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

Back to the daily grind

So, enough of all that fountain frolicking and other such unnecessary fun. Having only done one statistics exam in the previous semester and failed it, this was to be my 2nd semester in which I really knuckled down and got some real grades (French doesn't count as a real subject - it's just English spoken all wrong).

With this in mind, I took the unprecedented step of choosing 3 actual statistics modules, and just the one module of French to hopefully keep me sane. They turned out to be Statistik 4, which is a bit like Statistik 3 really, Lineare Modell, which is lead by a man who has a voice wasted on statistics - sometimes in lectures I close my eyes and imagine I'm in some kind of numbers therapy session, where all my cares are washed away by the proof to Fermat's Last Theorum. If only.

So, breaking with the usual strict chronological structure of this blog, I thought I'd take a look back to my previous post on 11th November, hilariously titled "The strange world of studying in Germany", to add a few more observations I've made, see how this semester compares to last and whether I've truly managed to adapt to the way things are done over here.

Cheeky mid-lecture photo

So, a few extra things to add. Firstly, and in a theme which comes up again after my issues having to fax off for a a mobile phone contract and an internet connection, things are done quite old-school here. No flashy power-point presentations or interactive whiteboard nonsense, this really still is the world of chalk and blackboard. So the lectures are delivered on a 3x3 grid of green 'black'boards, which are moved up and mechanically by buttons along the wall. Due to the massive amount of proofs given here, these inevitably get filled up after 45 mins, whereby a necessary 10 minute break is taken in order to give the lecturer time to dip a huge long white mop into a bucket, and perform a complicated procedure of board manoeuvres and window-cleaner style wiping. Clearly a bit of a waste of time, but somewhat charming in a way. The other main lecture with Mr Therapist involves him standing behind an overheard projector and writing on a never-ending piece of see-through plastic - even better.

Another thing I've learned is not to be intimidated by the whole thing. At the beginning I had this feeling that all the Germans students were ridiculously intelligent and I was ridiculously stupid in comparison. This was mainly because I was sat around like a lemon whilst they all had these seemingly terribly in-depth and intellectual conversations. Now I'm used to the language more it turns out the conversations aren't all that in-depth and intellectual, they're just doing what English students do all day and asking each other 'what the hell is this all about?' 'do you have any idea how we're supposed to answer this?' and such things. Very reassuring. A lot of students here have done similar semesters abroad and are quite understanding of my issues, which means they're more than happy to let me copy their work. Bonus.

Generally though, I think I'm becoming more and more German in my studying ways. I often have work finished by Friday when it doesn't have to be in until Monday, and if I know I have a lecture at 8.15 I'll go to the student bar with the intention of only having a quiet beer, and actually just have one quiet beer. A 90 minute lecture starting at 8.15 doesn't really seem like such a big deal any more. I've definitely changed...

Aside from that, the stats isn't all that exciting, and I'm not about to waste precious internet space talking about the awesome applications for the poisson distribution that we learned the other week. However, my French course has been somewhat more interesting.

My very considered opinion of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys

Having registered late for the course, I asked the teacher a few questions in German about whether I'd be able to stay on the course since I knew of a few people who'd registered but had dropped out, each question provoking an outbreak of laughter from the classroom full of strangers. Was feeling pretty fed as our teacher, a Swiss-Italian teaching French, asked if there were any Erasmus students in the class. As I held my hand up, she turned to me and asked 'you?!', after which followed 5 minutes of her trying to find out if I really wasn't German, including the sneaky tactic of asking ' if youu are eeengleeesh then you can speeek eeengliiish, no?', to which I replied 'well, a leetle bit'. I could have skipped out of the classroom that day, finally mistaken for a German. Living the dream in the truest possible way.

Anyway, it's been a tough old course as the only non-German speaker and the only one who had never learned French to any level at school, in a class containing two older women, one of which clearly thinks the class is below them and tuts at any grammatical mistakes from the rest of us. The whole class is delivered in French, with only complicated grammatical concepts being explained in German for ease of understanding (ha ha).

