January 23, 2009: Tom’s On the Rocks

Today was a fun day. I left for work at 6:21 the earliest that I ever have. I left my bus pass at home and instead of missing the bus I decided to pay the 2.2 Euro each way and save the 30 min of my life that I would have wasted going home. Work was uneventful because not much was going on in my part of the factory for some reason. There is good prospects of some really fun work on the horizon though, so I am pumped for that.

 

I left work at 15:27 and headed home. I stepped off the bus and into the light rain. My next objective was to get some eats. I hit up the Aldi bargain supermarket. Here I got the standard German food, pork, bratwurst, cheese and a bottle of 2 Euro wine (not the cheapest one there). I got home and cracked the wine, fried up some pork and made some spaghetti sauce. It was great. After talking to my mom on skype I decided to check out the Ratingen nightlife and went in search of a bar.

 

This is when the good times began to roll. I walked up and down two of the main shopping streets in town which have café/bars dispersed between the clothing stores, bakeries and the dozen cell phone stores. Most of the places that I saw were either empty or filled with old people drinking wine on tables with white tablecloths, not my scene. I eventually saw a place that was filled with mostly young people and seemed to be pretty happening, Tom’s On the Rocks. I walked in and immediately was hot with the inevitable wave of cigarette smoke. Three out of every five people were lit up, no joke. Despite the thick smoke the bar had good music and fair prices, 3Euro for a pint. So I took a seat. About half of the way into my Wheat beer I turned to the two guys next to me and asked them about where the best bar to go to in Ratingen was. This turned into a two hour long conversation on topics ranging from type 2 composite pressure vessels to the legal maximum velocity for paintball guns in Germany and the US (240ft/s Vs. 300ft/s). After a beer or two they, Sasha and Markus, decided to take me to another bar, Comic Bar.

 

Comic Bar was really neat. The walls were covered in newspaper and house music was blaring. This bar was only slightly larger then my apartment and jammed with people. It was in the basement of a shopping center. I continued my conversation with the two guys that I met and met some more nice German folk at this bar too. We left at 1:00, parted ways, and I left for home.