New year, same old parties, lots of pfand, and Hamburg

Hello people of the future, welcome back to my blog, where we've just arrived in that long-forgotten Month of January 2011. Ahem, yes. Actually I realised that I forgot to mention Berlin Comedian Harmonists who we saw as a Christmas cultural present to ourselves. Watching 5 grown men dressed in dickie bows singing 99 Luftballons in a comedy acapella style whilst making bizarre pained facial expressions was a true cultural treat. Get a taster for the strange expressions here.

Me looking like a bit of a twat whilst dancing on a table
next to Marcos from Gran Canaria, who is topless

So yeah, the new year began pretty much as the previous year had ended, with the usual parties in Spunk (which now has completely lost it's amusing qualities, and 'gehst du heute ins Schpunk?' has become the most normal sentence in the world for me), Eastend and so on. One notable exception was the Maschinenbau (mechanical engineering, or 'machine building' in it's purest literal German form) party, simply held in the foyer Maschinenbau department, which had 6 of us at any one time dancing on two of those tables that you used to eat your school dinners on until way gone 3am. How no-one was seriously injured I'm not quite sure, but it was an awesome night all the same.

Actually, speaking of that party reminds me to mention the various strange systems around drinking in German bars, pubs, supermarkets and clubs. Anyone who's already been to Germany is probably already quite familiar with the 'Pfand' (deposit system), whereby pretty much every drink container bought in shops or kiosks has a deposit on it, which is then reimbursed when you bring the bottle back to the shop to be recycled. Cheap supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi charge 25 cent per plastic bottle of beer (yes, plastic bottle of beer), and surely make up their profit margins through disorganised foreigners tossing their bottles away, since actual recycling systems are alien to folk like us. The idea of going to a house party with X amount of beers and then rummaging around at 4am to make sure you leave with exactly the same amount of bottles as you came with is just a step too far for me.

This system also extends itself to the student bars on campus. Since they are run by students who just sell beer that they've bought in the Supermarket, they're also slaves to the pfand system. When you go in, you pay for your drink, plus one Euro extra pfand. For that you get a little marker, and as long as you keep bringing the bottle you've just drunk back, you pay no extra pfand, and get the Euro back. As open to abuse as this system is, it just doesn't get abused. On the contrary, I currently have 4 of those sodding markers in my room, so the pfand system has found out my stupid simple english ways again.

In pubs, your order is taken and you get served at your table. When the drinks are brought out, every person is simply given a beer mat, on which a couple of lines or some indecipherable symbol is written to indicate what said person has drunk. You're then simply expected to present your beer mat at the bar when leaving and pay what's on your beermat. Once again totally up for abuse (the symbols are only written in pencil after all) but it just doesn't happen.

Various pfand-markers and
a drinks card

Finally, in clubs you usually pay a cheap entry fee of 2 or 3 Euros, but am then given a card, on which you must buy at least 5 Euros or so of drinks, and pay for all the drinks on your way out. So you basically go up to the bar and have your card of numbers written on. Very strange. At the Machinenbau party you had to buy cards with values of 5, 10, or 20 Euros on (see right), sort of like buying yourself gift vouchers for a club you're already in. I haven't lost a card as of yet, but apparently what happens to you if you do doesn't bear thinking about...


So, moving swiftly on, the already-mentioned Hun-gu had his birthday on 23rd January, and where did we take him? To the city with the biggest red-light district in Europe of course - Hamburg. What a place that is. One of the biggest ports in the world, it has a red-brick canal feel like Manchester, and is chock-full of history (which I would love to tell you about, but most of it passed me by due to having to go on the spanish walking tour to make up numbers armed with only newly-learned basic french).

The Rathaus

On the evening, we gave Hun-gu his presents, which were a table football table from the sensible types, which he then had to spend the whole weekend lugging about, and from the self-styled 'cool group' of Benito, Kerem, and Radu a handy sex package containing condoms, blow up dolls and his very own copy of the karma sutra, as 'preparation' for the night ahead.

So yeah, the Reeperbahn (pronounced rape-her-bahn) was quite the experience. Amongst the ridiculous amount of sex shows, shops, cinemas, museums and everything in between there was also a few Beatles memories to be seen, such as the Star 69 bar, which was prouder to show that Alice Cooper had once played there than the godfathers of modern music, and the 'Beatles Platz', where we were swiftly moved on due to cramping Bushido's  (a rapper from Berlin) style. What an honour.

