce. As for me, I'll be safe at home, not watching the game.