Eastern Europe and the very best and worse of the British

 Once again, a late blog post. I guess if you intend to make each post cover ‘a week in the life’, and you only get around to writing it every couple of weeks, if you carry on living then you’re gonna carry on getting behind on the old blog writing. Anyway, presuming I can still remember all that way back, I shall continue…

  So the end of April brought about another trip into the unknown. I may have previously mentioned about how shit it was that you make all these new friends from all the world, have an amazing 5 months or so, then most of them bugger off to wherever it is they come from, but I hadn’t realised the one major advantage of them all buggering off – that it gives you an excuse to go and visit them in wherever it is they come from. So this rather long weekend was spent dashing around Eastern Europe to visit Petra in Zagreb and Dora in Budapest. Nice work if you can get it.

  For a reason I can’t remember I thought it was a good idea not to sleep before our 8am flight, presumably thinking I can get forty precious winks in the hour and a half spent in the luxurious hands of EasyJet (this sounds like a joke but it really isn’t – as a frequent Ryanair flyer you really appreciate small mercies such as being able to hear yourself think over the noise of the engines, not being asked every five minutes if I’d like smokeless cigarettes, a cool refreshing glass of J20 or a Ryanair lucky scratch card, and the lack of that fucking fanfare to announce they’ve landed on time again when they always overestimate the flight time by at least half an hour, so that it’s practically impossible to be late without taking a wrong turn towards the Norwegian Fjords. I love Ryanair of course, but you really do get what you pay for).

Well good ice-cream

  Yeah so due to lack of sleep that first day in Zagreb was somewhat of a haze, apart from that our hostel was above a restaurant that did the best (and biggest) pizzas ever for less than four quid, they had this amazing huge fruit and veg market around the size a football field, and that the whole place was slightly run-down but somehow quite romantic for that. We wandered around the nooks and crannies of the city, had one of the best ice-creams of my short-but-ice-cream-filled life, and had a cheeky cocktail in the Lord of the Rings themed pub, before getting a relatively early night in preparation for the big important day ahead of us.

Somewhat confused by the St. George statue

Wedding Preparations

  The big important day was a Friday. Friday the 29^th of April to be precise. Does that date ring a bell for any British readers out there in web land? If not, then shame on you, because I was certainly aware of a certain wedding taking place, and had come well-prepared. Scones and jam already cooled in the fridge overnight, tea in the pot and Union Jacks at the ready, we went into the common room at the hotel to find the TV remote was missing. Luckily Petra’s mother was able to rescue us from catastrophe, and we made it to their flat in time to see the vows being exchanged in Croatian and Petra’s mum on the verge of tears. Clearly the Croatians had taken our dream couple to their hearts too.

Toasting the happy couple

  I was able to convince her to switch from the Croatian channel, and in the absence of BBC on their satellite network (what the hell?), we were forced to go with our dear friends across the pond and our not so dear friend from this side of the pond, Piers Morgan, drivelling on CNN with a couple of blonde airheads about how Kate’s dress was really ‘pushing the boundaries of wedding-day fashion’. Luckily we found German network ZDF later, who remarked that the atmosphere before the balcony kiss was like if England won the world cup, only less drunk people. Not so sure myself – I have a feeling most people in that crowd were pretty pissed, I mean it was mid-afternoon at the start of a four day weekend after all.

  It was all very sweet though, I taught Petra’s mum how to make a proper cup of Yorkshire Tea (surprisingly difficult to explain – she wanted to do it in a saucepan, and explaining the colour and that yes, it does taste good with milk was tricky), she dutifully decorated the room with my Kate and Wills tea towels, everyone ate and loved custard creams, I got unexpectedly emotional when they played Jerusalem, and when we went outside again (after having a conversation with Petra’s dad in very broken English about how Peter Crouch is very tall) I felt that the world had become a slightly better place now that we’d blessed it with our magical fairy tale wedding.

I'm clearly the most excited of the lot here

  Shaking myself out of my bliss, we set about checking out some of Zagreb’s museums. The Museum of Naïve Art was very cool, and almost unique in being one of the few art forms that I could appreciate in some small way. Petra and Chris (I was travelling with Hun-gu and Chris from Iowa) went off on a date to the movies, and Hun-gu and I, as if we were trying to do the complete opposite of their activity, went on a date to the Museum of Broken Relationships.

