Bikes and Police

On Saturday we met up with friends to go to a light dinner. We heard "meet us at so-and-so's house and we'll all bike over to Ockeshausen for dinner". We said, great, we'll be there! Except we went there and found out we'd heard incorrectly and were actually biking up two giant hill/mountains for 45 minutes to go to a place 2 villages away. We managed. 30 minutes into it I was pushing my bike up a near-vertical trail with another friend, but yes, we arrived. And what goes up, must come down, so the majority of the ride home was coasting. It was so much coasting, and at such high speeds, I wondered if my brake pads would wear down on this single ride. They didn't. It was fun riding in the dark, the spring breeze in your hair, following the tail lights of the other bikes (there were 6 of us).

We pulled up to our driveway at 11:15pm. There were about 30 high school aged kids smoking and drinking on our front walk. We barely were able to get past them to go down to our garage. Stefan went out front switching on his teacher's voice and the big Mag-Lite and told them to pick up their beer bottles and cigarette butts and go back to their party across the street. Fast forward 10 minutes and Stefan is out on our front balcony yelling at two boys who stumbled down our driveway to urinate on our garage door. They ran off and Stefan called the cops.

Twenty minutes later a cop car pulls up. One old guy gets out, shakes his fist and says something to the swarms of teenagers - who promptly mock him and laugh and pull out their digital cameras to take pictures of the cop and his car. He gets into his car, starts the engine, the kids surround the car, taking pictures of him through the windows, and he peels off. That was the last we saw of the police for the rest of the night. GREAT - now I have a lot of faith in the cops here in Germany - um, hello disturbance of the peace!!! 30 minutes later saw Stefan chasing off two more guys who thought our driveway was a toilet - and then it was 2:30am and we said forget this, and we went to bed.

Sunday afternoon from 12:30pm-7pm there were about 4 kids cleaning up the building. Then again for several hours today. The building used was a sort of fellowship hall from the state church. Usually it's just the AA meetings, choir rehearsals, and occasional university class that uses the place. Glad to see they had to clean it up, but um....yeah, I'm hoping that doesn't get repeated. And to think the people who lived across the street from us in Lanesville used to complain about our youth group outside!!! Gosh, all they ever heard were games of volleyball and capture the flag.....they should think twice.

And no - there's no law here against drinking in public. There's also no law about walking around with an open container. I really hate that - I see so much of that here and I just find it totally disgusting.

I know the US could stand to make a few laws itself, but seriously - what's so difficult about banning drinking in public and open containers?