Seven Days and the Smell of Cheap Grilled Meat
The TV Tower appears on the Berlin horizon and, despite everything, I’m glad to be home. We pass the Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column, Revolverheld’s Mit dir chill’n in the CD player the way it always is on drives like this, and I close my eyes. Still got ringing in my ears from SingStar at full volume. Head still carrying the weight of the tequila competition. And the image of hairy naked men on an FKK beach is apparently going to live in my memory forever now, rent-free and unrequested.
We arrived Saturday afternoon in what might be the most deserted town on the entire northern hemisphere. Sun burning, sea sending its first waves in as a greeting, and we had a whole house to ourselves. PlayStation plugged in immediately—someone screamed Tokio Hotel’s Monsoon into the living room at full volume, speakers maxed—food and beer distributed across the kitchen and the terrace like the opening moves of something we’d already decided to win. Norman and Jini brought along Ewa, their tiny, ferocious toddler, who became the undisputed mascot of the whole week. Ewa, over here!
became a kind of incantation. Without her, we’d have had maybe half the fun.
We watched both Germany matches—the good one and the shit one—at full commentary volume. We grilled suspiciously cheap discount meat that tasted incredible in the salt air. We lay on the beach until we stopped being people and became shapes. We perfected the art of seagull-clapping. We got rescued from a series of escalating domestic disasters by what we collectively named the miracle substance Gasag. And we bore witness to the emergence of Slady and Tom as an actual couple—beautiful, inevitable, slightly annoying. Sorry, Anne.
Somewhere in there we killed a mutant spider of genuinely alarming proportions, used windows for activities windows were never intended for, and played what I can only describe as a Mario Kart knockoff in which I absolutely and consistently beat Tomi. He’ll tell you differently. Don’t listen. The themed evenings happened, the themes involved drinking, and Anna had some kind of legendary confrontation with an open window whose full details I still don’t have but which she apparently won decisively.
By Friday my body had filed a formal complaint and presented me with a proper cold, so I nested on the couch and watched a full day of MTV gaming coverage. I’ve got a lot of love for the GameOne crew—I nearly ended up working with them once, before Berlin intervened and changed the whole plan. I mention this only to immediately stop mentioning it. Mostly I watched music videos, which I never get to do at home since I don’t have MTV or VIVA. Observations from the couch: Mandy from Monrose, objectively. The girl from Aloha From Hell is also genuinely something, though I feel slightly complicated about it given how young she is. Sido’s new track is better than I expected. Anna’s enthusiastic chorus participation every time the children’s choir kicks in is something I’ll be hearing in my head for weeks.
Now I’m sitting at home missing the hot sand, the big shared bed, the cheerful noise of those faces around me all week—the trash talk, the in-jokes, the invented words (Lolomat. Mondschutzfaktor. These are real and they will be remembered.), the mutual piss-taking, the moments where everyone just looked at each other like idiots and grinned. Where did Gayman even go?
One of the best weeks I’ve had in years. If you bailed because you were worried about your relationship, or needed to feed your cat, or water your plants, or just didn’t want to deal with the group energy—that’s entirely on you. Already thinking about next year. And for the record: lol
is not a word.