As I gradually got more confidence in the class, I started to be more open with my opinions. This started off with being asked to draw what France means to me and going just slightly over the top (see above), and came to a head in a slightly uncomfortable exchange last week which went something like this:

Madame Scapozza: "Ce que la Belgique pour vous et les Anglais?"
Me: "Uhh, le chocolat, la bière, je ne sais pas... ahhhh les Belgiques, je sais.... (this next bit in attempted French), yeah we have a good relationship with the Belgians because they stood up to the Germans in the war due to the neutrality agreement we signed with them that the Germans contravened..."

It was about this time that I realised I'd had my first 'don't mention the war' (see above!) moment. In the whole time I've been mostly hanging around with people younger than 30, and have been used to making comments like 'sometimes I complain that Dortmund is ugly, but then I remember that that's because we bombed the shit out of them', and had completely dropped my guard. Clearly to a woman in the autumn of her life, some jumped up English kid explaining the heroics of the Belgians against those big bad naughty Germans in terrible French doesn't sit too kindly, and she spent the rest of the time criticizing my history and then history teaching in my country, and finishing off by asking me if I'd be coming back next week, and whether I'd be doing out my presentation in French, since she didn't think I'd be able to read it out. Most definitely an enemy gained and a lesson learned.


So that's pretty much it. I still have my job that I've been doing since October, where I sit in a computer room, collect the post and wait for people to need English translations (they generally don't). For 2 and a half hours a week I end up getting 250 Euros in my bank at the end of the month, and I'm not quite sure how that makes sense either. Sometimes it can be tricky, such as the time I had to correct a paper written in English by a Chinese man who was translating in his head from Chinese into German and then into English. Not the easiest of tasks, but was rewarded by a bottle of chinese spirits. Tastes disgusting, but looks rather good. I sit up on one of those important looking boards of workers now, and was so excited that I took a photo.

Think that will do for now. Will probably write another one of these before rocking myself to sleep after my two end-of-year oral statistics exams. That's right, 15 weeks of work decided by two separate 30 minute meetings talking about the course content, calculating formulas, and drawing graphs. In German. Terrified doesn't cover it.

23rd March - 4th April. Korea collides with Yorkshire

After all those exciting tales of trips to European destinations, I needed bringing back down to earth, and what better way than with a trip back to good old Yorkshire with my Korean friend Hun-gu. As regular readers will no doubt appreciate, he was totally psyched for his first visit to the land of Top Gear, and I was secretly shitting it about disappointing him with the Yorkshire reality of pessimism, heavy drinking (of both beer and tea) and sheep.

We all love sausage rolls

It didn't get off to the best start - my mum was a bit nervous and started using funny little English expression like 'you have to drink tea here on pain of death', which no doubt made him feel totally welcome and at home, and possibly wondering what my true motives for bringing him to England were. However, the fresh air was a big hit, and gave him the idea of filling it up in bottles and selling in Dortmund. I think it'd go down a storm. My motives for bringing him to blighty were partly to show him that England isn't just grey and miserable, and that our food isn't all so bad, hence he was taken straight away to Gregg's. 1-0 to England there. The first night was spent down my local, The New Inn, where we got a mixture of strange looks and 'aww's. Guess it makes a change from being called Shinji Kagawa (well-loved Dortmund Japanese player) all the time.

Appreciating the tea cosy

The rest of the time in Cononley was spent walking up Pen-y-Ghent, which almost killed Hun-gu since he was wearing 5 layers after all my warnings about English weather, only for it to be sunny and actually warm (20 degrees in March!!!). Pub quiz on the evening left him totally dumbfounded, and eating fish & chips in the blazing (for March) heat the next day was a bit of a set back for the joys of English cuisine. Thank God we'd made a fried breakfast that morning and introduced him to the wonder that is baked beans. He spent the rest of the day asking for the recipe. The highlight of the North Yorkshire trip had to be explaining the Yorkshire walkers greeting code (say "lovely day!" to everyone you see), and attempting to explain the humour behind the response "aye, not bad for August" that we got from one witty chap. Typical Yorkshire humour which I love, but not easily translated into German.

20 degrees?! You didn't warn me about this!

On Friday we headed for Sheffield to sample the joys of the student drinking and other types of 'culture'. It won't surprise any English readers to learn that this involved lots of cans of continental lager, drinking competitions, my friend Bradshaw being forced to (and failing to) lick a lamppost, and then a lot of sweat and arm in arm singing in Propaganda. God knows what Hun-gu really made of it all, but he joined in with the Bradshaw-mocking, which is the main thing.

