My BVB shirt - who signed what

Clockwise from top left: Jürgen Klopp, Nuri Sahin, Sven Bender, Mohamed Zidan, Lukas Piszczek, Shinji Kagawa, Lucas Barrios.

Top middle: Marcel Schmelzer

Bottom middle: Mats Hummels

Ba ba da daaaa: The final post, AKA The End...

Bring out the bunting, put the champagne on ice, and breathe a huge sigh of relief, for this is the final post in my big self-indulgent blog, the main purpose of which has to brag about myself and my wonderful time in Germany, and make you all feel as jealous as possible. It has also served as a something for me to refer back to for when I need to tell the grandchildren about that time I spent a whole week living off kebab and Kinder Surprise, so everyone's a winner I guess.

  What's left to say then? The last couple of weeks were, rather predictably, split into two periods - the time conscientiously (spelt that right at the first attempt, wow) preparing and sitting my exams, and then going a bit mental at the end. Anyone who read the last post will realise that the word conscientious is used with a certain amount of irony, but I was facing my two main statistics exams, where the standard is already much higher than England, which would be 30 minute oral exams, in German of course. To anyone who reads this and thinks I  went to Germany for an easy life, I'd like to see them in my shoes for that little challenge.

  Luckily, I had a plan. Knowing that my lecturers also serve as my examiners in this particular system, I arranged little meetings with both of them, to clear up my misunderstandings as a poor little foreign student in the big scary world of German exams. In other words, I gave them my best puppy dog eyes and begged them to go easy on me.

  It seemed to work - in my first exam I was praised for being one of the first to sit the exam (I had no choice in that matter, it's hardly like I was going to stay until September like most people do), and was allowed to pick and choose my favourite topics, which was handy. That went so well that I got a bit cocky and was convinced into going to the local dirty heavy metal club in Dortmund, so that I was almost sent to sleep by my lecturer's smooth therapist's voice. Despite this, I got a 2,3 for each exam, something equivalent to 80% or so.

  After that, it was time to get down to the serious business of properly saying goodbye to everyone. The first emotional goodbye was with me and the Americans, mostly with Brian from Tennessee, which finished with him sticking potatoes in jam jars and on door handles so that people 'would have something to remember him by'. I've clearly come a long way in the past few months, since when I told my parents I was partying with Americans, they were genuinely shocked that I would want to spend my time just with such loud obnoxious creatures. After some convincing, they accepted that maybe Americans are people too and therefore worthy of my friendship. Who said us brits were prejudiced?


  That little goodbye preceded a little sojourn to Amsterdam to meet a couple of mates from school. Most of you will know what that generally involves so I won't go into too much detail about it,Let’s just say I spent most of the night laughing at rose bushes and being convinced my mate was an American newsreader in HD…

To be honest, I’m not sure why it took me so long to get over to Amsterdam, when I only lived 3 hours and 20€ from the place. I mean imagine coming to Yorkshire for a year and not going to London, despite it being the nearest place where you can do almost anything you like. Apart from drinking on the street – that’s just Germany, and is one rule I’m finding it hard to get used to.

  So yeah, that was an experience, especially the part where I was able to bitch with my good friend Hilke about a guy who’d come from Canada to stay with her whilst he was actually walking with us. Having a secret language is a sheer joy sometimes, and if anyone out there is stuck for a reason to take up a language, let that be it.

  After a chilled night on Thursday (I mean, even Craig David took a break at some point), the final emotional goodbyes started on Friday, where I was reunited with my original man-love Robert as he came back from South Korea, I reconciled with him and confessed my bro-fling with Brian. Luckily a heart-shaped balloon bought for 7€ at the airport can heal even the deepest wounds, and the biggest obstacle to our festivities was artfully dodged.

The happy couple reunited...

  We went out with the best intentions of marking his return in fitting fashion, but made a fatal mistake of going to the Leed’s Pub (sic) in Platz von Leeds, where I just ABSOLUTELY had to finally go before I left, and which completely sucked the life out of us. I don’t really understand these ‘partner town’ things, the only evidence of them is in naming the shittiest part of the town after their beloved brother town, as anyone who’s been to Castrop-Rauxel Square in Wakefield or Dortmund Square in Leeds can testify.

...and happy together again

  Anyway, it was no biggie, as the real fun was around the corner. As if the city of Dortmund had got together and collectively decided on the best way to see me off, the Juicy Beats festival in the massive Westfalenpark was scheduled for the day before my departure, and I’d managed to find 9 friends from somewhere who agreed to come and see me off there. The fact that they were mostly Germans just added to the feeling of a year very very well spent.

