Quiz Night

Steffi, David, his girlfriend, and Elisabeth.

So I lied. I didn't hate EVERYONE that I went out to lunch with the first day that I met the neo-Germans. There was one girl in particular who I really liked. Her name was Steffi, and like me, she was also in the first session of classes, but I never met her then. She had a friendly face, a wonderful laugh and was the only one who seemed interested (and interesting) that day. Before we parted ways, she told me that her boyfriend was coming into town.

Then she fell off the face of the planet. I never saw her again. Until yesterday.

I was sitting in the hallway at school, talking with British Jill, and Steffi saw me and ran up to me. She was so happy to see me--I could see it in her face. Apparently when her boyfriend was in town, she stopped going to classes and then the weekend came, and she was sad that we hadn't exchanged phone numbers. We were both going to the school-organized movie outing (to see a Polish film called The Debt) and so she invited me to come out afterwards with some of her friends.

After the movie, I felt like Steffi and I had some catching up to do. So I told her about my classes, the mean Germans, my trip. She told me about her boyfriend's visit. She even said that she had told her boyfriend about me, and how I might come visit them in Germany. Considering we met over a week ago and only briefly discussed this visit, I was touched.

Her friends ended up being people that I sort of knew from last session. There was David, the friendly Brit with a blonde hair and the very small head, who brought along his Polish girlfriend. There was Jacub from Austria and Nele from Germany who I bumped into time to time. And then there was Elisabeth, one of the neo-Germans from the first-day lunch table, who I discovered is a nice girl, perhaps a little shy.

We went to an Irish pub that was something like going into a warp zone. All of a sudden, everyone spoke English. The bartender spoke English, the wait staff spoke English. We were one of the first ones there, but after an hour, the bar filled up with a rowdy contingent of people from England, America and Australia. Hearing everyone speak English--quite loudly and quickly--made me realize how slow of a pace the conversations I have been having with my fellow students who are not native speakers.

The reason why the bar was so crowded was because it was Quiz Night, which is quite the rage in England right now, according to David. Essentially, someone working for the bar reads out a list of themed trivia questions and you work in a team to write the answers on a piece of paper. The team with the most questions right gets a prize.

Our team was called the "Violent Fishcakes" (I wasn't involved in the name selection process, so don't ask). A British guy with bad teeth walked around the bar screaming "Shut Up!" and then he read the questions on the top of his lungs. We would have a few minutes to converse and answer the questions.

The first round of questions, called "Heroes & Villains", had lots of comic book references, so I wasn't very good at those. The second round, "Live Fast and Die Young" offered me some relief, with questions about James Dean, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain and Anna Nicole Smith. There was an American movie section where I ruled, and then "Sporting Losers" which was the death of our team. These included questions such as "who were the last four teams to lose the World Cricket Championships?" The group of Australian boys sitting next to us got every single one of those right.

I tapped the Australian guy with the blonde hair on his arm.

"Can you explain cricket to me?" He rolled his eyes. He said that it was like American baseball but with 100 balls, but I still don't know what that means. And then he said that Americans stole the game from them and that Americans don't invent everything. Okay, good to know.

And so the Violent Fishcakes came in 5^th place out of 11 teams. I am usually horrible at trivia, so I was surprised that I was a viable player in the game. But then I realized it is because it was mostly about pop culture. Before the quiz started, our table had gotten into a ten minute discussion about the history of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. It was so boring that I completely zoned out. My classmates know history, but when it comes to James Dean and Anna Nicole Smith, they know nothing. Only I know. Silly American yet again!

Writing down our answers.

Nele, me and David.