Wednesday night fever

Saturday night fever in Hannover has less to do with bell bottoms and disco and more to do with running a temperature and lying on the couch. This week, I learned that on a Wednesday night, the symptoms are even worse.

My Colombian friend Olga got the idea to go to Club Havana, a Latin-themed bar and dance club in Hannover's Steintor district. If there is a sketchy part of Hannover, Steintor is it. There are some strip clubs and lots of bars, a few questionable hotels and several late-night Turkish restaurants. In any other country, this would be a rough neighborhood, one you'd avoid at night unless you were in a big group of people. But Hannover is incredibly safe, and so is Steintor.  

Olga wanted to go out on a Wednesday mostly because her husband is working in another town and only home on the weekends. If we went out on a Friday or Saturday, she'd miss out on time with him and he would call her. A lot. Once when she was out without her husband, he called her 25 times, concerned for her well-being.

The whole idea of going out to a disco is strange to me. It's not something we ever did in the U.S. First of all, the word 'disco' meant Bee Gees and platform shoes. In German, Spanish, and probably a lot of other languages, it means dance club. In the U.S., we went to bars that had live bands or DJs, and sometimes people started to dance there. Clubs were for the very young or the very sleazy. They were good for bachelorette parties or special occasions. But there aren't very many bars here, and not a lot of live music, and sometimes in the bars that do exist, they don't play music at all. That's why you have to go to the disco.

What Brian and I do for fun has changed in the last few years. We don't go to the movies (they're in German) and don't hang out on our patio. We do go to biergartens and sometimes a minor league hockey game. We rollerblade. We also spend plenty of time in the living room. Going out dancing is only the latest addition to the list of how I spend my social time differently in Germany.

And Wednesday night at Club Havana? Salsa music playing, half the bar closed off, and three people sitting on barstools. That was it. There was no dancing. We left and ended up at another place with worse music and about 20 more people.

What we have learned from this experience is that, no matter how hard Olga tries, Hannover will never be a Madrid, a Berlin, or a Medellin. It will never be happening on a Wednesday night. It is the city that always sleeps.

If we want to go dancing we have to do it on a Friday or Saturday like everyone else, when the neon lights are flashing and Steintor is full of people. On Wednesdays they are home nursing German-style colds and ironing their bell bottoms.