  Before that, there was one last big surprise to come. The three German members of my Wednesday Apprentice viewing group had clubbed together to get me a rather special leaving gift. The most personal part of the gift was a yellow t-shirt, onto which over 70 pictures which represented my time in Dortmund had been ironed, from BVB to Lidl to Brinkhoff’s to Eastend to Deutsche Bahn to photos from parties and trips to… you get the picture!

   Most people would consider that to be a sufficiently special leaving present, but that wasn’t it. Wrapped up inside this t-shirt was a huge bundle of things, again all personally picked out to bring back fond memories. I don’t have space to write everything here, but I think a picture tells a thousand words. Not bad, eh? Add to that my University of Tennesse t-shirt and various posters from Brian and it really brought home to me how lucky I was to have made such close and thoughtful friends in such a short space of time.

  That wasn’t even it. As part of The Apprentice viewing and drinking sessions, the ménage à trois (as it shall forever be known) made a little bet on who would get the furthest. Mareike and Robert picked Leon and Zoe respectively purely based on looks, where I went for Jedi (pronounced yay-dee in German – yuck) Jim, and as history will testify, I was the one who won the bet of having cookies baked for him by the shallow losers, and was as such presented with a shoebox full of lovingly baked cookies in the shape of the Brandenburg Gate and the Alexanderplatz TV Tower in Berlin. Overwhelmed doesn’t even cover it, I felt truly loved!

Best present ever

Best cookies ever

   After all that excitement, Juicy Beats could have been a let-down. But it wasn’t. The highlights included chanting along to Hurensohn (son of a bitch) at the KIZ gig, being in the most ridiculous pogo-pit at Kraftklub, forcing everyone to get Deutschland war-paint on, and finally letting all of it get too much for me at around 9.10pm while watching Gisbert Zu Knysphausen. Well, if you will start your first song with words that translate as ‘congratulations/you’ve lost everything’ then what do you expect? I think secretly my friends were pleased that their cynically bought packets of tissues were finally getting their desired use.

Juicy Beats crew

  It had all obviously got a bit too much for most others too, and by 1am there was only me and Jakob – a stats friend from Berlin – left still standing. Not wanting to go quietly, we spent my last hour or so of my last day in Dortmund going absolutely mental and waving our jumpers around to some ragga/techno/d’n’b/whatever. Not quite sure why, but it seemed fitting. Before I finally went to bed he promised to visit Sheffield because you can learn a lot about a country by going to its shitholes.Charming, and perhaps a line the Sheffield tourist office could pursue.

There doesn’t remain a lot to say, other than that we were seen off on Sunday morning by my delightful personal room-cleaners Robert and Hun-gu, and we took two goodbye photos – one to show we were sad I was leaving and one to show we were happy I’d been there. Aren’t we cute?

Happy :)

Saaaaad :(

  I say ‘we’, because as fate would have it, Mareike was driving up to Glasgow to spend 4 weeks learning English (yes, I know…) on exactly the same weekend as I had to leave for home. Which made my journey back approximately 10000 times better and less depressing than it might have been, as it meant that I could live in my German bubble for that little bit longer and drive through the Kent countryside talking German and singing Die Ärzte and Die Prinzen, as well as enabling me to fill my boots with Lidl plastic-bottle beer and bake-at-home Brötchen.

Germany comes to England...

  And that, apart from introducing my parents to the delights of weißwurst that evening which they stoically finished, was that. For a few weeks I really felt like a stranger in my own country, but after an intensive re-familiarising programme of trips to see old friends in Chester and Woking, regular visits to the public house, and large doses of tea and proper English sausages, the mornings of waking up in a cold sweat muttering to myself in German about that recurring dream where I jump on the first plane back to Dortmund started to get less frequent, and it’s got to the stage, almost 2 months after coming back, where I finally feel English again.

  I’ll certainly never forget Dortmund, the university and the people, and everything they’ve given me. It’s not the sort of place I’d recommend to anyone to go on holiday to, but it’s a place which is more beautiful on the inside, shall we say, and I’ll have to go some to top the time that I had there.

  Auf Wiedersehen Dortmund, man sieht sich.

