Verpennt

Verpennt, roughly translated, means something like 'misslept'. pennen, the verb, means to sleep, in a slang crash-on-yer-couch, whose derivative, Penner, is a homeless person, the kind that sleeps in the bushes in the park.

Someone crawling into bed with me disturbed what fitful sleep I had hitherto been enjoying, and just as I fell asleep again Linda came with an urgent need for paper. I explained the location and contents of my backpack but decided I really was awake and got up anyways. I hadn't slept well, due to the pounding music jostling in through one wall and the pounding someone had literally been doing on the other (a popular party game involves pounding the bottle of beer on the wall, dangling it from a string. The victim, to applause, has to uncork and down it without dripping). Turns out two people had joined me on the bed; no surprise.

The kitchen looked like Dresden in 1945, empty glasses mimicing the ruined stumps of buildings; the living room, a mute forest of empty bottles, candy wrappers, and a pile of forgotten pretzle sticks cowering forlornely in the corner. My feet stuck to the floor and the room had the sickly sweet smell of alcohol and juice. Linda was in the dining room, scribbling furiously in what I assumed to be Czech but didn't ask. I rolled up my proverbial sleeves and set about collecting the three crates of bottles and packing them in their plastic home like little eggs.

It took less time than I expected to remove much of the debris from the party, wipe the counters, clean the glasses, sort the straws, lime peels, and bottle caps to their respective containers. I had just finished clearing glasses when L.--who had not slept--burst into tears in my arms, cause unknown. Two kleenexes later, she helped me in her own way with the dishes (her mobility was somwhat hindered by a difference in opinion she had had with a tree some hours previous). We talked and waited, tried to make coffee, and eventually some of the other poor bastards stumbled out of their respective/collective beds. They all looked just a little bit verpennt.

The point I wanted to get to, irrespective to party stories, is that this was a room full of smart people. With few exceptions they were all either fellow students or had met at an international youth seminar, bringing together students from Rheinland-Pfalz, Burgundy (France), Prague, and an area in Poland. Interesting people with interesting histories and stories.

But I caught my train, one minute to spare, with two of the people I had met previously. We were at L's ex-boyfriends, and met some of the other students studying for a Master's in Public Administration. My train companions were two girls from Albania and Peru, each doing various interesting internships (one worked for a Development NGO in Frankfurt, the other for the State minstry just around the corner from me). I have their email addresses.