Mulled Wine, Board Games and München.

Hello there eveyone (well I presume someone is reading this). It's been a while, ain't it?

The past two weeks have offered me that bit more of an insight into this strange and contradictory land. Last time we spoke I was mildly shitting myself about a statistics trip we were heading on, about which the only information I had was "well we're just going to this holiday park in the middle of nowhere to play board games and drink beer, but it'll be FUN, honestly." Getting an email the night before from the guy driving me and two others there, to tell me that they'd bought a crate of beer for the 2 hour journey "but I won't be drinking any!" was also a test of nerve, but I came through it thanks to regular 15 minute 'Pinkelpause'. As a result of this I don't remember much of Friday apart from being happy that Dortmund won the football and sad that I was taken to bed around 1.30am.

The rest of the weekend we really did just sit around, eat lots of ham and cheese, play board games and drink. But it was fun. Everything was very (sorry) efficiently organised, with exactly the right amount of food and alcohol bought, and our bungalow of 8 sat around a table for a meal every evening, which I found particularly sweet. I was also introduced to the world of binge Glühwein (mulled wine, or literally 'glow wine', which is a nice description) drinking, which requires 2 shots of amaretto in every cup, and 7 hour german sober karaoke marathons - Sexy by Westernhagen, Wie Es Geht by Die Ärzte and Kleiner Satellit (Piep Piep) were particular favourites. I even beat the Germans at this one.

Lecker

Arrived back on Monday, and just about caught up on enough sleep before heading off to München on Friday (19th November). Even by my standards it was pretty stupid to set my alarm for 6.50 when needing to catch a 6.40 train, but dispite that (slight) issue, I made it, and was able to spend a very interesting car journey from Köln to München. This trip was my first time using the website www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de, which is very popular in Germany and allows you to arrange lifts to places with random strangers. This was certainly an eye-opening introduction to it - I was in a car with a guy and two girls, and we spent most of the journey playing truth or dare. Now, I knew the Germans are filthy, but even so some of the answers were quite shocking. This is a family blog so I won't go into too much detail, but one of the girls thought it was normal that she'd been with three different guys in the same day, and I got taken the piss out of for having never made a sex video. Of course that same girl had some kind of chronological library of videos of past conquests as some sort of sick possible nostalgia trip - apparently she'd never not done a sex tape with an ex-boyfriend.

Having survived that disturbing journey, it was down to business. The culinary side of the weekend was spent sampling wheat beer from steins, 1/2 a duck, and Weißwurst, which has to be peeled out of it's skin and eaten with a large dollops of sweet mustard and one large pretzel per sausage. Sounds disgusting, tastes amazing.

Basically any of the hollywood stereotypes of Germans originate from Munich and Bavaria, and presumably most of those were formed by american tourists at Oktoberfest. So if you want to go where Fräuleins with blonde pigtails serve litres of wheat beer to moustachioed men wearing Lederhosen, whilst oom-pah music plays in the background, then go to Munich. When Oktoberfest is on. Otherwise I fear you may be disappointed. People do those things in Bavaria, but only on special occasions (its like asking an englishman if they always put bells on their shoes and do weird skipping dances with sticks).

The rest of us quite happily distance ourselves from all that. Give me Currywurst, industry and tiny beer glasses any day.

The strange world of partying in Berlin and studying in Dortmund

So that's enough of all that  "on Monday I drank some beer, then on Tuesday I ate a sausage" rubbish, it's time to become a proper blogger and deliver some casual but crushing social comment.

So, we had a week off (because as you can see, I'd been working so hard and really needed it), part of which was spent having a hellish journey back to England for Jess' parents' renewal of vows (which basically consisted of the vicar taking the piss out of them and implying it was a holy miracle they're still together), and Wednesday to Sunday was spent in Berlin with 8 Erasmus people and my friends Nathan and Sean who were studying in Heidelberg for mine and Nathan's 21st birthday.

It was eventful to say the least. Definite highlights were the three English boys finding German flag vuvuzelas and annoying the whole city with them, finding the best lasagne ever in Kreuzberg, having happy birthday spontaneously sung to me by hundreds of German football fans in the U-Bahn, partying at week-end - an electro club 20 storeys high directly overlooking Alexanderplatz, gaping in awe at the palace gardens in Potsdam, and attempting the 21 beer challenge on my actual birthday.

Never one to shirk a challenge, I started at 5pm with the intention to keep a steady pace of one beer every half an hour, ending at 4am or so. I was aided in this by wearing a white t-shirt, on which people had the dubious honour of writing on, as long as they bought me a beer. I managed 14 on a night where eventually all my friends went home but I went on with some Russians and a couple of Germans to another bar where I played - and won! - at chess, before four of us were driven for breakfast at 7 in the morning.

While this was going on, my friends were waking up and a 'The Hangover' style situation was taking place, where they considered having to bring me down off the roof so we could get our 10am train, while I rocked up to the hostel at 8.15 wondering what all the fuss was about. Once on the train, it turned out that there were 5 remaining beer bottles, which I finished off (I hadn't gone to sleep so it still counted) before falling into a kind of coma which I didn't quite recover from for the rest of that week.