A few more adventures in the world of maths, beer and The Beast

  These last few little adventures came in and around the time of the end of lectures in Dortmund, which felt like a huge relief. For all the things I’ll miss about Dortmund, that’s not one of them. The experience of starting a 90 minute lecture at 8.15am, sitting on hard wooden benches and attempting to listen to a man explaining statistical theories and formulae in German… well to say it was tough would be something of an understatement. Having finished the lecture period, I started to revise the lecture material and was surprised how interesting and understandable it all was, which really didn’t appear to be the case in lectures. Ho hum…

  What with this being my year abroad and so therefore not designed to be taken seriously, I satisfied myself with highlighting my entire notes in pretty colours, writing a very attractive contents page, and doing all this in trains on the way to more interesting things. One of these higher priorities was the women’s world cup, experienced with my new love, Brian from Tennessee.

  Keen readers of this blog will have read about my ménage à trois with Mareike and Robert and thought that I’d found my dream German relationship, something for everyone, right? Well, it was all over far too quickly. Robert left for Korea for a month and Mareike found a new ménage à trois with Charlotte and Jenny – two crazy German girls who are fans of Moroccan men, Kölsch accents and unreasonable amounts of Mojitos and ever-presents at the ‘fests’ on campus.

  Me and Brian had had a few dalliances in the past (see BVB party, Männertag), but it was at the women’s world cup that things really got serious between us. The England vs France game was being played in Leverkusen which is easily and freely reachable from Dortmund, and he was the only one kind/bored enough to come with me, and all the while respecting the colours of the flag in a fetching white shirt/red shorts combination.

Proper English

  Yeah yeah, anyway the women’s cup was really cool – I kept approaching people draped in huge St- George’s flags in my best “awwright mate, where’d ya get yo flag?” English only to get the response “jea, I voz een Berleen and met zis really great English guy…” Due to the lack of proper Englishmen, I felt we were a bit under-supported, and most people were rooting for the bloody French. Outrage. Anyway, after a passable game and a decent 1-1 draw, the inevitable came, penalties were required, and despite my hopes of being one of the first English people EVER to be in the stadium to see an English football team win at penalties in the world cup, our ladies bottled it and I was left with that familiar feeling. Two good things came of it though – I was able to tell the parents of a young boy who’s son was supporting England to advise him against a life of footballing disappointment, and a beautiful friendship was born.

At least the local Sparkasse were England fans

  This was continued the following Wednesday, when USA were playing France in Mönchengladbach. Partly to pay Brian back, and to get revenge on the frogs, the two of us headed up ticketless to the sold out match in the hope of somehow getting some joy from the touts, which are apparently called scalpers over there – useless fact of the day there. What followed was (not wanting to show off or owt) another display of my awesome German skillz, managing to persuade the Turkish scallywags outside the stadium to go down on their ticket price of 100€ (the ticket was 70€ face value) to 30€, which is easier said than done. Even more satisfying was the look on the face of the other touts circling the stadium when they asked me how much I’d got my ticket for, I told them, and the best they could manage was an ‘oh, well, nice one’. England 1 - Turkey 0.

Proper American

  This time the match was a bit more exciting, and the yanks, assisted by Abbie ‘the beast’ Wambach steamrollered the French 3-1. The real spectacle though was the American fans. Due to various military bases around Germany, they were out in moronic force. I guess they were nothing if not entertaining – holding up signs like ‘I have a birthmark FML’, chanting ‘USA USA USA’ all game and high-fiving random strangers for the mere fact that they came from a state in America. Here is a sample conversation in the men’s toilets:

“Who here is American?!”

“I’m American!”

“What state you from dude?”

“I’m from Maine!”

“Awesome, I’m from Massachusetts!”

 “High five!”

The Beast did what The Beast does

  As I said, entertaining if somewhat soul-destroying. Another such distraction was a last minute idea of Brian’s to do a Biergrimage, which would later be redefined as the BierGRIMage. This involved taking 48 bottles of Brinkhoff’s on a tour of 7 cities (Münster, Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Essen and Bochum to be precise) in Nord-Rhine Westfalen, thereby sampling the local tipple in each city and getting through the crate in the otherwise beer-less train travelling times. I first joined them in Bonn. Bonn was the second city but by then the cracks were beginning to show. We made it to Cologne and Duisburg, before realising the whole thing was ridiculous, heading back to Dortmund, my room and German hip-hop, necking a silly amount of Pálinka and almost, but not quite, making it into a club in the city. It was an experience nevertheless, and most importantly the 48 bottles were drunk dry.

