Day 5: Man in the Mirror

I haven’t updated in a while, but it has been quite a few days. On Wednesday, we had an awesome three part lecture revolving around marketing. The professor, Dr. Fassnacht, was an interesting character. Really looked into students eyes, yelled the entire lecture and just generally conveyed his passion for the topic the entire three hours. It was an impressive display of information, and I feel better educated on the topic. While he was quick to point out cool things like price change being a dramatic factor in profit improvements, he also gave a shot at the public sector when he claimed it was a waste of time that people would join for a year or two before getting a real job. Regardless, it was really positive. That afternoon we went on a river boat tour of the Rhein River near Koblenz. It was a little rainy and cold, but it was cool to see castles and interesting mountain side.

Towards the end of the boat ride, we had a friendly match of Euchre which Cale and I handily. After, we returned to the hotel before heading to dinner. We went to another local place called Austeria. Since the menus were entirely in German, we had relatively little idea what we were ordering, but trusted the waiter to give us good suggestions. Unfortunately, a few of us got appetizers and salads which delayed our order. Apparently, they delay giving your table’s order to the kitchen until everyone finishes the first course. This delayed us for the night’s Cinco de Mayo festivities: Kareokee. We returned to the Irish pub to meet our friends who had already joined the locals in screaming this decade’s hits and various oldies while someone held a microphone and attempted to ignore their accent. It was really packed at first, but eventually some of our group’s members got to perform (Steve even sang a recent rock ballad).

Robbie impressed the entire bar with a rendition of Billie Jean, and we left early to try to stay quite in the hotel. As background information, the past few nights, the hotel has been really frustrated with our group because we have been loud when we return in the evenings. The stairs are really good at echoing every whisper and the tile floor has made footsteps sound like cymbals. Christine and I wanted to revoke Ann Arbor culture for a bit and actually take the time to walk to the crosswalk which put us significantly behind the others. When we entered the hotel, we could hear the three or four others we had walked back with all the way up on the fourth floor. Without saying anything, both us went into James Bond/Jack Bauer/Mission Impossible mode, and began tiptoeing up the stairs, hugging the walls, hiding behind the plants on the landings, etc. This ensured we remained completely silent, but unfortunately made us look really conspicuous and guilty when we turned the corner hunched over using our fingers to make secret spy guns and bumped into our trip advisor searching for the cause of the noise. We just smiled awkwardly and continued normally to the 4^th floor, but it was a really funny memory considering how stupid we must have looked. We promptly reenacted the covert operation so Steph would understand why we were all chuckle house at 2am in the morning.

Most importantly, happy birthday to my oldest niece Jessica! I hope it was great!