I’ve recently come across a sentence:
Einmal war ich nach einer Party um zwei Uhr morgens Döner essen mit Jamaal, einem syrischen Freund.
What I didn’t understand is what war is doing here? When I translated the sentence with Google Translate, its translation was:
Once, after a party at two o’clock in the morning, I was eating kebabs with Jamaal, a Syrian friend.
So is the verb to be sometimes used to create a continuous form in a sentence? But I was under the impression that it’s not necessary; we just use the simple tense to make a continuous sentence.