  In amongst this slightly gay behaviour, and when I'd finally recovered from the BierGRIMage, I managed to fit in another Mitfahrgelegenheit (this lift sharing service exists in England at www.rideshare.co.uk but no one uses it. Whhyyy?) to head to Gießen for the day and visit Dominik, a German friend of mine I made last year in Sheffield. Gießen is in all truth not the most exciting of places, but is worth mentioning for a number of reasons:

Loving the Elefantenklo

• It has a reet lovely lake in the middle of town
• The town is infested by dinosaurs like Dortmund is by winged Rhinos
• There's a bizarre concrete structure in the middle of the town referred to as 'Elefantenklo', or 'elephant loo', because it contains three massive holes, which could well be elephant loos. The highlight of any tourist tour...
• ...or it would be, if it wasn't for the Mathematikum, a museum dedicated to maths!!! Obviously practically all of it I already knew, but the chance to find the position of your date of birth in pi and make a massive bubble around yourself was worth the 5 Euros in itself

DIPLODOCUS!!!

For those that can't read it, my date of birth begins at the 865,130th position of pi. Nice.

Literally living in my own little bubble

And those were the things I had while it was actually exam time. The life of a student in Germany really wasn't as tough as I'd expected...

Belgium - Bruxelles, Bière et Blagues

After a quick stopover back to Sheffield for the truly amazing Arctic Monkeys gig at Don Valley bowl (10,000 Sheffielders in a huge tent, new songs were immense, met former premiership referee Uriah Rennie, all that jazz…) the weekend after was spent getting out of my German ways and heading to one of my new favourite countries – Belgium.

  Through my international friends I’ve become rather fond of countries that I’d never really given much thought to, such as South Korea with their muscular baseball players and Hungary with their lethal home-made Pálinka, but Belgium has to have been the most pleasant surprise.

  Like most English people, when I think of Belgium I think of that plucky little country who seized on a meaningless piece of paper and helped us out in the war. However that point of view often gets me into trouble with scary German women called Helga, so I needed to expand that view to escape a collective clip on the ear from the German nation. Through my friends Nada and Hugo I learned that they bloody love waffles, crepes and Nutella, that scouts are all the rage, and that they’re the kind of people who’d present an invented story about waffles being discovered by a drunken man followed by 100s of smurfs to show the foreign students what their country is like because ‘it seemed funny’. Fair to say I went into my trip to Brussels with Hun-gu with some fairly low expectations.

The thing that I don't have the skills to describe

  Well, it was freakin’ awesome. Brussels is stunning, all old squares and gothic architecture and that kind of stuff (OK, I’m pretty crap at describing things like that and will never be the next Bill Bryson, but search it in google or something because a picture tells a thousand words anyway). So that was all very nice, but it’s things like the ‘pissing boy’ that really appeal to me – a fountain in the form of, you guessed it, a boy pissing which is clothed appropriately to commemorate national days and whatnot, and you get the impression that it’s a true honour for the people of Burkina Faso when their national day of the sloth is immortalised on a bronze five year old with terrible toilet manners.

Pissing boy in all his glory

  After me Nada and Hun-gu dicking about for most of the day looking at pretty buildings and Tintin graffiti, we headed up to the royal palace for the Fete De La Musique, a music festival essentially taking place in the royal car park. Just imagine our royal family allowing a load of nutters clutching carrier bags full of cheap booze to descend on the holy land of Buckingham Palace while Amadou and Miriam play in the background and you’ll get an idea of how cool it really was, and I felt a kinship with a people who don’t really give a shit and are happy to swig beer in the streets making jokes about their friend’s mum.

Music festival, royal palace there on your right

Manly chips eating

  The next day was time to experience the Atomium, get rained on at a European model village thing (which I objected to on principle due to the United Kingdom being solely represented by the south of England and Scotland), and another thing we two nations have in common – chips. Belgian chips give ours a real run for their money, and they shit all over the laughable twigs choked in paprika that pass for chips in Germany. The Belgian versions are slightly thinner than our offerings, but fried so that they’re golden brown and crispy on the outside but still fluffy on the inside. Godly. I’d go as for to say the chips themselves are better than ours, but they let themselves down by covering them in sickly mayo-based sauce and not serving them with vinegar, battered fish or mushy peas. Close, but no cigar.

