Before Madrid: Mainz, Germany

After a short walk around the nice streets of Mainz, and finding super-cool postcards of Mainzelmannchen (local TV-legends apparently, some friendly comics-figures), the guy at the Mainzelmannchen-shop advised me that it's definitely worth it to spend the Wednesday night at Mainz. With all the students and a nice choice of bars/pubs, it's miles better than a night at the airport, anyway :) Decided - now I just needed smth to do until at least 3:45 (the first bus back to the Hahn airport)...

So... To make a long story short, I met some jugglers on the street (will post a video here soon hopefully :) , who invited me to join their meeting at the university campus later.

Well, I have been trying out juggling for 1-2 months now, so it was a cool invitation ;) One of the guys, by the way, had even been to Parnu before :)

It seemed to be simple to find the university, to go up the hill, and to ask for the swimming pool.. Mr Murphy jumps in with his laws of "what can go wrong, will". Naturally, I managed to step into the wrong university building, and get directions to the wrong (public) swimming pool, go up the wrong hill, and find no jugglers meeting there :) :)
40 minutes later I arrived to the correct place & met the familiar street-jugglers, and many others who were throwing & catching balls, clubs, and other objects. I had fresh oranges to juggle with, since I left my balls to the airport luggage locker with the rest of my suitcase.. :) A fresh & healthy hobby ;) The atmosphere was further improved by some people doing rope-walking.. And just for the feeling - next to the park where we were, some capoeiristas were working out, of course with Brazilian music & songs! And in a hall on the other side of the park, a kendo-training was taking place, with all the complementing sounds/screams that go with it (tell me if I'm mistaken with the name of the martial art here.. anyway - guys in black, fencing with samurai-sword imitations).

Although the newly-found friends were super-helpful with trying to find me a place to crash at for the night, the intentions were not meant to succeed. Which did not hurt our moods, because after dark, we had to continue chatting on the warm grass, took a beer in a christian student bar, drove around the city on bicycles, and spent the rest of the night at one of the few local clubs.
About the beer - I can totally suggest you to try a trick they did in that bar ;) Pour the beer in a glass, and add about a finger-wide bit of banana syrup/juice. It mixes nice and adds an exotic taste to the beer.. Yep, I will try that one again.
And the nightclub - Red Cat - although the jugglers didn't join me there anymore due to the early lectures/work on the next day, I quite enjoyed it. First of all - they played my music :) (post-modern indie & alternative sounds was written on the flyer). And I learned new tricks - for example that they have the beer-bottle 'pfand'-money also in bars! You buy a beer and pay 1 euro more than the list-price. And if you return the bottle to the bar, you get that euro back ;) What else - some local guys were doing quite a bit of circus, probably because the club had no wardrobe :) So they stuck their jackets behind their backs under the shirt as giant humps. It was fun seeing 2 Hunchback-Quasimodos swinging around the dancefloor, making freaky face-impressions and finding 'cheap popularity' (or disciplinary slaps to the face) after their interesting flirting moves :) :)
So, at first I was kind of waiting for the first 3:45 bus, but after getting used to the nightclub atmosphere, I discovered that I simply missed it :) And the next, 4:45 bus took me sleeping back to the airport.