Hangover in Hannover

This title is something catchy I came up with on Saturday morning when I woke up on Sina's friend Natalia's couch after a night of dancing and drinking at "Cumberlantsche Gallerie". The place is awesome for a Friday night. Sina's cousin Timo works sometimes as a bartender there and he was the best host ever. We would have never found such a cool spot like that on our own. We came to a realization that clubs in Germany are a lot different from their US counterparts in the way that they are very quiet outside. Granted you will have a visible smoking section outside, but they are all sound-proofed well and crowd-controlled so that you only see a single bouncer standing outside as opposed to "the line" outside of a club that club-owners in the US allow to build so as to attract more customers. Well, we had a great time dancing to what was a mash-up of jazz, soul and funk. When we decided to leave we were told that we were "walking distance" to Natalia's apartment.

"Walking distance" is a term that Germans take very literally, maybe more similarly to the way that Forest Gump would consider walking distance. Drunk, freezing cold, we walk for at least a half-hour. I am starting to see where stereotypes of fat, lazy Americans are derived from. Natalia and her boyfriend Malte were also excellent hosts, and after we woke up and changed to couch from sleep-mode to living-room mode we were all enjoying German breakfast together in her cozy living room.

The German breakfast is something I have really begun to love after a little time to adapt and see what I like. Everybody does it a little different, but it definitely has a few common denominators; everybody gets a hard-boiled egg, everybody gets some toast or fresh rolls (from either a bakery or they get these rolls that they bake in their own ovens), some fruit (usually some bananas, apple slices, grapes, pomelo), then saft (or Zaft, which is juice as we would pronounce it, usually orange, just like us), but the big deal is all the spreads. You see a table set up for German breakfast and it's really impressive, like "you did all this for me?!" Literally every bit of space on the table is taken up, these people like OPTIONS. So you sit and talk with everyone, and split open a roll and everyone grabs different stuff. Nutella, cheese, butter, lunch meat, jam, and some other stuff I have to explain. They have this spread that you get at the grocery store in the Deli section that tastes so good to me. Describing it might not do it justice because it really is tasty, but it's a cream sauce with onions and very thinly cut prosciutto or ham. Seriously, I could live off of this stuff, I don't get tired of it. Natalia shared with me how she likes to eat her b-fast, and it is supposedly very European. She puts a piece of gouda cheese on a roll and then adds jelly on top of it. I tried it, and it was way better than I expected, and I think I actually like it better than the common butter and jelly combo I was used to. So at this point my hangover has subsided quite a bit and just in time because we all clean up breakfast (I'm always the last one eating, staying true to my stereotype), and we head out the door.

The weather is cold, big surprise, and a light rain is falling but no problem, I have a Burton jacket on so I throw my hood over my tuque and off we go. We visit the Rathaus in Hannover which is beautiful. There were two couples taking wedding photos, a bunch of unattended little kids running around, and four big models of Hannover. It was pretty cool to look at the models, they showed the city as it looked in Medieval times, right before WWII, right after WWII (which made me sad because Hannover, like so many other German cities, were devastated by the Allied forces), and Hannover as it is today. If you have to make one stop in Hannover for a bit of history, this is the spot, thanks again Natalia.