Berlin/related shenanigans:

Vuvuzela + Beer Hat = Great Combination

Loving the Brandenburg Gate

Probably having a bit too much fun at the Holocaust Memorial

Potsdam

Feeding the swans as a big happy family

Pictures with newly-acquired 'friends'

I won!

Birthday boy looking confused at
his 7am post club breakfast

The party never dies...

Anyway, after all that frivolous fun, it was time to get down to business and start with the horrors of studying Statistics in German.

It goes without saying that it's different. First major adjustment is the 90 minute lectures. To most people that would seem a long time, but I got a good insight into the hardcore work ethic in my first lecture when the lecturer asked, quite reasonably, if we'd like a 5 minute break halfway through the lecture. Instantly chorused the entire room "NEEEEIIIIINNNN!!!!!", as if he was somehow doubting their uncompromising conscientiousness by even suggesting it. Personally, I shat my pants at the thought of a year of this.

But honestly, it's not been that bad. An hour and a half lecture at least gives you a reason to feel you should get out of bed in a morning - although the 8.15 starts are still proving a struggle. Living 5 minutes bike ride away does help with this problem. And, despite the early starts, foreign language and mega long lectures, I still feel like I can keep awake and concentrate. That might be because I'm shitscared of falling asleep - really not cool here.

Generally my fellow students are pretty cool, which is probably because most of them are Dortmunders. There's nothing like the same "get as far away from home as possible" culture, which is refreshing. It leads me to imagine how nice Sheffield would be if it wasn't overrun by (fucking) southerners. One can but dream.

Apart from that, there seems to be a lot more expectation to work things out for ourselves here. Theories which we would spend 2 lectures and a tutorial on in England are stated, spoken about for a minute or two, then left for you to work on at home. Which I haven't really done as yet. Something tells me that might come back to bite me on the arse.

But, as my coordinator  in Sheffield said: "just get a number as your grade - 1%, 5%, 20%, it doesn't matter, we can multiply it by 10 and add a few and you'll be fine". In other words: just enjoy yourself.

Just don't tell that to anyone here. Enjoyment is not the name of the game.

Wish you were here?

20/9 to 30/9 - the end of language course and when lots of Germans bought me shots...

It's taken a while for me to update this - not just through laziness but because German 6GB internet must not be surpassed. I've survived 10 days without internet in my room and feel like I deserve some kind of medal. Or not. Anyway, I digress...

So, this last week and a bit brought my language course to an end and came with the creeping feeling that something wasn't quite right with the world. Essentially, I'd been bought shots by a worrying amount of German lads. Looking back over the three and a bit weeks since the start of everything, I realised I'd been bought shots by 5 separate groups of German lads (maybe there was one girl in one of the groups but that doesn't really help much). I'd had Jägermeister, Rhubarb schnapps, tequila, and my personal favourite - Vodka with fizzy sherbet - bought for me and couldn't really figure out why. Firstly I thought it was as a joke for me to drown my sorrows after the world cup, but noone really mentioned that, so I came to the conclusion that I was being hit on by a lot of German men at the same time. Well I was willing to accept being attractive to German men for the sake of a bit of cheap booze.

On the subject of alcohol (I am a student after all), I'm noticing a tendency towards continental drinking methods on my part. One Monday I even went to the student bar near my halls and didn't buy a single drink. And get this - I still had a good time. Crazy. To be fair, I made up for it the next Monday by getting into dangerous shots competitions and being forced to drink a litre Stein of water before I went home, so seems I'm still English at heart.

Staggering away from that subject, I used this last week and a bit to introduce some more positive aspects of English culture to the internationals. First idea was to make a nice wholesome shepherd's pie like mother used to. To be fair, it was doomed from the outset. Firstly I chose the warmest summery night we'd experienced the whole time, then went to Lidl only to find that concepts like lamb and beef mince and nice English herbs like Rosemary and Thyme don't exist over here. I left the shop with a packet of turkey mince, a shaker of paprika, and dread in my heart. The end result was just as disappointing as it sounds. Much more successful was the showing of 'The Germans' Fawlty Towers episode, just need to pluck up the courage to show that to some actual Germans now, will be a good test of the famous sense of humour...

No home should be without one

Trips-wise, Düsseldorf was visited and found to be very nice, with an excellent line in shisha bars. The Westfallenstadion (AKA church of football) was visited, which was all very nice, but the fanshop was the real star. Here you can buy BVB (Borussia Dortmund for the uninitiated) wine, garden gnomes, Monopoly, and my personal favourite - a toaster which pops up with the club logo. Genius.

 The last day in Dortmund before we had a week's break and I headed back to rainy old England has to be reported on. This involved a trip to the Actien Brauerei in Dortmund, a tour around the old machines etc, and then the taste testing. Oh yes. Between 16.00 and 17.00 we were sat on long wooden tables being ploughed with glass after glass of Brinkhoff's, Dortmunder Kronen and DAB. How we were meant to actually taste them and appreciate the flavour is a bit beyond me when a new one was passed out every 5 minutes, but I'm not one to complain. Feeling rather tipsy, we headed to our finnish friend Petra's house to make pasta for 20 people, which ended up with huge chunks of garlic after my drunken chopping. No-one seemed to notice anyway. From there we headed onto Dora's for some drinking games and then for some fun in Spunk, because if there's one thing this country has taught me, it's that everyone loves Spunk.