This week has been a bunch of adjacent holidays, and therefore I decided to take a small vacation: mainly because it would only cost me about two days of leave to get an entire week :). As some of you might know, yesterday, the 30th of April was a National Holiday in the Netherlands, called Koninginnendag (literally Queensday). For me and the Namesake, this was a reason to visit our beloved Aachen again, also because the Namesake needed some translations of German documents for his soon to be departure to the States. Therefore, I met him already in Aachen and we went for the usual coffee at Glasskubus and of course it was again absolutely necessary to at least have a couple of German beers afterwards 
It was a lot of fun indeed, also because the Namesake was introducing me to some new pubs and restaurants along the way through Aachen. Because it was our Queensday, we also heard a lot of Dutch in Aachen.
A rather weird thing we found out during our visit is that one way of avoiding those (mostly annoying) Amnesty International recruitment people is to just have a coloured person in your company; when sitting on the terrace we saw them only addressing white people, totally ignoring the more exotic looking people. This really surprised us, as you don’t expect these people to be totally narrow-minded too (and maybe even xenophobic). Therefore, we decided to carry out a little experiment, so the namesake and I paraded alongside their Human Rights booth for a couple of times…what we noticed is that all around us people were asked to join the recruitment guy or girl to the booth, but not me nor my friend from Indieland. Kinda shocking, but also a bit ironic, seeing those world-rescuers having similar prejudices as the ones they are trying to get rid of in the first place. This had the namesake and me continuing our way through Aachen with a big smile on our faces, rather enjoying this irony. After a couple of small interludes, a brass band playing Bach, a jazz-band on the Hexenhof, and a nice student pub, we decided it was time for dinner, pizza at Pallas. Our day ended in the usual way having a nice coffee at the Mölkerei, a place really living up to its name 
In the evening I joined Olivia and Stephan (and Dirk) for a gig in a local pub called Bluff. The first band was a jazzy trio; drums, bass and trumpet, and though the players were quite good, too much of trumpet is just that, too much…our ears started hurting Next, a second more pop-like band started, also quite good, but rather boring. Another band was planned was after that, but we didn’t stay there to see it, it was just too smokey and warm in that pub; our eyes started to tear and our throats were getting sore, so we finished our evening at our Stammkneipe Erin’s Isle. All in all, the evening was still a nice one, catching up with Olivia and Stephan, because I didn’t see them in a while, mostly because of my travels last month. Let’s hope that next time only the music will be a wee bit better!