Note the clear daylight between
tongue and pole

The rest of the time in Sheffield consisted of lots of Top Gear watching, winding Welsh Dan up during the England vs Wales match, a nice traditional English curry followed by a similar night out to the one before, but this time in Pop Tarts (amazing cheese-fest of a night) in the Student's Union, Wetherspoon's Sunday lunch (only the best for my guest), running through the Peace Garden fountains (yes, it was still warm AND sunny!), and a night of English and Irish folk music, with plenty of real ale of course.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

So that was a lot of Englishness packed into only four days. No doubt it was quite of a very foreign culture for one man to take in, but I think I gave a pretty good account of my country. The only 'disappointment' was that it didn't rain once the whole time he was there, in fact the weather was perfect throughout. I made it very clear to him that that part of the trip was NOT typical English - I wanted him to understand how we suffer with our weather and don't spend the whole time casually sipping coffee on outdoor terraces and frolicking in public fountains.

The whole experience, including the time after Hun-gu left and I went down to see my brother and sister in Bristol, was just ace, and reminded me that there's a lot to be proud about being English. Especially introducing your little island world to someone who'd never been to England showed me how many stupid little things I love about England. When you get super excited about a trip to Greggs you know you've been away too long.

So at that stage if there'd been a way to avoid going back to Dortmund and the land where cyclists don't say hello to each other and you have to explain every time you make a joke, then I'd have taken it, but I have another semester here in Dortmund to honour of course

I'm so behind with this blog that it feels like the ending of each post is like serialising my own life. So come back next week to learn how I adapted back to life in Dortmund, and began to rebuild my social life after the loss of my foreign friends. I'll sell this story to Take A Break yet...

Schöne Ferien...

I'm just going to use this little post to fill in the not-insignificant 'Vorlesungsfreiezeit' between middle of February and the start of April, where I decided to hop around Europe somewhat.

  

First stop was Prague, setting off from Lille at stupid o'clock in the morning to get a flight from Brussels. I have to say my heart sank somewhat when, dressed in a light jacket and not much else, the screen at Charleroi Airport at 7am informed us that the weather in Prague at that time was minus 14 and snowing. Curse those Siberian winds. For some reason we boarded the plane anyway, and braced ourselves. Luckily it had warmed up to a comfortable minus 10 by the time we got there so that was one worry out of the way.

Prague pendulum

Yeah anyway, the city was good - a highlight of which being the slightly confusing 'communist memorial' which was just some massive metronome on the top of a hill, supposedly representing the constant change in Prague - communism, being out of communism, being in the EU, that sort of thing. To be honest I'd have preferred the Stalin statue that it replaced, but that's just personal taste I guess.

The castle was also massively impressive, although somewhat spoiled by our constant need to hop from warm cafe to warm cafe, and that was only topped by a boat ride along the Vltava river, complete with many free cups of Glühwein, French children screaming 'Mustafa' at any ducks we saw, and a near-Titanic moment with the floating ice blocks in the river

There's a pub called Leeds!

And a Platz called Leeds!

From there I flew to Cologne, then directly to Düsseldorf (Weeze) to pick up my friend Rowan (yes, I know...). Weeze is a complete piss-take of an airport, it calls itself Düsseldorf when in fact it lies on the dutch border and Dortmund airport is actually closer to Düsseldorf. But Ryanair fly to Leeds return for a little more than a 12 year old's weekly pocket money, so can't complain too much. In the three hours it takes to Dortmund we got a bit tanked up on vodka then went straight to Silent Sinners indie club at 1am. Yep, Rowans have more fun. Afterwards we did most of the things on my standard English guide to Dortmund, with the extra Yorkshire element of a visit to Platz Von Leeds and The Leeds Pub, which Rowan was maybe a little too excited about...

Sean and Nathan, pre-sick

From that excitement it was on to Neckargemünd, near Heidelberg, to visit my uncle there. The trip consisted mostly of eating schnitzel every day, conquering an icecream made from (and served in) half a pineapple, and seeing off my mate Sean who's leaving his year abroad in Heidelberg by getting him completely pissed for his midnight coach journey and forcing him to spend his last hours in Germany inside a coach toilet. That's what friends are for I guess. We also rode the Bergbahn which is truly awesome, it climbs nearly 500m up to the hill overlooking Heidelberg and the steepness makes you feel like you really are ascending into heaven or something. Either way, it's scary stuff.

