Swede and Sour

“Could I interest you in a pub crawl?” inquired a lady as I was standing in East Berlin’s Hackescher Market with my friend Philippe and two travel companions. As the four of us hesitated, the lady went on in a thick English accent to invite us to join a pub crawl organized that night, with free entrance to the bars and clubs and free shots, all for a ten-euro fee.

An organized pub crawl sounded touristy and gimmicky, but hell, free shots were a tempting offer. And I’d made this two-week stop in Berlin—in between my summer research trip in Ukraine and returning home to Korea—for no reason other than Berlin’s party town reputation (and that Philippe and another recent Harvard grad I knew were there).

So that night, Philippe and I joined the pub crawl. This was my chance to ditch the “Harvard student” tag and join the international crowd in Berlin as a regular party dude. We joined the other would-be revellers (mostly American and Australian students) and toasted our bottle of complementary beer, exchanging introductions and soon moving on to overt flirtation. I was getting pretty, you know, excited for the night.

But we soon blew our cover. At the very first bar. Our conversation had turned to Yale—don’t ask—and a couple of the guys declared they were Harvard students. We quizzed them: “What house are you in?”, “What’s the mascot of Eliot House?” We exposed them as poseurs but blew our own cover in the process. What were we thinking?

In the end, however, the pub crawlers did not prove the hardcore partygoers they pretended to be. By the time we had reached the final destination, a famous Berlin nightclub, most of the group that started out were gone. Philippe and I called up two recently-met party-buddies, Swedish-speaking Finns Lala and Djingis (yes, these are their actual names). This was turning into something like our previous party nights in Berlin, where our inability to speak German prevented us from any fruitful socializing. I started dancing with abandon on the dance floor, resigning myself to the situation.

Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a pretty blonde girl in her twenties smiling and trying to get my attention.

“Was ist das?” she asked, pointing at my shirt.

I just happened to be wearing a blue T-shirt that had the picture of the Swedish band The Sounds in front, and the word “Sweden” printed in big yellow letters on the back.

“Das ist ein Schwedisch, er, band,” I answered in my laughably pitiful attempt at German. Smiling, the girl asked something else in German, and I smiled back, trying to communicate that I didn’t speak German, but I did speak a little Swedish.

“Åh, är det sant?” she responded immediately in Swedish. I couldn’t believe my ears. An attractive girl I could actually communicate with (thank God for Swedish A), who moreover sought me out from the crowded dancefloor, without my dropping the H-Bomb! We started a thirty-minute-long conversation in Swedish right there in the middle of the dancefloor.

She introduced herself as Malin; her mother was Swedish. After a while she pointed out all the people she came with, naming her several girl friends… “And that’s my boyfriend there,” she said. Oh. The six-foot-tall boyfriend and I waved awkwardly at each other as Malin was almost screaming in my ear to be heard above the noise.

It had been so close. Well, tomorrow night...