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.