View from Bergbahn into Heidelberg

Luxembourg

From there me and Jess drove to Luxembourg, which had weirdly always been a bit of an ambition of mine. It's a strange old town - divided into the 'upper town' where everyone lives and the 'lower town', which is basically a river cutting right through with cliff faces on either side. Once we figured how our way around the four languages (English, French, German, and Luxembourgish, who knew?) we had a reet good time, but it feels like a country stuck between bigger neighbours and therefore lacking a bit of identity. But what do I know.

Never knowingly underdressed

Back to Deutschland then, and just in time for the Cologne Carnival. Carnival is a big deal here, which starts at 11.11am on 11^th November (they clearly have different ways of dealing with their history) and goes on until early March in most places. The whole weekend had stuff going on, but we were there for Rosenmontag, the final day. That basically consists of people dressing up, getting pissed on the streets, and watching a parade of many variations on traditional costumes, ropey political messages (Google Street View No Thanks!) a lot of sweets being thrown out, and slightly creepy old men giving roses out to good-looking women in exchange for a rose. Was slightly disappointed not to get one myself but I guess I’m just not attractive to old men. Shame. After the parade we stocked up on drinks from the kiosk, before heading to Friedensplatz to see the most awesome rhythm band I think I’ve ever seen. That might have been due to the lethal mix of beer and sugar rush though – lethal.

Political statements...

...and bizarre drumming bands

Last but by no means least I popped on a plane to see my mates Emma and Dan from Maths in Sheffield in Madrid. They both do basically the same Uni course as me and the idea was to show me what I could have had if I’d studied Spanish at school instead of German. Thursday night was St. Paddy’s, so the English contingent was out in force. Not sure I met a single Spanish person there, nor did I drink any Guinness, but I went into a huge club in the centre of Madrid with a shamrock on my face so I feel I represented there.

The next day we headed to Valencia for Las Fallas, although we were lucky to even get there after booking coach tickets for Valencia Don Juan – a completely different town in completely the opposite direction from Madrid. Las Fallas is a funny little tradition which basically involves huge wooden statues being set up all over the city, which are rather ugly and grotesque if truth be told, and then (thankfully) burned in a huge ceremony on the Saturday. The rest of the time is passed by setting off fireworks and annoying little bangers everywhere you go, to which we had to do what I presume gangsters have to do and just get used to the constant banging sounds.

From this...

...to this

After being awed by the biggest fire I think I’ve ever seen in my life, which towered over the 5-story luxury apartments surrounding it, we celebrated a bit, toasted churros in the glowing embers, and then retired to the beach to make a somewhat pathetic fire and see one of the most amazing sunrises I think I’ve ever seen, the sun coming up like some fiery UFO from the horizon over the sea. It was a bit special I have to say.

Ooooh, get us.

As I final treat I got to see the man, the legend himself on my last day back in Madrid – only my namesake King Juan Carlos! He was just popping by for a meeting or something, so I had to pay tribute to the man who gave me my ridiculous middle name. The rest of the time was just occupied with wandering around the parque del buen retiro, and eating ham and tomato bread things, which was by no means a bad thing.

Not bad all in all, and sorry if this has been really boring, but I’ve had to remind myself of all the good things I’ve done in this lecture-free time to comfort myself with when I’m still here revising into August…

Birthdays, Balls-ups, Brits, and Bye-Byes...

It's obvious that I've been spending the past couple of weeks back in England, cause my alliteration skillz are right out of the top drawer today...

The big reveal...

You join me back in January, and while I generally try to focus on German, and more specifically Dortmund things in this blog, what with the title being about Dortmund and all that, I think Jess' (Jess being my girlfriend who's teaching in Lille, for those who don't know me) birthday deserves a very honourable mention. As showed by my own vaguely ridiculous birthday goings-on, we English take 21st Birthdays quite seriously, and this was no exception. My attempts to buy a table in French were pathetic (uuhhh, je voudrais une table pour neuf personnes á douze heure... non, c'est pas deux heure... uhh vous ne comprenez pas, c'est vrai? Parlez-vous anglais?) but luckily they finally found someone who spoke English, and Jess was knocked off her socks by being met by practically her whole family sat in an unassuming Créperie in downtown Lille. Couple that with a party spent bellowing along to the, ahem, finest in 90s 'classics', and you've got a pretty damn fine way of seeing in your 22nd year, which was only somewhat sullied by the pathetic human being that is Andy Murray in the Australian Open final, but can't win them all I guess. Oh and Blazin' Squad and Afroman are of course considered as classics in our book.

