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