FourSquare has been a lifesaver before to find cool, local places to visit. But not for finding gay bars in small German towns :(

I was just traveling around Germany for a bit, and seeing as how Berlin has such a big gay scene (ie, Berghain), I guess I thought the other cities I’d be visiting would have some serious gay nightlife as well. Turns out, that wasn’t so much the case.

Admittedly, I was in some pretty small German towns and missed out on most major German cities. And in actuality, Germany’s most notorious scene for gay life is in Cologne which wasn’t on my itinerary for this trip. But maybe because I’d just been in Dallas, Texas (where there is actually some gay nightlife), I thought I surely must be able to find it in Germany easy enough.

Problem is: I didn’t do any research beforehand. So that meant I was totally reliant upon asking other people or what I could scrounge up on my iPhone. And in a truly hipster style, I did a terrible job! The only app I had that may have been helpful was FourSquare, and searching for “gay bars” within a 10km radius of my current location continually brought up nothing. Nada!

Looking back, it would’ve actually made more sense to just Google “gay bars in Lübeck” (for example). I was a little too reliant on modern technology (and my limited iPhone apps). And if I had just googled for what I was looking for, I would’ve found it. Life lesson learned.