After that, there was just one week left before the end of term. Finally. The end of term at the start of February signals the start of the Vorlesungsfreizeit, literally lecture-free time. This two month 'break', which has only just ended, is kept free for oral and written exams, work experience, and resits for the exams taken at the start of the Vorlesungsfreizeit which you've inevitably failed. All very well you might say, and it gave me plenty time to mooch around Europe a bit, but it means that this term doesn't finish until the 15th of July, plus god knows how much extra time for exams and whatnot. They really make you earn your degree here.

Another happy Currywurst customer...

...and another happy yoghurt
man customer

Before all that, there was time for Bradshaw to come, and for me to work on my standard weekend plan for guests in Dortmund - what with there not being an awful lot to do here I need a schedule to keep people entertained. He'd come to experience the legendary atmosphere for Dortmund vs Schalke 04, only to find that in a particularly strange display of schadenfreude, the match had been organised for Friday night (imagine 40000 scousers finishing work for the week, necking a pint or five, and going to the Merseyside derby...) meaning we pretty much missed the whole thing. To show that the gods do like us after all, the match finished a dull 0-0. Take that, Polizei. From there it was on to the first of many many 'bye-bye' parties for brazilian Gigi, not getting in (once again) to the stuck up Nightrooms in town, and ending up headbanging to Rammstein in a German metal bar. As you do.

So yeah, the schedule has basically become: go out on Friday night, wander to the massive market at the Uni on Saturday and buy a bag full of yoghurt from the man I've inventively titled 'yoghurt man', watch the football in town, celebrate with a beer and a currywurst, then go out again. Having sampled practically all Dortmund has to offer (the monorail is saved for Monday), I then suggest we go somewhere else on Sunday, which this time was Aachen - a lovely city near to the border with Holland, which requires little imagination to see why it's such a big student city.

Getting down and dirty with some strange sculpture in Aachen

My revision for my French exam on the Monday basically consisted of me and Bradshaw having nonsensical arguments in French on various topics such as where the chemist is, and how much you should be allowed to charge for a kilo of oranges in a market, when I would have been better off learning how to tell the time. In the end, the outstandingly stupid mistake of turning up half an hour late to an exam paid off as I could do the listening part of the test sat right up next to the stereo. Clearly such tardiness is encouraged by the French, had it been a German exam the result might well have been somewhat different.

An emotional last Mensa meal

The only other exam was Statistik III, generously organised for a Friday evening 17.00-20.00. Despite revising (fairly) solidly for a couple of weeks with actual Germans, the actual exam was a total nightmare, which I ended up failing. Not that it really mattered too much, since Sheffield will just add a few and times by two to give me a respectable mark, and since it gave me an excuse to get truly drunk for another bye-bye party, this time for Dora from Budapest, one of my best friends here and really a friend of everyone due to just being really open and friendly with everyone from all the diverse countries we have here, and always up for a laugh. Sometimes I wish I was more like that but then I remember I'm English and we live our strange little island life and are generally a bit wary of foreigners, I guess I can't be blamed for that...

Perfect post-exam relaxation (note the Deutschland belt)

The party (what I remember of it after eating the sum total of 20 little pretzel sticks as dinner) was of course amazing, as many of them were, with nearly everyone coming to say goodbye and give her a proper send-off. In that time most of the guests ended up in a heap on the bed, I formed a band with, well, anyone and everyone, and Las Ketchup was played. As good as it was, having good-bye parties inevitably ends up with having to actually say goodbye, which is not so good. After saying goodbye to Dora at the airport and Croatian Petra a week later, that meant all four girls (including Belgian Nada and Brazilian Gigi) from my main friendship group were gone, and left me with the realisation that all I had left was the few remaining guys, and a load of Germans to hang out with. Somewhat depressing in anyone's book, but there you are.



All that was left after all that was to go on holiday, but I guess you'll have to wait until next time I can be bothered to read about all that. Now there's a cliffhanger for you...