New Happenins

Well..the beer trials kind of faded....study week kind of killed the rhythm we were in and it's hard to get back into now that we are pinching pennies...so there's another thing we have failed at. But we are always creating new things to keep ourselves entertained.

I went to Marrekech, Morocco last weekend and it was incredible...completely different but completely awesome. It was almost like I wasn't in Africa because everything was green, and I was in a Muslim country so it seemed more Middle Eastern really..which was fine with me...even more cultural exposure. We flew up early Friday morning and met up with a guy that some girls recommended we contact and he took us out to the Atlas Mountains where we hiked around and saw some water falls and ate lunch by a river. Pretty cool dude...smooth talker but he seemed pretty genuine.

Our hostel was awesome...we stayed in a 13 bed room and met some awesome people from Greece, Italy, and Argentina. It had a rooftop terrace that you could see basically the whole city from so we spent alot of time up there just relaxing and talking to people. It was about 85 degrees and sunny as hell so my paleness fried rather quickly...always good to get the first one over with early because its inevitable.

Saturday we walked around the city and there wasn't a whole lot to see...very non photographic town unless you are taking pictures of people. As we were walking through the Medina, some dudes under an umbrella suddenly jumped up and came over and shook our hand so we played along and when we got back to their umbrella, they flipped over a thing that had a damn Cobra under it. Needless to say it was a pissed off and stuff...so the dudes tossed some snakes around our necks and took our cameras to take pictures of all this. So now we have some randos with our cameras, snakes around our necks and a PMSing cobra (Ladies, I'm not suggesting that you are like some ruthless snake...just ruthless in general sometimes) whipping around on us. So, after we changed our pants....

It was a great weekend overall...everyone was extremely nice..even if they were trying to con you for money or sell you weed. I would definitely like to go back for about 10 days so I would have time to make it out to the Sahara and the Atlantic Coast.

Skydiving Video

Beer Trials Day 3 - February 12, 2009

Beer of the Day: Bischofshof

Cost: 1.05 Euro

Bottled In: No City Given

Country: Germany

Alcohol: 5.1%

Size: .5 L

Ian's Rating: 6.4

Brown's Rating: 6.987

Overall Drinkability: 6.6935

This was yet another wheat beer but it definitely left much to desire after yesterdays. It wasn't that this one was terrible today, just that it didn't stand out. However, +10 cool points for the company for putting this on the label: "Made from the best raw materials according to the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516". I'm glad the 5 ingredients involved have been approved by the food and drug administration that's still following something written 500 years ago.... they knew all about sanitation then I'm sure. Where's your medieval purification law Adolphus Busch...you ninny.

Beer Trials Day 2 - February 11, 2009

Beer of the Day: Schofferhofer

Cost: 1.21 Euro

Country: Germany

Alcohol: 5%

Size: .5 L

Ian's Rating: 7.7

Brown's Rating: 7.681

Overall Drinkability: 7.6905

Bottled In: Frankfurt

This was a German wheat beer (Weizenbier) that started off strong in the ratings. Towards the middle of the bottle it faded just a little bit like any wheat beer does but came back towards the bottom with a sweet finish. Definitely would have been better cold but we haven't discovered a way to do this yet figuring we can't have alcohol in our homestay so we can't use the fridge.

I suck at this... BUT BEER TRIALS BEGIN TODAY!!

Ok...so this whole updating, telling my adventures isn't going very well...I am keeping a journal of my own and its hard to do it twice...so.... Brown and I decided that everyday, we are going to the Corte Ingles (huge shopping mall) across from our school, heading to the beer aisle where there are easily over 70 different kinds, buy one, split it over our turkey sandwiches in Placa de Catalunya, and document everyday we do this. Our goal is to go down the aisle, 1 beer at a time, until they have all been tasted. This will force me to get on here everyday, and i can add anything interesting that may happen on here as a sidenote.

Here is Day 1:

Beer of the Day: Alt-Bamberg Dunkel

This is a German beer that wasn't terrible. It reminded me of something else but I still can't put my finger on it. It came in a big 16 ounce bottle which was a plus. Remember, college kids will go for quantity over quality at every opportunity. In time I will come up with more interesting ways to evaluate but it's only my first day.