In Cologne's Qlosterstüffje, you can get a drink, a bowl of soup, and a game of nine-pin bowling in one place. Photo courtesy Qlosterstüffje

We had spent a quiet morning in Bingen, playing music to a smiling crowd of cafe goers and passersby on the Rhine.  From time to time a ship docked behind us, releasing enthusiastic groups of tourists onto the river banks to snap photos of the grape fields lining the hills across the water or of the castle perched just above them.  On a sunny day the Rhine moves, sparkling blue-green and silver in the light.  On a sunny day, this stretch of the Rhine is everything that the travel guide books promise.

The night before our band had played a small festival on an outdoor stage facing that same view, a view that, despite five years of seeing it on various trips north, I still find worth a good long stare and a handful of pictures every time I pass through.  But we didn’t spend long on the river, and before noon we were back on the road and on our way to a Straßenfest (English: street festival) in Cologne where an usual pub awaited us.

The Straßenfest was set up like a long, brightly lit carnival.  Rides with colorful, blinking lights filled sidewalks, and vendors selling cheap trinkets and sugar-coated snacks filled the spaces between them.  People walked slowly by, filled benches and tables in front of pubs and restaurants, and crowded the spaces in front of the stages set up every few blocks.  It reminded me a lot of the county fairs I had visited in America as a child.

We had been invited to play by the Qlosterstüffje–a smoker’s pub with drinks, food, and two bowling lanes in the back rooms.  A pub with bowling lanes? Now this I had to see.

They were tucked away in the back of the building: past the bar, the kitchen, and the bathrooms, and if I hadn’t known they were there, I might not have seen them at all.  Each lane was lined with 70s-style wood paneling and shelves full of gold, plastic trophies.  Walking into those lanes you felt like you had slipped back in time 20 or 30 years, like The Big Lebowski’s Dude was about to appear to offer you a white Russian and a game.  But there was something else I hadn’t expected: The bowling balls didn’t have the three finger holes I remembered from bowling in America.

Kegelbahn is German for bowling alley. Photo courtesy Qlosterstüffje

“This is kegeln, not bowling,” one of my bandmates explained.  “They’re two different games.”  Though my German-English dictionary translates the word “kegeln” as “to bowl,” it turns out that the word refers more accurately to nine-pin bowling, or skittles.  “When we talk about the game with the balls with the grip holes, we just call it bowling.  But this is kegeln.”  Even after years living and breathing German, there is always something about the language I have yet to learn.

We turned on the machine that controlled the pins and began to play.  It was pretty much the same as the bowling I knew, except for the fact that you balanced the small, heavy balls between your hand and wrist before throwing them toward just nine awaiting pins.  Then a machine sent the ball barreling back down the lane into the queue of unused balls at hand-crushing speeds.    The pins dangled at the end of the alley on strings that facilitated the machine to pull them speedily back into place after each player’s turn.

Though no one managed a strike, we had a good time over bowls of the pub’s delicious soup.  But as usually happens when I encounter something new in Germany, my German vocabulary made it hard for me to communicate with the others about the game.  So for those of you new to German who would like to have a go at kegeln, a short tutorial.

Photo (cc) flickr user streetpreacher83

Bowling auf Deutsch

Skittles/nine-pin bowling = das Kegeln

To play skittles/to nine-pin bowl = kegeln

Bowling = das Bowling

Bowling alley = die Kegelbahn

Bowling pin = der Kegel

Ball = der Ball

Gutter = die Gasse

Gutter ball = der Gassenwurf

Strike = Alle Neune