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.