Aalen

Yesterday I was still in one of my favorite small cities in Germany , my good friend Rainer lives there and I have been there 3 times now in the last 6 years . It's like a second home I always feel so welcomed there by Rainers family and friends ;)

This time was the first time that I got to see a bit more then just the bars LOL ! Went to the city center and Rainer filled me in on some history of the city , wish I had laptop to post pics:( if you want you can look up the story about the spy of Aalen , quite interesting . But really that wasn't why I was there ! Finally I had the opportunity to play hockey there .

Aalen lost its arena when there was that tragic accident with the roof collapsing ( in another city ) and all those children died. A lot of obsolete arenas were torn down in Germany after this tragedy .... Aalens rink was one of them unfortunately , city council has not wanted to build another one there but they still have their hockey club playing in other cities or holding other fun events amongst themselves . They have a small "mobile" rink but this year they decided to make an outdoor rink !

The ice surface was not exactly level and the lighting situation could be better but it's better then nothing. It was a thrill for me to play there and usually I don't do outdoors games but this I couldn't turn down ;)had a great time there even though I was the only goalie . I think we were on for 1.5 hours and afterwards we began drinking ...

I had about 4 beers in the room and was feeling good , it was my last night with Rainer do it was a good excuse to get our drink on , so we went to the Irish pub . They had this special where you roll dice for free drinks that night and let's just say Rainer won a couple that turned into Jagermeister ( uh oh ). We met a couple guys there named Stefan and Freddy and next thing you know we were on way to another bar.

That walk to thebar was dangerous as it began to rain and freeze ( freezing rain) and on cobblestone roads it's almost impossible not to fall , we all fell at least twice each ... At one point Rainer fell and Stefan went to help and wiped out banging his head on the road really hard , I still think he got a concussion and he was the first to go home apparently barfing when on his way, that is a bad sign ! If you read this let me know if you are alright man !

I think it was like 430am when we got back to Rainers house totally molested drunk .. Yeah haha then but ouch the next morning when I had to be up at 8 am ! Will tell you the rest tomorrow I need some sleep ...zzzz