Wishing I could be shrunk to 1/50th of my normal size

  Belgium’s parting shot was the scout party. Taking place between 7pm and 9.30pm in a run-down youth centre sandwiched between a church and a school , it was a supposedly quiet night due to the exam period, but was still seriously mental. The evening went something like this:

Embarrassing myself with my pathetic nail bashing

A happy man

• Forced to neck a beer as a welcome to the foreigners
• Played a game where all scouts (15 lads and my friend Nada) stand around a tree stump and take it in turns to attempt to hammer their nails into the wood. The winner pays for the nails and the losers (me and Hun-gu, naturally) have to pay for the drinks. I guess that’s what they call hospitality there
• Everyone necks their drinks. I lose again and so have to drink another
• A bizarre chain of events where one of the scouts drops his pants, is almost thrown out of the window, and is then carried around the room on everyone’s shoulders before smashing his head on one of the exposed pipes in the ceiling
• A mosh pit to Scooter. Just because
• Kicked out of the youth club. Walk down the street pissing in hedges and throwing people’s shoes over walls
• Pick up 2 crates of Jupiler and cruise into town
• Pay 5 Euros each for two of the biggest Mojitos EVER. The deposit on the glasses alone was 40 Euros per glass
• Sample some 12% beers from the café with the largest beer selection in the world
• Almost pass out from the stress of it all, have to be driven home, and am regaled the next morning with a ‘hilarious’ story about Nada having her handbag and all her belongings stolen, the policemen being a total legend and taking the piss out of the whole situation, them finding the handbag in the band who’d been playing’s guitar case and spending 3am to 5am in the police station. Apparently I’d have loved it.

So a country with amazing chips and chocolate, 12% beer being drunk around the clock, and whose people find literally anything funny,? I’ll be back, Belgium.

Heaven

12th May - sometime in June: acting like a proper German.

Did you know that 31% of all blog posts ever begin with the phrase "I'm so terrible at keeping this up to date, but I guess when you lead such a busy life you never get time to write about it..." At this stage it's also relevant to mention the stat that 80% of all statistics are made up, but sometimes I (and I'm definitely not the only one) feel like a bit of a broken record going on about how tough it is writing and keeping up with a blog. Therefore I've decided to cut down a bit on the interesting anecdotes about Moldovan restaurant owners and avoiding the British at all costs, and will instead cut things down to a list of things wot I 'av dun an' if dey woz gud or not gud. Before I explain how I acted like a proper German, it's the....

BVB PARTY!!!!!!!

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that the football club here, Borussia Dortmund aka BVB (Ballsportverein Borussia if you ever wondered what that stands for) is quite a big deal here, and they won the Bundesliga which is also quite a big deal for Germans who like football. Unsurprisingly, the weekend of the last day of the season (14th-15th May) was more than a big deal.

Saturday was the day of the last match of the season, and on top of a final game in the Westfalenstadion for which so many people applied for tickets that they could have sold out the 82,000 seater stadium six times over, 30,000 or so spaces were made available in the arena nearby, for which we somehow made it through the crush to get in for. Despite the crazy beer prices the atmosphere was brilliant, helped no end by the constant singing of the 'wer ist deutscher Meister' (who are German champions), see right. Once the match was over we headed into town, where there was a relaxed party spirit that I don't think I've experienced anywhere before, everyone just out on the streets drinking together (another great thing about this country is that drinking in public is completely legal), live music on stages around the main square and generally enjoying the biggest party in Dortmund in 9 years (2002 was the last time they won the league...)

We headed to a local cocktail bar where the planned acoustic gig was turned into an impromptu BVB singalong, and my korean friend Hun-gu kept the fans happy by signing autographs as Shinji Kagawa (the japanese BVB player). After that we decided to spare some BVB love for the next day and headed to my American friend Emily's flat where we ended up improvising along to balkan beats with tuba, trombone, piano and guitar. Die Jungs would have been proud of us.

The next day was the big procession through the town with the trophy, for which the whole team (most noticeably the legend that is the manager Jürgen Klopp) was brilliantly drunk. Not being a real fan and feeling pretty rough from the night before, we waited for the team at the stadium and were treated to a performance of 99 Luftballons (99 red balloons to you English folks) by the actual Nena, and all the fans singing 3 Lions '98 (yeah, the one about when we lost to Germany on penalties in Euro '96 in England) whilst I lay weeping on the floor. All the team got another well-deserved huge round of applause and I promised myself to a reunion when they inevitably draw and embarrass an English team in the Champions League next season. At the end we bumped into Hun-gu, who hadn't managed to find us and had been adopted by another group of star-struck fans. Seriously, if he ever gets sick of industrial engineering he could make some very good money charging 1€ a go for official Kagawa BVB photographs.

So with all that nonsense over, it was time to find a new purpose in life. Together with Robert and my new friend Mareike (who I ironically met at the English 'tea party' and got to know through being the only person from the English party who bothered to come to the continuation of that - a weekly showing of The Apprentice at mine about which more will be spoken later) we formed a 'menage à trois' with the aim of helping me to spend my last months in Germany as germanly as possible. That's how I saw it anyway.