Of course there was the requisite visit to the actual red light district, which is strictly men-only. There's an old wives tale that says that any women passing through would get steaming urine poured onto their heads. Not sure it's true but none of the girls in the group decided it was worth the risk to find out. To be honest I just felt really uncomfortable going through it - the girls were all quite good looking but if you looked at any of them for longer than a split-second the window would open and you'd be beckoned over and begged for money. The only men I actually saw talking to the women were all at least 40 years old, grey and balding, so it's not exactly the glamourous life that it could be thought to be.

After that we just kept it safe and found clubs playing all the classic euro-pop that we all know and love, and were all the happier for it.

Living the dream at 'Beatles Platz'

Die letzten Monente von 2010...

Yeah, I've just got lazier and lazier at writing this thing, I admit. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, 2010, that byegone year. One thing I forgot to mention from back then was the Schlager/Christmas party organised by my good self on 13th December. Es ist abgegangen! In my sad little ways I bought Santa hats for everyone working at the Monday night 'Eastend' bar, and got my brother to import mince pies for me from blighty, which I then heated up all warm like mother used to make them, only for some people who tried them to say they tasted 'a bit like fruit cake'. These lot really don't know what's good for them.

Rocking it out German Schlager/Christmas style

Anyway, we got all the cheesiest songs you've ever heard in your life cranked up, including all the 'classics' already mentioned before in this blog, and people went absolutely mental. Nina by Michael Wendler and Amsterdam by Axel Fischer must both have been played three times, with people somehow more up for it the more they heard the same songs repeated. Can't see sticking Cotton Eyed Joe on repeat in Porky's in Bingley getting the same response somehow.

Then someone had a birthday, we all sang 'Hääppy Böörzday Tooo Yoooouuuu', cake was shared out, and copious amounts of fizzy vodka shots dealt out. Ace.

Our Christmas farewell party deserves a mention too, mostly due to our dear South Korean friend Hun-gu. Having never been to Europe in his life before and having led a pretty sheltered life, he's totally thrown himself into life here, and will probably end up going back to Korea an alcoholic, sex-addicted chain smoker. Anyway, when he first met me and discovered my englishness, his face instantly lit up as he exclaimed 'OOOH! VERY NICE! TOP GEAR, JEREMY CLARKSON!' to my total shame and embarrassment. When our country is primarily known for that sack of climate-change-denying middle-aged testosterone-fuelled excuse for a TV Show it makes me feel better about saying 'you know, like Mr Bean' when people don't hear my name properly.

Anyway, I digress. So amongst our main friendship group (Hun-gu, Chris from Iowa, Dora from Budapest, Nada and Hugo from Belgium, Gigi from Brazil, Iver the man-mountain from Denmark, Petra from Zagreb and my boring English self) we did a secret Santa, and as soon as I picked Hun-gu out I knew exactly what to get him. Again using my brother as goods-smuggler, I just told him to buy any type of crappy Top Gear merchandise from Debenhams and Hun-gu will lap it up. Joe came up with the goods, and Hun-gu sat there eyes-a-popping at his 'Where's Stig' book (reduced to half price for obvious reasons) and chuckling about Toyota Priuses.

The best bit was that during our christmas dinner and Glühwein we noticed that Hungu had been missing for 10 minutes or so. On looking for him we found him sat back in the living room, once more in Top Gear based raptures. The power of Top Gear has been very much so underestimated on my part.


I can now finally wrap up 2010 with a telling of Silvester in Köln (new year's in Cologne for the English-speakers amongst you). We headed off with a barrel of Frankfurt beer, sparkling wine and some sparkly pink glasses, and just intended to soak it up. For some though, being welcomed at the Hauptbahnhof by horizontal fireworks shooting along the square was just a little bit too much, and we arrived at the bank of the Rhine minus two pussy Turkish girls. For those who stayed, we were treated to roman candles set off at every street corner, sparkling wine basically being shared out, and an awesome display of borderline maniacal firework firing put on by all the members of the public stationed along the river. The night ended in Das Ding, and the only disappointment was not seeing Dinner For One - an old English sketch which is a complete German new year's institution, but not heard of by a single person on our shores. Get a beer or two in you and no matter how many times the butler trips over, you'll still piss yourself.

So that was 2010 in Dortmund. Not too bad. Come back here in May sometime and I may have got around to speaking about this year

Christmas Markets...

Well I promised a post about the christmas markets, so here it finally is, time to get nostalgic a whole month after Christmas. Better late than never I guess. 

So yeah, Christmas markets. They are (were) bloody lovely, and this place doesn't feel the same without them. Most people probably have a decent idea about what a German Christmas market looks like, having seen all the poor imitations in town centres all over the UK, but I think I need to explain what it is that makes these Christmas markets the original and best.