  It’s a cool idea actually, basically asking people to donate objects that were symbolic of a failed relationship. The objects and stories were nothing if not wide-ranging, from the psychotic (a huge axe, an old love letter glued to a mirror and then smashed to pieces and stored in a jar), to the tragic (a book written in memory of a life cut short, fallen-out hair from a cancer patient), via the perverted (a paper maché model of a big pair of tits that a girl was asked to wear so that her husband would get turned on when they have sex) and the jokers (a picture of President Obama with the sign “relationship length: 2 years – I really wanted it to work out). Most of it was just quite poignant, old unloved teddies, discarded marriage albums and the like, and it’s in London soon on the search for new objects, so if you get your heart broken between now and then, you know where to go.

Traditional food

  We finished up with ordering traditional Croatian food, getting pissed on strong Croatian lager mostly because I was so pleased I could order it in Croatian, and dancing the night away to The Beatles. After that it was on the old East European train to Budapest.

Lovin' Budapest

  I think I came across as a bit of a smart-arse in Budapest, since I’d spent all of 48 hours there at the end of my hitch-hiking trip last year, and had learned to count to ten in Hungarian from Dora. Those of you who know your way around Europe will probably know what to expect from Budapest – one side of the Danube (Pest) full of cafés, tourists, nightlife, and a breathtaking parliament building, and the other side (Buda) full of awesome castles, walls which offer spectacular views of the city, and therefore lots more tourists. The city is also famous for its old roman baths, and we went to the grounds of the most famous, Széchenyi, but not to bathe, rather to a may day fest where we danced to Hungarian folk music, and I made a pathetic attempt to haggle in Hungarian (haggle here is an overstatement, I can only really do the numbers so I just shouted random numbers at the man in the hope I could confuse me to give me it for cheap. It didn’t work) for a Dora the Explorer balloon.

The main purpose of the trip to Budapest was to party, so I guess I should talk about that. We went to many famous bars in the city, but the one that sticks in the mind is Szimpla. The inside is mental, kind of decked out like some sort of dystopian robot land of rubbish, where you can sit back and relax with some Hungarian Pálinka in the back seat of an old Chrysler or sat on a trashed TV set.

   In this bar I had my two worst experiences of the whole trip. The first was a shot called Unicum – very famous in Hungary and originally designed as medicine. After taking the shot I honestly wished I’d been given cod liver oil instead, I’ve never tasted medicine, let alone alcohol, that tasted as bad as that. The second was plain embarrassing – on the way back from the toilet I encountered 4 burley bald-headed men blocking the way through, so I attempted to use ‘bocsi’ (excuse me) to get through, and when they continued to keep their backs turned, I squeezed through them. After a few steps I heard a deep threatening voice call ‘oi you cocky shit, come back ‘ere if you fink you gonna push through us lads like that’. Not only do you have to ask yourself what he thought he was going to achieve by threatening in thickest lad-glish someone who spoke to him in Hungarian, but what makes dickheads like that think it’s alright to cart this boorish shite around Europe. Some might call it ‘aving it, I think it’s just sad.

Luckily I could drown my sorrows with a well tasty Langos  (a deep fried flat bread made of a dough with flour, yeast, salt and water.) from the market for lunch, once I’d weaved through all the English lads already on their third beer. Somehow I’d never been more pissed off to hear English voices. In Germany I’d already got that strange sensation from being surrounded by people who answer German attempts in English, and foreign students who obviously speak English nearly all the time, but here it was really strong.

Perfect Pálinka Glass

Unfortunately the only picture of me and the phone box

To shake that feeling, our last night was spent in an English-themed karaoke bar called Morrison’s (yes, really). Luckily we weren’t dancing in the frozen foods aisle of a modestly priced Bradford-based supermarket, but a really cool place boasting loads of old signs for products you don’t see any more, and a full-sized red telephone box, which you don’t really see any more either. My triumphant rendition of We Like To Party by Vengaboys was one thing, but eating a Pálinka soaked apricot and singing along to all four tracks of Follow The Signs by Room To Move (the greatest thing to come out of Cononley since Yorkshire Dales Ice Cream) on the way to the bar with Hun-gu was really something else!