So the first idea was to put together a list of must-see German films, the most must-see of which is of course the world famous output of the erotic industry. Before anyone says anything, that's 'erotic films' and not pornos, the difference being that erotic films are much classier, have a sophisticated storyline and most definitely do not include any gratuitous sex - all the sex that there is is crucial to the plot-line and the film would make no sense (or should I say even less sense) without it.

Mareike

Robert

The central film to this evening was ‘Ach jodel mir noch einen – Stoßtrupp Venus bläst zum Angriff’ (in English something like 'ach yodel me another - Raiding Patrol Venus blows the alarm'), a Bavarian personal favourite of Mareike’s. The storyline revolved around a group of sexy aliens who needed to collect sperm in order to keep their ship running and who were therefore sent on a dangerous mission down to Bavaria to extract their fuel from the local men, and if you knew what the men in Bavaria are like then you’d understand how dangerous this mission really is. Central to the film was clever wordplay (the mission was coded 6666, which sounds remarkably like sex sex sex sex in German) and, er hot alien chicks having sex on top of hay bales. The three of us ate strawberries and drank sparkling wine (not typically German erotic, but never mind) and, well, that’s how lasting friendships are made.

Also more than willing to assist on my quest were the ever-friendly statistics students. After the success of the mulled wine drinking and karaoke on the last statistics trip, I headed with them to another family holiday park near Holland, where the mulled wine was replaced by unreasonable amounts of beer and grilled meat, and the singing was replaced by even more singing. So the old classics like 99 Red Balloons came out, we drank beer by the beach, played table tennis using the plastic outdoor tables and dinner plates and played volleyball using a washing line, a few towels and some trees. Anyone would think we weren’t staying in a fully kitted out holiday park. The favourite thing I saw there would have to be the blow-up beer crate which we tied to the back of our rubber dinghy in order to keep our beers cold on the journey out onto the lake. Why the hell have I never seen one of those before?

The cool crew

Improvising with dinner plates...

...and with washing-lines

Märchenhaft

Inspired by the success of the ‘geil’ decorating suits that we all wore one day to mark ourselves out and prove how truly cool we are, I decided to take part in the stat team’s dressing-up in the theme of fairytales for the Campus Lauf at the Uni, and was handed with the daunting task of being Hansel from Hansel and Gretel. To my utter joy I was showered with compliments for my look, the biggest of all being ‘you look like a proper little good well-behaved German boy’ as I ran gaily through the campus marking my path with breadcrumbs and singing German folk songs.

It was working! I was turning into a real German! You can imagine my excitement at this development – not since going to watch the national football team with a German flag draped across my back, a beer bottle in each pocket, a copy of Bild under my arm and a sausage in brötchen with mustard in my mouth had I felt such a sense of belonging here, and I wanted more.

My previous best in german-ness

After a slight setback in my mission at a poetry slam, where the hilarious stories about weed trips to Holland and a theory on how to win the German presidency went straight over my head, the chance to redeem myself came at the first of many Wohnheimsfeste, or ‘studenthallsfestivals’ to give it a clunky English translation, in Emil-Figge-Straße. This was the first of June, and with the start of unofficial summer comes the start of a wave of such 'Sommerfests', where a usually quiet and unassuming area of campus is taken over by either a subject or a one of the sets of people that run the student bars in the dorms, and chaos invariably ensues.


The fests usually involve one stage with a few bands, then club music is banged out until the wee hours. Alongside this is the tried-and-tested combination of dirt cheap beer served along damn good sausages, with cocktails offered too if the organisers felt like being a bit fancy. My group of German friends and a few hangers-on from around the world went to so many of things that a certain routine started to form:

Shaken in action

• 'Vorsaufen' beginning at 9pm or so, which involved a combination of some or all of meatballs, mojitos, ring of fire (yes, I taught them well), 'shaken' to our favourite Shakelied (see above) and, err, lots of beer.
• Head to the fest a bit later armed with spirits and beerkegs (the people here really don't give a shit about people bringing their own alcohol in) and doss around on the grass
• Head to the fest if we manage to avoid being distracted by the various flat parties going on, dance around a lot, lose everyone, find everyone again, watch Hugo climb the marquee, blag free shots, invariably lose everyone again and head home with whoever is still hanging around at 2am or so.
• Then go to bed and look forward to stories of Robert's drunk escapades. One one night he stole a beer crate from the stands, rode home in a shopping trolley, was then sick on his deskstool at home and out of his window, before attempting to wash his chair and breaking the back off it. 

