Quarta at Ako

I was in Quarta at Aloisiuskolleg from Sept of 1965 until April 1966 - that was the end of the German school year... And this is going to be another one of those rambling "odds and ends" posts....

One thing I haven't mentioned is there were always 3 or 4 empty beds in every dorm class at Ako. Prospective students were told that there was a 3 year waiting list. But that was the 'typical' case. When a student with the right connections and qualifications applied they were immediately admitted - that's why they kept those beds open... So, I guess I felt pretty special for having gotten in - but I'm still not sure if I was "fortunate' or not :-)

BTW - not all of the Ako students were boarders. I would guess the school was split 50/50 between day students and boarders. There wasn't very much co-mingling between the two groups.

In my prior post I mentioned there was a kid who veered off the track while running with his eyes were closed... Yeah - he was the 3rd and final kid I punched in the face while I was in Germany. I no longer recall what he did to piss me off but I kicked his butt :-)

When kids called me "Ami" (derisive term for American) I would respond with "Nazi". That seemed to really shock and upset them (which was the desired effect). But somebody finally clued me in that I could actually be arrested for it... As I mentioned many posts ago - there was kind of a government mandated "cultural amnesia" thing going on with regard to some of the history around WWII. I guess I can't blame them...

When I first got to Ako I ate with one hand in my lap - that's "proper" table manners in the U.S., right? - But the Germans were completely disgusted and called me a pig. Apparently proper manners in Germany requires keeping both hands on the table... One of those kids never stopped referring to me as "the pig"... So, I guess manners are kind of arbitrary - aren't they?

The entire Quarta boarding class (roughly 40 kids) slept in the same large room. The head of my bed was right below a window that was always open at night regardless of the temperature (unless it was raining hard). That really aggravated my asthma but they refused to move me to another bed...

Luckily, we didn't have to do our own laundry. All of our clothes had to have little tags with our student number. Mine was "104"... We'd keep our dirty stuff in laundry bags on the end of our beds and about once a week they'd get collected and cleaned...
BTW - Hygiene was not a real priority - I showered once every 3 or 4 weeks... And I was about average - I don't think anyone got cleaned up more than once a week...

OK - I still feel a bit bad about this one:
After "lights out" we were expected to remain completely silent - one of the priests stayed in an adjoining room and could hear if anything was going on...
One night the guy next to me started making bird noises - some of the other kids were responding - and others were telling them to knock it off... It was all happening quietly enough to escape the priest's attention. And I was trying so hard not to laugh out loud that I was literally convulsing.
Finally the kid next to me said "I hear someone whistling!" and I couldn't hold it anymore - something had to give... No, I didn't burst out laughing - my efforts to stifle it caused me to blow what was probably the loudest fart of my life - I'm talking potential hearing damage within a 10 foot radius - I think it even registered on nearby seismometers :-)
The entire room burst into uncontrollable laughter and the priest was in there right away... I confessed to being the source of the unfortunate noise but I told him I couldn't help it because the guy next to me was goofing around (which was true).
The culprit admitted it - the priest took him out in the hall - we heard a loud smack - and he came back in a bit later with a black eye....
If I hadn't passed the blame I doubt I would have gotten hit nearly that hard. It was (after all) just an inadvertent bit of gas... And that's the part I've always felt bad about...

Finally - this is one of those things you can't make up:
One of our Sunday field trips was to the zoo in Cologne. A group of us were standing next to the water buffalo enclosure - separated from the sidewalk by a 6 foot fence (wire mesh and wooden beams) - and one of the water buffaloes was standing a few feet from the fence staring at us.
All of a sudden "Hacki" (who was a tremendous gymnast) vaulted the fence - punched the water buffalo in the nose as hard as he could - and vaulted back over the fence - all before the buffalo figured out what was going on...
Needless to say, as soon as the water buffalo realized what had happened (which took a surprisingly long time) it went haywire and tried to ram its way through the fence to get at us... And we moved along in a hurry :-)
We asked Hacki what possessed him to do that - he had no idea - it was just "one of those things" :-)