I’m back!
And I had fun.

I didn’t get particularly close to Berlin, nor did I spot any falafel places. I didn’t sleep as much as I normally do, I didn’t manage to find any particularly humorous licence plates, and I could do without hearing the Radetzky March for a good while.
But I managed to have a very good time regardless.

I found something vegan among the catered stuff about half the time and actually had one of the catering people ask “vegan?” when I asked if something had milk in it in my best German, which made me exceedingly happy (though I was also most appreciative of the guy who bothered to ring someone about whether the mash had milk in it, even if he assumed food sensitivities rather than ethics), I met my quota of conga line-fun for the year, if not the decade, spent a lot of time in a car yet didn’t get carsick even once, got delightfully loopy due to lack of sleep and abundance of social time rather than abysmally grouchy, and had a ton of fun hanging out with people from all over and making music.

And while I spent most of the time indoors, either in hotels or in sports halls, I did manage to visit a supermarket for some extra food and got to see enough of the outside of Germany to aquire a strong desire to go back there for a nice holiday.
Preferably the sort that involves some nice hiking.

Conveniently, it turns out my German isn’t actually that dismal. My dad did say I’d pick it up easily.
The weird thing is, though, if I didn’t quite know how to say something in German, my brain quickly switched to French. A language in which I may have been fairly fluent some years ago, but with me not having anyone to talk to and losing TV5 and thereby the ability to watch French-Canadian news during breakfast and French krimis during the weekend, my fluency level has dropped dramatically. So it makes no sense whatsoever to switch to that.
Also, with me not coming across too many Germans who seemed to speak English well enough to try it on me (the Musikparade had an overwhelmingly geriatric audience), I doubt French would be much use.
My brain is delightfully strange at times.

The Spanish I knew was of little use in trying to communicate with the lovely (and remarkably polite for a bunch of teenagers) people from the Mexican band, but then my Spanish is limited to the most basic stuff picked up from U.S. television, and maybe a handful of insults. I also have some vague recollections regarding the correct pronunciation of “pollo” and remember correcting my dad on it il y a quelques années, with some embarrassment due to the meaning of the mispronounced version, but I forgot what you’re actually supposed to be talking about when you’re saying it wrong.
Probably penises or something.

There were a bunch of other bands, either more showy marching bands, or military marching bands. There was a Polish one, a Ukranian one (which mixed the military with the showy into something pretty damn cool), a Czech one, a German one, and another Dutch one. The public were told we were Scottish, which we aren’t technically, but no one seemed to care.

Though I took my camera, I forgot to take pictures most of the time. Besides, while there was some vegan food, it wasn’t all that spectacular overall, so apart from being very happy that, unlike the rest of the people, I had my own food to fall back on and wasn’t fully relying on the catering, I didn’t really bother taking any pictures of it.

I did, however, take some other random pictures, mostly not related to food.

Don’t feed the water birds.

Use condoms.

Bracelet I got from one of the Mexican kids. At least I got to use some of the Spanish I did know to properly thank them.

DNA car! This is about as funny as it got for me, licence plate-wise.

And for your entertainment, a minute’s worth of afternoon autobahn, showing you, among other things, that I don’t have very steady hands.

To make this seem at least vaguely like a vegan food blog, I’ll tell you that I very much loved the Berief Soja Fit Schoko +Kalzium and wish I could get my hands on it here.

~-*-~

While going through my stats from the last few days, I noticed someone found this site by searching for “picture of twigs as a meal”.
Cracked me up something good.