jump in my car

[editor's note: this should have been posted last night, but blogger was down and i couldn't actually upload it. sigh.]

I am completely and utterly wrecked, thanks to several days of overindulgence in alcohol and underindulgence in sleep. I got back from Berlin this afternoon and came immediately to work (after washing my face at my apartment), where I’ve been working for the past seven hours. Brutal! I’m having difficulty formulating coherent thoughts, so please bear with me.

I left for Berlin Monday morning, on a Ryanair flight from Dublin. Ryanair is completely ridiculous; they are so low-cost that they actually make prospective employees pay something like 600 euros for their own training, and then they only make job offers *after* the training has been completed. That’s such a brilliant business model! Also, all of their terminals are unnecessarily far away from the rest of the airport; one of my coworkers was telling me that she went to a Ryanair terminal in some city that was actually just a tent on the tarmac, and the tent would shudder horribly whenever a plane flew overhead. However, we made it to Berlin without any incident, and that’s where the fun began…

After checking into the hotel, I went around Berlin’s city centre with some of my coworkers. We had a great time, and I finally got to see the Brandenburg Gate (it was wrapped up for renovation when I was in Berlin in 2002)—but the gate was partially obscured by the preparations for the opening ceremonies of the World Cup. The city was gearing up for the World Cup at a feverish pace, and we were able to go into a gigantic replica-soccer-ball to watch highlights of previous soccer games and play with interactive demos and things. We also wandered around Potsdamer Platz, a large square in the former East Berlin that has been the sight of extensive redevelopment and now contains some amazing displays of postmodern glass-and-steel architecture. It was great to see the area again, since I had been impressed with the construction going on in 2002 and had wanted to see what came of the building spree.

When I got back to my hotel for dinner, I ran into some of my other friends from the office, who convinced me to skip dinner and go back into town to drink with them. This is what I shall fondly call ‘mistake #1’. ‘Mistake #2’ was drinking before ordering food at the bars we went to; by the time I realized that I hadn’t eaten, the alcohol had lulled me into believing that I was no longer hungry. ‘Mistake #3’ was getting up the next morning; even though I had only had three screwdrivers and a glass of white wine on Monday night, I was operating in extremely dangerous territory without any food to soak up all of the alcohol, and so I was violently ill on Tuesday. That’s when I vowed never to drink again; and, I held to my vow on Tuesday, despite the temptation proffered by the wine-soaked gala awards banquet/disco competition on Tuesday night. I made it through dinner, watched some truly awful dancing, and amazed even myself by going to bed shortly after midnight. This was a huge improvement over Monday night; Monday was extremely fun, but I didn’t go to bed until almost four, and so I was completely doomed when I woke up at 7:30am. Ugh. I desperately needed the six hours of sleep I got Tuesday night, even though it wasn’t nearly enough.

Wednesday, though, was where it was at, so to speak. The conference proper ended around 3:30pm, and we left the hotel on buses bound for parts unknown. Our grand closing party was grand indeed; it started with an hour-long boat tour of downtown Berlin on one of the rivers, which gave us great views of the Reichstag and other government buildings. I was with three of my friends from the Dublin office, and we happened to be the first people on the boat, so we sat in the very front and had unobstructed views of everything, as well as unshaded access to the gorgeous sunshine. The boat dropped us off at the evening’s destination—a beach-party venue, replete with sand, swimming pools, cozy beach-style lounge areas, barbecues, and an attractive (and free!!) bar. We had to do some obligatory team bonding, which involved painting a Berliner bear (Berlin’s symbol is the bear, and there are some amazing painted bears around the city symbolizing tons of different countries, ideas, people, etc…I saw some in 2002 and really liked them, never imagining I would have to paint one). I’m pretty sure my group’s Berliner bear was the ugliest of the bunch (see below). That was soon finished, however, and then the party could begin in earnest. I spent the evening hanging out and drinking with the group I had spent most of my time with during the conference, which was fun.

The fun was amplified a hundredfold, though, when we were tipped off to vacate our comfortable seating area for some chairs closer to the pool. As we were lounging around, the main executives gathered on a balcony overlooking the pool, encouraged us to make some noise—and then moved aside to make room for the arrival of DAVID HASSELHOFF. The crowd went absolutely wild. He sang four songs, including a cover of ‘Secret Agent Man’, as well as his song ‘Looking for Freedom’, which he sang seventeen years ago on the Berlin Wall (and which he once pointed to as an example of how influential he was in the reuniting of Germany, in a petulant demand for more recognition of his efforts). The best song, though, was a cover of ‘Jump In My Car’. They had played the video of the song for us at the banquet the night before, and it’s absolutely brilliant—I hope that the song shows up on iTunes, because it’s totally stuck in my head and may never leave it again.

Anyway, Hasselhoff was amazing, and I felt more emotionally, physically, and spiritually drained after his performance than I have felt in a v. long time. Everyone was a little dazed afterwards, even though it only lasted twenty minutes, and it took us some time to recover. By that point, we were being ushered to the buses; since the opening ceremonies of the World Cup were in Berlin last night, they were expecting one million people to be milling about in the area that we needed to get our buses through, and so we had to leave in a quick and orderly fashion so that the police could clear the way for us. The fact that we had to leave the beach didn’t mean that the party stopped, however; I hung out in the hotel bar until 3:30am, reacquainting myself with the screwdriver that had made me so miserable two nights before. Luckily, my love/hate relationship with orange juice and vodka was resolved amicably, and so I awoke this morning (after four paltry hours of sleep) merely feeling like death rather than like a vomiting zombie, which was a huge improvement over Tuesday. I dragged my stuff downstairs, ate breakfast, boarded a bus and then a plane and then another bus, and was back in my apartment by 1:30pm.

There, I made another small mistake by washing my face with a new scrub that I had gotten at that hippie store; the girl said that it was very refreshing and great for hangovers, but I forgot that its main components were vodka and citrus, and so the smell of it covering my face almost made me throw up. I recovered quickly, though, and did feel remarkably revived. So, I slathered makeup on my face, shellacked the dark circles under my eyes with concealer, planted my sunglasses firmly on the bridge of my nose (where they had remained since 9am, with two brief breaks to pass through immigration in Berlin and Dublin), and sauntered back to the office. Now, it’s almost ten p.m. and I’m feeling decidedly less perky, so it’s time for me to go to bed. I’m doing absolutely nothing this weekend, except for work, which will be lovely; you can tell how wrecked I am when I actually think that working over the weekend is preferable to going out. But, tomorrow will be a better day; and if it isn’t, my concealer is admirably equipped to help me fake it. Goodnight!