  Once back in Dortmund I had just under 48 hours to prepare for the next onslaught that was my family coming to stay, but there was still time for a Belgian beers and Scrabble evening with Hugo from Liege. On the day, I spoke to him and he assured me everything was in place except for one thing – celery salt. I was somewhat confused to say the least, but after what felt like hours searching for this magic ingredient, we unearthed some and the evening was saved. The beers were awesome (Leffe and Delerium are especially worth a try), and it turns out so awesome that they can only be truly enjoyed with cheese cubes sprinkled with a generous amount of celery salt. Those crazy Belgians. German Scrabble was a bit of a failure though, there are far too few words and far too many that end in EN or contain SCHT or some other lovely combination of consonants for it to work, and even the German amongst us gave up on it.

So Eastern Europe started with joy in my heart for the magic and romance of a royal wedding, and ended with it being completely crushed by a few rowdy lager louts. Sums up the regular let-downs that come with being British quite nicely I think


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April 2011 - 'direct' Germans and Royal Wedding mania

BVB Barbecue

So yeah, coming back to Germany was something of a shock after all. Due to my sudden lack of friends, I needed to get out there and ideally meet some more Germans, but any kind of new friends would have been nice. Luckily, the start of April and good weather also signals the start of another German obsession, barbecuing, or 'Grillen'. All the students Wohnheims are already kitted out with a big fat grill and seating area, and for the first couple of weeks it felt like barbecuing was literally all I did. Which was no bad thing, because it's done damn well here - people bring Bratwurst, kebabs, steaks and every form of pig meat possible, the beer is obviously there in copious amounts and is top quality, and even healthy things like salads are thought of. One of the main student bars, Eastend, had to be shut over the first few weeks of term, so the students just went out, bought beer, spirits, cups and all forms of mixers and just proceeded to sell them all at such barbecue nights. Something struck me as very German about that enterprising spirit.

Then there was getting back into the ways of going about things here. There's no denying that life is taken more seriously here, and the British are seen as immature and silly for always trying to make light of situations, because let's face it, life can be a bit shit sometimes. I've met Germans who are genuinely pissed off with how we always try to make a joke of things - 'why can't you be more serious?!' This is quite evident at the tennis training that I frequent over here - while I laugh at my mistakes (and sometimes at theirs), there's none of that from the other side of the net. Sport generally seems mostly mostly to be played to be won, and enjoyment comes from winning, and less from the sport itself. This is backed up by the time I was told that the reason fan's don't celebrate so much after Borussia Dortmund win a match is that 'only titles count here', so winning a match is just another step on the way to true victory, and not worth making massive song and dance about in itself.

At the tennis was my worst encounter with the German directness, shall we say. While getting changed after a training session, an tall old man in work clothes strode into the room, and announced 'Tag!' (as in Guten Tag) in a booming voice. Given I didn't know this man, there were other people in the room who also said nothing, and the not particularly friendly or personal nature of the greeting, I left the room without saying anything. Big mistake - the man waited for me to leave, turned and stared at me, shouted at me 'I said Tag!' and slammed the door in my face.

Psyching myself up to say hello
to some more Germans

Naturally I was quite shocked and taken aback by that. On the weekend me, my German mate Robert and a couple of others from the foreigner asylum where I live went on a cracking little bike ride to the port in Dortmund and along the river, where we decided to carry out an experiment on greetings. This involved standing to the side of the track, greeting most people who come past, and seeing what sort of responses we got. When smiling and/or waving and saying hallo, around two thirds of people we encountered just went straight past us, no smile, no wave, no reaction. Maybe they thought we were taking the piss (and I guess they'd have been right), but I really can't understand how people can do that - just completely ignore a friendly greeting without breaking stride or pausing for breath. We then had more success on our bikes greeting other cyclists with a 'Guten Tag' or 'schöner Tag heute, oder?', so maybe it is just that Guten Tag requires a response and hallo somehow not. Essentially it's just not the done thing to engage in mindless conversation about the weather with total strangers here. The whole thing is summed up rather nicely in this this article from the BBC website:

