Friday morning myself and three other classmates all leave Marketing during the break and head to the airport to fly to Hannover, Germany.
The annual "Rolling Stone Weekender" music festival had happened at the Weissenhauser Strand in Germany, and after seeing the prices and list of bands playing we were on it. Two-hour flight, learn a little about "operational levage and its relationship to Return On Assets and Common Equity" and we're circling to land. Get a mietwagon at the airport and we... are headed north.
We go around Hamburg, out Autobahn 1, and by 9pm we're pulling into our bungalow at the Weissenhauser Strand resort on the Baltic Sea about an hour east of Kiel, pitch black with Kiel's familiar freezing horizontal rain blowing up into our souls. But pumped for the music. The National (a band I've mentioned before) is playing in the largest tent, as are both of the Black Keys and a few others.
Yeah, that's my voice cracking at 3:18, not his.
Matt getting his drunk on during Mr. November offstage
Turns out the bands are spectacular, the location beautiful in a "summer resort in November" kinda way, the people fun but older than we expected (mostly 40-something local farmers), but we make a good two days out of it anyway. A few walks to the beach, much Erdinger, much music, and suddenly it's Sunday morning and we're racing back to Hannover for our flight.
Die Drei Herrengedecken
We end up 30 minutes behind schedule after taking a wrong turn pulling out of the resort, and with our time to get to the plane already tight, Jared floors our worthless little Ford Fiesta for all two hours south.
Half of us have a team presentation for our Business Valuation class the next day worth 40% of our grade. I'm already picturing having to take a 14-hour train from Hamburg to Barcelona. I swear to myself I'll always leave an hour extra early from now on if we just somehow make this flight.
Ran up and down this at least eight times in five minutes looking for Jared
We pull into the Hannover airport at 12:15pm for the 12:35pm flight and I sprint inside. Remembering the assholes in France in 2007, I'm sure that since we're not there an hour ahead of time they're going to say "Sorry, you're out of luck, the next flight ist morgen."
But the older Frau at the Germanwings counter just dryly asks me for my passport, takes it, prints out my ticket and hands it back to me. We made it. I look at her in the eyes and say with total seriousness "I love you more than any woman in the world right now."
She looks back at me sternly with her arm pointing off to the left and replies "The gates are THAT way." Her mouth says one thing. Her eyes say another.
We get back to Barcelona at 3:30pm. I head over to a study session with my group at Carl's place, we stay up until 1am finishing our report, and Monday morning our investment recommendation to the class regarding the Washington Post's excess cashflows goes smoothly. Life is good.
I love Germany. Taxes are high but there's a lot of fun to be had there.
Posted by: Bucket Trucks | November 24, 2010 at 05:49 PM
Looks like a good weekend, next year I'll be there with you guys. As far as the post below, there's a bar in SF called The Pied Piper in the Palace Hotel, you should check it out some time...
Posted by: Ben | November 26, 2010 at 12:26 AM
Looks like a ton of fun. What's nice about Europe is you can experience many different cultures without extensive travel.
Cool article...
Posted by: bucket trucks for sale | February 15, 2011 at 03:15 PM