Being such a waster has its advantages - he once almost managed to convince me and Mareike to walk half an hour to meet him at the local hypermarket and pay 50€ bail because he'd been taken there by the police for stealing a whole kebab on a spit (so like the huge pieces of meat they have spinning at the back of kebab shops). We believed him despite this information coming from him via facebook - an unlikely form of communication for a hostage. Now for something truly special:


MÄNNERTAG


The Figge-Fest was the night before the greatest excuse for a bank holiday I've ever heard. The 2nd of June is really the bank holiday to celebrate the ascension of Christ into heaven, but in modern times it's been also known as Vatertag, which the non-fatherly of us have generalised into Männertag - MAN DAY.

Katerfrühstück fit for a king

The concept behind this is simple - a day off for men to feel free to be as manly as possible. This shit really happens too. With this in mind, we set up a Katerfrühstück for me, Robert, Mareike and Brian, a friend of mine from my halls from Tennesse who is also very keen on being German. Being modern men, we prepared the breakfast for the good lady, which consisted of lots of freshly baked Brötchen, baked beans, scrambled eggs, sausage and many tasty fruits. Oh, and champagne and orange juice, which not all felt fit to drink, but which was necessary for the now must-see viewing of The Apprentice, complete with drinking game (the aerial shot rule is a particular killer).


Feeling that our manliness was well and truly fuelled, we set forth on a man mission. The tradition is for guys to take a trolley, fill it with beer, and parade their awesomeness around town. Imagine how messy that would get if it was in England. Lacking a trolley, we headed to a little music festival in a park, made some slightly inappropriate comments about ladies, drank a beer or two, ate steak and felt happy with how damn cool wee looked. The proof is below:

Rowan mit Steak

Moody Rowan mit Brian in background

Rowan und Brian mit Bier

Grrrrr

Robert - that's what you call gravitas

German enough for ya?

The family comes, and wreaks havoc: 5th - 11th May

This was most certainly a weekend I'll never forget. Picked up my sister, niece (11 years old, called Frances) and nephew (7 years old, called Rhys) from Düsseldorf Airport at around 17.00 on Thursday 5th, and spent the first moments with them chasing my nephew around the airport, hyping up (and apologising the shocking lateness of) the double decker trains which were well exciting for a 7 year old from a country plagued by low bridges, and trying to teach the two young-uns the a few bits of German so they could maybe impress the odd passing Dortmunder. Frances is learning German but her only bit of working vocabulary is 'Old Macdonald Had A Farm' off by heart. Useful, but perhaps not for every situation that life in Dortmund throws up.

I decided in the end it would be best just to tell Rhys the English words that have made there way into day-to-day German life, which are many and varied. I intend to write a bit more about the anglicism of the German language, but all Rhys needed to know right then was 'soweee' and 'hey' and 'hi'. Gets you a surprisingly long way. Unfortunately he decided that no Germans could speak English (very much wrong) and that he's English and therefore can speak 100 times better English than any stoopid German (once again wrong, most Germans can speak better English than him). Fair to say we got some interesting looks in the U-Bahn

So far, so good, but then the problems started to arise. Having managed to get on the bus in completely the wrong direction, and having forgotten the name and address of the flat we'd arranged, which was incidentally not on the list of approved holiday flats from the Dortmund tourist office (yes, such a thing does exist), and arranged through a sort of back door contact in deepest darkest Hörde, I rang our woman to receive a somewhat alarming response.

"What the hell are you doing in the area so early? (I had said 10pm but due to a good train connection we were in Dortmund at 8.30) There's no way I can get the flat ready in time for that, can you not go somewhere else and entertain yourselves for an hour or so?"


I informed her that we were travelling with two young children who might like to go to bed before midnight, and so would come straight away, that I was sure the flat wasn't in such a bad state, and that we would relax in their lovely Mediterranean Restaurant in the meantime. Alles klar.

The Phoenixsee as we experienced it...

We arrived at what we thought was the flat, but that seemed more like a builder's outhouse for the building of the new man-made lake in the area, the Phoenixsee, which looks nice now but back then was just a mound of rubble. After being told to stand and wait in almost incomprehensible German, we looked on as burley men took all sorts of things out of out humble abode - chairs, piles of ashtrays, numerous Pringles boxes, you name it. After half an hour we were in to our admittedly quite nice but rather smelly flat, and were able to sweep the last specks of plaster and cement from the table and settle in, however not before our charming Moldovan host insisted on perservering to speak to my sister in German despite her clearly not understanding a single word. Eventually the conversation between the two of them was brought down to the understandable level of

"du bist kaputt?"
"Ja...."
"Kaffee?"
"Danke!"