Post-ride

Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of interest in the differences between Brits and Germans, and the same can be said for Brits and Americans. After going to a barbecue (what else) to say goodbye to Iver the massive cool danish guy with a wife, I headed up with Hugo to meet some of the new American students. We didn't get off to the best start at Hugo introduced me as 'this is my British friend Rowan, and he always goes on about how much he hates Americans' They were all totally engrossed in a John Wayne film, but once they got going on my Britishness, there was no let up. They wanted to know if I could speak like the queen (I couldn't), how I pronounce tomato (in the correct way) and whether I wrote Jeff or Geoff (who cares?). The best bit was the accent discussion. Americans find the British accent equal parts cute and intelligent, which was somewhat embarrassing as some of them apologised for their stupid-sounding southern accents, to which I said that it was all the same to me and if I or any other Brit hears an American accent then we just presume they're stupid, no matter where exactly in the states they're from. I guess the love just isn't totally mutual.

So finally, this undying interest in our strange polite little ways and our accent came to a massive head in April, for the wedding of the year/decade/century/whatever. The Germans went absolutely crazy for it. I mean, I wasn't in England for the big build-up, but from what I gathered, most people were for it since it meant a four day weekend and a chance to get pissed and have a bit of a party. Not here though - oh no. If I had a Euro for every time I'd been asked if I'm excited for the big wedding, I'd have a lot of money, however not enough to buy all the magazines, special edition newspapers and merchandise hanging around here. The newspaper Bild (for those of you not familiar, the absolute dirt of the German press, shittier than the Daily Star, but massively popular) had a headline about the royal wedding every day in April, my favourite being a feature on the most embarrassing German royals, with the question 'why can't our royals be as cool as the British?' At times I felt I was being personally stalked by Kate Middleton and her 'fairy tale' ways, so often I saw her (admittedly far from unattractive) face grinning at me wherever I went.

Our lovely spread:

Matthias totally out-britishing me

 Inspired by this, me and a few German friends of mine (yes, at this stage I had actual German friends) had a tea party on the Tuesday before the wedding, since I wouldn't be there on the day of the wedding. We had a lot of tea, biscuits, Marmite sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, and sticky toffee pudding with custard, which was regarded with suspicion for looking like mud, but it turned out to be lecker in the end. They totally went for it, with the girls wearing silly hats and the boys in braces and Sunday best, before taking 'typically British' family photos of ourselves. On a personal level it was important as it helped me spread the word for Yorkshire Tea, and to teach them the ways of proper tea drinking (always top up before the cup gets empty, just a little milk so it's the right colour, little finger sticking out etc) because weirdly, these things that are the very cornerstone of our lives are alien to some people. Weird.

Typical British family photos:

In all that excitement there was still time to get a bit of travelling in. Firstly, me, Hun-gu and Marcos headed to Bremen (a four hour train journey away) for the day, as you do. Bremen is mostly famous for being the setting of the fairy tale 'The Bremen Town Musicians', and for being the home of Beck's Beer. Guttingly, the brewery was shut when we went there, but there was still plenty of things to keep us interested. Bremen is similar to Hamburg in some ways, being a hanseatic port town and former industrial centre, and boats a very cute artists quarter called Schnoor, full of chocolate box houses and little nooks and crannies, proper classic German style. Being able to relax with a glass of fresh Beck's in the market square made all taste that bit sweeter.

Bremen:

Eating kebabs in front of a windmill

The Bremen Town Musicians

Schnoor

Schnoor again

I liked this postbox

Jess also came for the last time to Dortmund before she headed back to England, and we saw that off in style with a trip to Haltern am See - a big boating lake north of the Ruhrgebiet. There we hired a pedalo and drank sparkling wine and ate strawberries on it, before a spontaneous trip to Münster, the Aasee and schnitzel by the lake (Jess got a bit addicted to schnitzel and demanded we eat it at least once a day). I totally love the laid back attitude of people just hanging out by the lake, drinking beer and eating ice cream, without any of the health and safety or security bollocks that you get in England. Our safety debrief before getting on the boat was "Are you drunk?" and "Can you swim?". We answered no to the first (which was a lie) and yes to the second, and got a 'Viel Spaß!' and were on our way. Brilliant.

Living it up Andrew Flintoff style on the pedalo