Schwartzbiernacht

This weekend we had Schwartzbiernacht here in Jena. For those of you who don't speak the beautiful language of Deutsch let me translate: Schwartzbiernacht means black beer night in English. One of the charming things about German is that nouns get stuck all together with no spaces. Like "doghouse" or something in English, but on a much larger scale.

So on Schwartzbiernacht all of the bars, restaurants, and other establishments in the city have bands, and if you buy a ticket you can go see all of them. It's great fun. Especially because of the great diversity of bands.

Some of the things we saw included: the worst cover band in the world, Russians playing surf music, Germans playing Irish folk music, and a Rockabillyish band playing 50's music. One of the highlights for me was the marching band where everyone wore red berets with giant white feathers and capes. This is the best video I've got of it. Also: what's up with those horns? You may notice that it's not oriented correctly as of yet. But don't worry, that's all part of Charles cinematography style.

Cool, huh? The headlining group from this evening was a band called "Boney M." We took to long at dinner and didn't get to see them. It was okay with me, because I had never heard of them and every time I pointed this out someone would sing "Rivers of Babylon." Okay, only Martin sang. Still, after skimming the Wikipedia article I feel like I should have heard of them. So that's the story with the poll. Please tell me if you know this band so I can know if I should. It's like if someone started telling you about elephants. You're like "wait, a big grey mammal? Do you mean a rhinocerous or maybe a hippopotamus?" and they're all like "no, and elephant - you know, with the trunk and the tusks." Then you have to say "sorry, I have no idea" and then you look it up on wikipedia and find you're the only one in the world who doesn't know what an elephant is. So, um, have you guys heard of elephants?