Männertag

Ahh, Männertag. I was trying to get the blog up to date in chronological order, and was waiting for Jeremi to write this post, as he was actually there, but found that it was creating a bit of a bottleneck. As such, I've decided to go ahead and write the blog post for him, just so I can catch up a bit, and maybe be only one month behind...

Männertag means "men's day", and it's sometimes also called "Vatertag" (fathers' day) or Christi Himmelfahrt (the day of Christ's ascension). It's a holiday here, on the Thursday something like 40 days after Easter. It's a holiday in all of Germany I think (some are only for some states, mostly depending on whether the state is predominantly Catholic or Protestant), but in some regions (including ours, and I think mostly in the former East), it's celebrated in a peculiar way. Rather than being like a North American Father's Day, where dads spend time with their families, the men go hiking in the woods and get hammered. They sometimes bring along wagons filled with beer (mini-kegs are often on sale around then), and there are even special belts that hold a couple dozen mini bottles of Schnapps (which just mean booze here, nothing sweet).

Last year Jeremi stayed home with a pregnant wife, and we just hung out and had a lazy day. This year, he got to celebrate like a real Thüringer, going out with (from left to right) Christian, Calin, and Dennis, for a day of walking and drinking.
The other three got a lift up to Calin's place in the morning (at 10:15), where they had a giant brunch before setting out on their hiking and drinking. This shows the lazy foreign influence of the group (Calin is Dutch and Jeremi is Canadian), as often German men here meet up around 8:30 to start drinking for the day. I'm just inferring from the scenery (as I was at home with the baby), but this looks like they were still up in Cospeda, on the Windknollen, having one of the early beers of the day.
From there they must have walked to the next bar (these pictures may not be in chronological order - remember, I'm writing about something I didn't participate in). One nice thing about hiking around here is that there's a bar on the top of every other hill, so there's always a reward when you make it to the top. (Raw wilderness it's not.) On Männertag they're all open early, with the grills fired up, and often have specials like whole roasted pigs to feed the hungry and drunken men.
Here they're at the Papiermühle, the local brew pub, which is at the bottom of the hill leading to Cospeda. Shockingly, I see some women in the background of this photo!

That's more like it, this is mostly men (some with matching hats, probably to make it easier to find each other when they lose someone unconscious on the side of the trail later).
Prost! (Like "cheers" in German.)

I can't be sure, but based on the light fixture in this picture, I think they might be at the bar on top of Jenzig, the biggest hill in Jena, on the other side of the river.


Meanwhile, while they were out drinking, I was home with Béla, busy baking a cake and preparing a Greek salad in preparation for a BBQ that night. I went over to meet up with the other wives and girlfriends at Dennis and Jule's place around 5:00, while we waited for the men to show up. Around 6:00 they called and said they'd be half an hour, and an hour and a half later they actually arrived. The evening was lots of fun, though Béla had a pretty good fall onto a bookshelf and got a big bruise on his cheek. He was fine after a few minutes of crying, but it looked pretty bad.

Here they're at the Grüne Tanne, an old bar just on the East side of the Camsdorfer bridge in Jena. (It's the bar at which the first fraternity was formed, and it's still the official bar of this fraternity. On the weekends we sometimes see old men wearing the sashes and hats of the fraternity going in in the afternoon. Fraternities are something different here than in the US, and they sometimes involve sword fighting and initiation rites involving facial scars, which are officially banned, but still sometimes happen. Weird, in any case.)
Finally, a picture of all four of them!
I'm not sure what's going on here, but it looks like Jeremi is going for Dennis's nipple...
On to the next place?
Alas, we didn't get any pictures of the end of the evening, but we had a lot of fun. Christian and his girlfriend Carmen hadn't seen Béla since he was four weeks old, so they could hardly believe it was the same baby. Dennis and Jule have a little girl, Nele, who was just over 2, and who weighed the same amount as Béla. She's just on the smaller end of normal, and he's on the bigger end, but it was still pretty funny. (They also had the same size feet, but she's way taller than him.) I'm sorry we didn't get a picture of him coming home. It was a bit cool, and we hadn't brought a hat for him, so he borrowed Nele's hat, which is like a little pink raspberry. Super cute, but super girly. Alas, we didn't get a photo. Perhaps he'll thank us for that later.