Saturday 28 March 2009

Boyz 2 Men

My brother-in-law left yesterday after a crammed two days. We drank beer at luncheon on show days and drank LOTS of beer on school nights, raced go-karts at the DOM fair, ate pretzels, hung out in Sternschanze, did the art galleries and, of course, trawled the Reeperbahn. Well, as Bradley says in the play, "It's there, he's young, so I gave him my blessing".
When we got to Herbertstrasse, the closed street which is basically a block-long brothel and which is verboten to any women visitors and men under 18, we did what hundreds of thousands of men before us have done, and walked down it to have a browse.
This, however, was a wet Wednesday afternoon, and we weren't anticipating much talent to be in evidence. How wrong we were. There were LOTS of women there, and some of them were arrestingly attractive.
And herein lies a thorny problem - do you give in to your strong instinct to almost break into a run (as someone did right in front of us) or take a measured and exaggeratedly carefree saunter whilst having no intention of buying anything?
I've only experienced this sort of dilemma once before - when someone bought me a lap dance at a club without my knowledge, and I found myself in a private room with a girl in a bikini. In the heat of the moment, is it worse to flatly refuse, or to allow the event to happen and live with your conscience afterwards? I opted for the latter, ands excruciatingly embarrassing it was too. I was clutching my beer so tightly she had to prise it out of my grip. Never again.
On the basis that this was the first and last time, however, my B-I-L and I took the more leisurely approach, even pausing to add credibility to the exercise and to more amply appreciate the visuals. We then had a stiff drink and talked about nothing else for the next few hours.

6 comments:

richchat said...

Naturally, for the benefit of any family members reading this, I was a wholly unwilling participant in the events described above...;-)

AliCoul said...

too late, Richard - I was with your family yesterday, and believe me, they *know*!

Vespertina Quies said...

I just want to point out, it sounds like your participation extended far beyond "giving your blessing." Unless that's some sort of euphemism.

Steve Dineen said...

Aha, good point, Vespertina Quies. But I think a blessing always means more when not given from an ivory tower or whatever, don't you?

Vespertina Quies said...

Oh, yes, I do. In fact, the only part of your story I found disappointing was that women can't go there, too.

Steve Dineen said...

Well you could try, but the guidebooks warn that if you do there's a good chance "you'll end up getting a soaking from an upstairs window with a pan of water or something".
Three guesses.