Glühwein: this is the German word for mulled wine, and literally means 'glow wine', presumably referring to the warm fuzzy feeling it gives you on a harsh winter evening in industrial Germany. The key differences are the stronger and less sweet taste, the shot of Amaretto or Rum chucked in there to enhance the warming feeling, and the cups they are served in, which are individually designed for each individual town (I don't think its just bias when I say Dortmund's is by far the best). Couple that with the sweet little wooden stands which serve the stuff, where people sit and huddle around wooden benches, and you have a very gemütlich little experience.

The Rat Pack reincarnated

Entertainment: Missed out on a lot of this, but things I saw on the big stages include Santa Claus singing about Santa getting off with some kids mum in German in Cologne, a children's Christmas recorder choir in Bochum and the German answer to the rat pack in Dortmund (at which me and my brother sang along and an old woman was so overjoyed that we were actually joining in she kept coming over and hugging us and telling us how wonderful it is that young people get involved in things like this. Makes you wonder about how dull and grey life in this place is). They were all cool (and funny for all the wrong reasons) as fuck.

Christmas tree: its time to get specific on this one: the Dortmund Christmas tree was really something to be seen to be believed. A total height of 50m, with 40,000 lights and some really naff candles is certainly something to mark your town out as something 'special'. Never mind the carbon footprint and the fact that it was absolutely ridiculous, this was something that Vegas might have rejected for being a bit too over-the-top, and I loved it for that reason alone.

Köln

Düsseldorf

Essen

Writing this now some time after Christmas, the huge squares which housed these wood-carved cinammon-flavoured delights now seem embarrassingly bare. Makes me wish that the Wizzard song could come true and it really could be Christmas every day, now THAT would give me incentive to stay in this place.

Winter ist gekommen...

The snowy path to victory...

So, as many of you may have noticed, winter is well and truly here, and has been for a while. You guys back in GB got the snow a few days before us and I heard about all the excitement back home, so couldn't wait for the proper snow to fall here.

Then it fell, and... nothing really. I don't really know what I was expecting, but snow is not really a big deal here at all, more a blooming nuisance that has to be dealt with for a 3 month period every year. I guess since there's no real doubt about whether snow will fall or not, there's less excitement when it actually comes. The most worked up people get is when they hear the S-Bahn has a 7 minute delay - shock horror. I've seen maybe one group of kids playing in the snow, a couple of pathetic snowmen and the odd little snowball fight has broken out at Uni, but otherwise its pretty much business as usual.

That said, it is bloody lovely here at this time of year. The christmas markets (which will earn their own post due to their true awesomeness) are all open, and every day at Uni there's a group of hardy students set up outside the Mensa selling waffles and sending the quintessential german smell of christmas (Glühwein of course) wafting along in the breeze. The problem with living in a part of the world which is just city after city after city is that there's nothing really to do when it snows, you either escape to the ski slopes (which, lets face it, is a bit gay) or go to the park and arse around. Give me a deathly steep hill and a little piece of plastic any day of the week.

Aside from the snow, I've been continuing in my quest to be more German, and getting German people to be more English. When a friend from me asked me if I knew any 'geile Weibe', he explained that meant 'hot bitches', to which I retorted that one does not say 'hot bitches' where I come from, but 'fit birds' would be much better. To see him spend the whole statistics party saying things like 'ich habe gerade mit einige fit birds gechattet' was priceless. I also took part in a Skat (impossibly complicated card game) tournament and managed to avoid ending with a minus score (I achieved 3, to be precise). The fact the winner got near to 1000 was scheißegal.

Schön, aber verdammt kalt

Also visited the Gasometer in Oberhausen which is basically a massive Gasometer converted into a sort of art gallery with awesome space photos, a lift up 200m to the roof and a huge (practically life-sized) model of the moon, but in sub-zero temperatures (its not heated of course) looking at pictures of stars was challenging. I suppose that's what you call suffering for art.

 On my side of things, I'm seriously considering changing my name. Or rather changing how I say it. It's become somewhat of a ritual for me to introduce myself as Rowan and be met with confused looks and 'WAS? Wrorun? Wrowan? Ronan?', to which I then explain:
'you would pronounce it CHROVANN'
'Ahhhh Chrovann, danke schön!'

So from now on I would appreciate it if you would all call me 'Chrovann Brunnsvickk'. Or Braunschweig as the surname if I want to be really German. It's all part of the process.

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.