Dashen Brewery

Dashen Brewery is the local government brewery. Some people drink it to show their patriotism and some people refuse to drink it to protest the government. I tend not to drink it because it doesn't taste very good. In it's favour though it is the cheapest beer you can find in Gondor. I meant to go on a tour of the their brewery which is located not too far out of town before I left, but instead I stumbled across a better way to visit it. On Friday myself and some friends were out at one of the local pubs when we found out that the brewery was having a big party on Saturday. All day long, free food and drink, live bands, a comedian, the works. Of course we have to try and go. Our first solution to try and crash it proved unnecessary when sitting next to us a friendly drunken man introduced himself as the Dashen Representative in Charge of Inviting Foreigners. He might have made this up, but whether that was the case or not he did have a bunch of invites to give us.

So the next day off we go to the Dashen party. It was fairly humongous with about 3000 people in attendance. The music was good from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about the music beforehand. I'd write a review, but I have no idea who played except for someone named Ababa. We were the only foreigners there except for the nice old Jewish man who runs the tahini factory down the road (he gave me some tahini). This fact gave the impression that the self-proclaimed Dashen Representative in Charge of Inviting Foreigners was not very good at his job, but also made us incredibly popular. I opened someone's beer with my key-chain/bottle-opener and was then swarmed with requests to do this to the point that when a proper waiter showed up people tried to refuse his service to get mine. That was actually a little much to be fetishized like that. Double-standard alert! What wasn't too much though was
when a security guard came up to me and said, "Do you like food?" Not something easy to say "No" to. I've always kept food up there with things like air, sleep and shelter when I'm deciding on whether I approve of them. So I voiced my approval and he took me by the hand to the back of the food tent, where I was given a plate and unlimited access to the food.

The funniest part was the other people who had also been offered this privilege which were a number of staff, myself and a guy in a really nice suit. The guy in the really nice suit kept stuffing chunks of raw meat into his pockets because he said it was expensive to buy. As expensive as your really nice suit, buddy? I doubt it.