For reasons I still haven't puzzled out – after six years here and counting – the Christian holiday of Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension Day, which is apparently the celebration of Jesus' physical ascension to heaven, but I'm pretty sure it's not as major a holiday in the US as in Europe, since I'd never heard of it before Germany...?) somehow transmogrified here in Germany and is now also Vatertag (Father's Day) or Herrentag (Men's Day) ...a day men use as an excuse for getting crashingly drunk all day, often by dragging a child-sized wagon packed full of beer with them on a ramble through the countryside.
Can't for the life of me see what ascension to heaven has to do with drinking a lot of beer, but there's probably a commentary on German culture in there somewhere...
Here's a picture, from five years ago, when my friend Anton and I went on a bike ride in the countryside outside Berlin on what happened to also be Herrentag. These chaps we met near the train station in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel were very much in the spirit of things!
And because this is Germany, we then saw the top-hatted gents ride off on their bikes:
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