Pub Quiz

Ann and I, our friend Ian, and two of our colleages (Fleur and Stefan), participated in the Jameson Pub Quiz at O’ Casey’s Irish Pub in Den Haag last night.

Generally, I like trivia games. The first challenge, always the toughest, was coming up with a team name. Since all five of us work at the same academic publishing company, we wanted something that reflected the nature of our day jobs. The first suggestion was “The Corrections”, which was pretty good. But then Ann had a brilliant inspiration: “The Table of Contents”

Beautiful. You go honey.

There were two pciture rounds where you had to say if the pictures were true or false (Bush looking through a pair of binoculars with the lens caps still on, a Japanese fashion craze of wearing skirts airbrused to look see-through). There was an audio round where the songs were all obscure and from the seventies or eighties (with the exception of Salt n Pepa’s “What a Man” which I am ashamed to admit I instantly recognized). All in all, it was good fun.

Some questions we got wrong:

• Year the Beatles broke up – 1970 (we had 71)
• First country to give women the vote – New Zealand (Ann insisted it was Finland)
• Year the Titanic was rediscovered – 1985 (we put 1991)
• Only two countries to be in every summer Olympics since 1896 – Australia and Greece
• City of biggest tank battle of WWII – Kursk (we said Stalingrad)

All in all, we finished 5th out of 12. More importantly though, we beat the other table of RSM executive MBA students! Woo hoo!

The frustrating thing is that it took us two and a half hours to make a forty-minute train ride back to Dordrecht from Den Haag because there was an alleged fire in a tunnel somewhere. The train sat stopped on the platform for almost an hour, then went BACK to Rotterdam Centraal. They told us there would be taxis to take us to our destinations, but when we got to Rotterdam, SURPRISE, no taxis. (Train official: “We never said that.”)

Then, after just 15 minutes back in Rotterdam they told us to get back on the train, it was going. We ended up getting home at 3am.

And Ann STILL doesn’t support the purchase of an automobile.

🙁