The German toilet and drunk hockey fans

This weekend, we went to Krumbach to celebrate Kathi's grandma’s birthday. (ed. note: Kathi's sister's name will no longer appear in these annals. I was writing a post one day teasing her a little and she flipped completely out so I don't want to include her or even mention her name in any more topics. /ed. note).

In any event, we spent the weekend in Krumbach, and though I didn’t think it possible, we spent every waking hour eating. OK, that’s clearly an exaggeration but it’s not as far from the truth as you might think.

Krumbach itself was a nice little town, right on the edge or some woods. The myriad of strange things and events really made the trip though. First of all, Kathi's grandma is cool as balls. She’s nice and very hospitable. She lives in an older house though and this house is equipped with the old-school toilets that were the bane of my existence during my first go-round in Germany.

For those of you that might not have heard or don’t remember: the older toilets in Germany have the hole in the front of the toilet rather than the back. When the whole is in the back, you shit and it slips peacefully into the water waiting to be flushed away. When the hole is in the front of the toilet, you shit and it drops onto a shelf inches below you ass and then you have a stinky log festering away. Crapping normally stinks. Crapping into these toilets stinks a thousand times worse because your load just sits there in the open air. So yes, the country that put the first jet fighter into production, the country that gave us cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and kick-ass steak knives also engineered a completely retarded toilet.

Something else of note: On the train ride back to Munich, we were packed like sardines in a crushed tin box for one leg of the trip due to some hockey fans that were traveling in support of their team. A minor annoyance became one of the highlights of the trip when one of the drunken fans vomited on another unsuspecting passenger. That was a lot of fun. The vomitee was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a sport jacket that looked like a left-over from a 70s leisure suit. After he was chundered on, he made quite a ruckus demanding money for his ruined clothes. When no payment was made, he demanded that the train officials arrest or otherwise detain the offending party until restitutions could be made.

While I certainly sympathized with his plight, I was unimpressed by his apparent non-violence tactics. If someone vomits on me and doesn’t pay within seconds, payment will be fucking beaten out of him. Shit, even if payment is made a beating may still be in order. After that, my second order of business would be to clean up. Not this dude. He never made any attempt to get cleaned up. He walked up and down the aisle with chucks blown all over him. Suave. The thing that I found curious was the payment he was demanding because it was both too much and too little. Here’s what I mean:

He was demanding 20 Euros as a cleaning expense. If someone were to chunder on me, I would think that 20 Euros was way too easy a slap on the wrist. I’d vomit on someone every week if I could get away with just paying 20 bucks then being done with it.

On the other hand, there’s no way the dude’s whole ensemble was worth 20 Euros. Well, maybe the nifty neon green and fluorescent yellow shoes but that was a fashion diamond in the otherwise rough rest of his get-up. 20 Euros might just have doubled his wardrobe.