And with that she finally left us in peace, and we were able to let Rhys and her son communicate through the universal language of football. An interesting start to their time in Dortmund to say the least, and not exactly what I'd had in mind.

And how it looks now

Rhys Loving Deutschland

Luckily the rest of the trip went a little more smoothly. The first port of call was my modest student abode and then to the University, and the famous H-Bahn, or sky train. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but the different campuses of the Uni are linked together by an actual monorail, which is pretty fucking exciting I'd say, and not the sort of thing I think I'll ever get bored of or not be excited by - I'm always amazed at the bored looks on people's faces as it swings it's way through the trees between north and south campus. Obviously the kids loved it, and we spent a good hour going backwards and forwards, playing 'tig' in the carriage before getting told off by a miserable German woman.

And the whole krazy krew (excluding Dad) in my room

Bitten by the H-Bahn bug, we spend our lunch in the Mensa planning on how to keep the fun coming, and decided to head to Wuppertal to get our next fix. Wuppertal is a town just south of the Ruhrgebiet, and has something really quite special called the Schwebebahn, or 'floating train'. Built in 1901, it's the oldest example of a suspended railway line, and runs the entire 13.3km length of the town, with a large proportion of the journey spent dangling seductively over the river Wupper, steel legs spread like some kind of sexy robo-dragon.

The very cool Schwebebahn

Floating train itch well and truly scratched, we headed for an ice cream in an Eiscafe, got some Schnitzel (another theme for the weekend), and Rhys bought himself a cuddly rhino, which gave me an idea for the next day's activity. Before that, my sister decided to relive her student days and come on a night out with me and the foreign students, which turned a bit ugly when she stated the obvious and told a french man wearing a pink polo shirt with a turned up collar, a checked neck-scarf and brand new trainers that he looked 'very French', not cool at all, and turned into a nightmare when we refused to enter the club when they wouldn't give us a Euro off the entry fee. She told me it reminded her of her tight-arse ways as a student, so I guess she lived the dream in some ways.

There's a strange trend in Germany whereby many towns require some sort of bizarre, unrelated, animal mascot in order to manufacture some sort of false charm. Berlin has big multicoloured bears dotted around the city, and in order not to feel left out, Dortmund plumped for a rhino-unicorn creation. With the amazing news that rhinos are Rhys' favourite animals and the need for something to do in the otherwise quite dull city centre of Dortmund we headed out for a rhino treasure hunt.

It was such wicked fun, and great to see this somewhat tired grey town through the eyes of children. We must have spent over an hour scouting out new rhino locations, creeping up on them so as not to scare them and therefore cause them to run off, and then taking lots of pictures of their bums. See below...

We then proceeded to eat more Schnitzel, have ice cube fights with random German girls, and generally 'menace' most of Dortmund. I introduced my so-called vegetarian parents to kebab too. The lure of sweaty meat on a stick with salad and sticky sauces is just too much to resist. On our last night with our delightful Moldovan hosts we were asked a few threatening questions about paying the rest of the rent, and were then invited for a beer with the proprietor and his son. I went to get my dad and entered fearing the worst, only to be treated to a very awkward conversation where the bloke spoke to me about football in some strange foreign german dialect that I didn't understand, every so often involving my dad in the conversation with gems such as 'you are English. German beer is good, no? You like?' or 'Arsenal is good team, Chelsea bad. Who you like?' to which my dad nodded and said 'ja' or whatever seemed like the right answer (god forbid he say anything against German beer) nervously. For our troubles we were presented with a BVB scarf, which kind of felt like an award for coping in that place for 3 nights and somehow not offending anyone.

Once the young 'uns had headed home, me and my parents attempted to be all cultural, heading to the Zeche Zollverein museum in Essen - an old coal factory converted into a history and cultural museum of the Ruhr, from which we could conclude that the people here like Football, are very 'direct' (not rude, mind you), and may well have worked in a factory at some stage of their life, on Sunday, before realising on Monday that the Zollverein was the only Museum in the area that was actually open on a Sunday. We gave up the idea of being cultured and instead headed to the awesome Rombergpark botanical gardens, found a cafe, and yup, you guessed it, ate Schnitzel and ice cream. It really is the only way to live.