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I freaking love giving tours

Today’s technically a holiday here—if I had to guess, I’d say Pentecost, but it’s been a long time since I was a Catholic, and the frequency of holidays here is almost greater than the frequency of workdays, so it’s really difficult to keep track.

Because it was a holiday, every store was closed, excepting in most cases restaurants. As a tour guide, though, I was still scheduled for work, and today I had an absolutely killer group.

Pretty much every day, there’s a healthy mix between Americans, Brits, and Aussies (even now and then you get a Kiwi). My desirable molarity of Australians is generally around 10%. Any less, they don’t serve their vital role of getting the group pumped and ready to drink. Any more, however, and the group becomes impossible to control. They’re almost as bad as Scots.

Today I had about 35% Aussies.

Rough stuff, right? You cannot imagine. As has been the case for the past week or two, there was not a cloud in the sky. Absolutely gorgeous weather, OK? The weather definitely has a very large effect on the enthusiasm of a group, and today was no exception. While riding through the Englischer Garten, some of the Aussies leapt off their bikes and into the Eisbach. This was after they stripped off their clothes and biked across the Nudists’ Meadow. Hooboy.

I was able to chase them all down and wrangle them together for the rest of the trip through the Garten. The problem is, the next stop was the beer garden at the Chinese Tower, which means everybody had a Maß or two, and then we had to get back on the bikes.

Hooboy.

Riding along Prinzregentenstraße was brutal, and worse yet was the home stretch on Tal. Tons of traffic, and tons of serving, hollering Aussies.

We were indeed able to make it back to the meeting point for the afternoon tour, despite several flat tires, which definitely hurt our punctuality. I think it might have helped the tips, though, because fixing a flat made me look competent, if a bit slow.

I then drank like crazy, for free, at the bar afterwards, and chatted up the lot of them. I got contact information for a dude in Dublin, and now have a place to stay there, should I ever have the financial worth to convert to sterling and take a trip out there. We’ll play that one by ear, I suppose.

I hope you had this much fun today.