St-Patrick's Day

We started the day off with heading to the computer store to see about getting our laptop fixed. It turned out he could fix it and it would only cost us around 40 euros (we didn’t find this out though until later when Tobias called the guy to translate everything for us). We will probably regret not heading to Dublin for St Patrick’s Day as it was one thing Julie and I did not want to miss out on. Unfortunately, it was just too expensive for us to justify the 4 day trip. There are two Irish bars in Regensburg and the one we went to was closest to Tobias’ apartment and had St. Patrick’s Day banners whereas the other one didn’t have any advertisements. Our initial plan was to have dinner and drink the night away at the pub, but to our dismay it didn’t open until 6 (as it is every day) and did not serve food. So we went to a bakery and picked up some beer absorbing food. Just after 6 Julie and I were in the bar along with the bar tender and the music being played over the speakers. We sat near the bar at first, Julie drank Raddlers all night, and I drank Kilkenny all night. Because it was St Patrick’s Day and I was drinking an Irish beer I was given a scratch ticket and proceeded to win one of those large goofy Guinness hats (I won on my next drink too but after that they stopped giving me scratch cards). When a few more people showed up, about an hour later, we decided to move to a long table, not sure if Anna and Michael got our message to come join us. The beer was going down easy and eventually the bar started to fill up. A guy sat down at the end of our table and was speaking to the waitress in English saying he was waiting for his wife. Well, his wife came with three friends and then two more showed up later. The table was full and the place was crowded. The band didn’t start until 9 (which I still can’t get over) so Julie and I had a few beers in us and were wearing the hats, the owner of the bar, a little lady with short red hair took our picture to go up on her bar. Eventually the band came and started playing, all American music, some English (no German, except when they spoke with the audience) and we managed to hear two St Patrick’s Day songs (can’t say they were Irish though). One of the guys sitting next to us was from San Francisco teaching English here, his name was Travis and he spoke to us for a bit, though most of the group spoke German and kept to them selves. On our way out though, more than one person at the table had said good night. We had a great night out, the band was great, the company was fun and it was the best way we could spend St Patrick’s Day in Germany (Most German’s don’t know about this auspicious day but they did hold a festival a few days before, so they are close enough I guess).
The following night Anna came by Tobias’ place for dinner and some games. I unfortunately decided to drink with them this night and the following morning was very rough not to mention that night. The dinner was once again delicious and we learnt a new game called Wizard – the play is similar to euchre but there are no teams and you must guess correctly on how many tricks you will take. It was fun and I won (Julie almost ended up with a negative score but on another day she beat the lot of us). The following day we met up with Anna and Micheal for coffee and made plans for dinner the following night. Before we left to meet up with them Tobias phoned the mechanic friend about our van, it looks like we will be driving it to Pasburg tomorrow to get the van fixed.