Cause of Death: Accidental Ingestion of Water

The wedding is over (it was wonderful) and the Wife and I are spending a few days on our own in Heidelberg.

The city. It is awesome.

Our hotel - named after a local dwarf (Perkeo) with a "prodigious capacity for drink" - is great. It's located right along the main drag of the Old City, so we're in walking distance to pretty much everything anyone could want to see. And our windows look out right over the street!

That's us - the three second floor windows right under the globe/cross symbol.

Awesome for people-watching in the morning

There's only one downside.

Nightime.

Since we're located right along the main drag of the Old City, in walking distance of pretty much everything anyone could want to see, there is a ton of foot traffic right outside our hotel - and our windows look out right over the street.

On Saturday night, the city was hopping. People were everywhere, drinking and carrying on and having shouting matches at all hours of the night. And the street - lined as it is with three- and four-story buildings - is a virtual echo chamber, so even the smallest noises bounced and amplified and shot straight into our room.

It stayed this crowded most of the night...

So we closed the windows.  Naturally.

Except, it being Germany in the summer, it is hot and there is no air conditioning.  So we sweltered for a few hours in only relative quiet before deciding that the noise surely had to die down sometime and that we absolutely had to open the windows again.

I recall looking out the windows at 4.30am onto a street filled with drunken, rollicking students and thinking a great many unsavory things about them and their countrymen in general - but I was tired and cranky and in desperate need of sleep, so I have some excuse for my foul demeanor.

But, just as soon as the sun came up, they dispersed, scurrying back their holes like so many nocturnes.  It was mercifully quiet, and we finally fell to sleep.

And then someone's kid started yelling and it was time to get up.