Ausländer

Today I felt, for the first time since I got here 11 and a half months ago, that I'd had enough of being a foreigner. I'm tired of every conversation being either an effort of one kind or another (a choice between the pain of speaking error-ridden and inelegant German and the pain of listening to a similar form of English) or being prey to the fickle whims of the Skype gods, who seem to control the bandwidth I'm allowed to enjoy with the jealous meanness of someone handing out tiny slivers of expensive cheese at the market. Enough to get the taste buds going but not so much that you take advantage and really start enjoying yourself.

Yes, it's true. I'm feeling in need of a break. The small slivers of hugely enjoyable English-speaker-based fun I've had over the past six months or so have only served to sharpen the need to sit and talk with a group of pals in a medium in which I'm not totally lost the minute I stop concentrating, or anyone dares to express themselves in a novel or, heaven forfend, regionally-specific way. My inability to understand anything outlandish, local or lyrical leaves me with only the workhorse parts of language which get the message across. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to be able to say "Having forgotten, once again, to take the bins out, our landlady is now threatening to kick us out" or "did anyone remember to buy toothpaste, or shall I pick some up while I'm here?" without having to grope around for the basics, and to be able to laugh along with the jokes of the humourously-challenged folk at work (unexpressive and slow-witted people make the best of friends for a language learner!) But to be able really to let loose and just talk about something and listen with pleasure and without a constant worry that it's about to get too complicated or interesting to understand, would be a wonderful thing.

This is why it's such good timing that I'm planning a proper trip back to the UK in September. Not just a quick nip over to enjoy the Cheddar and be appalled by the Ryanair, but a proper few weeks of drinking chalky water and playing Scrabble with those who mean the most to me.

You know who you are.

Rob

Germany disappoints

One coffee too many, and one bird-shit-free pair of trousers too few is making me do that thing I sometimes do where I grit my teeth unconsciously in an uncomfortable and unnerving fashion. A day of highs and lows unfolded as follows:

A physio appointment which I'd for some time been anticipating would get, once and for all, to the root of my wobbly ankles and ungainly gait, turned to hours of total tedium in a waiting room full of magazines in a language I couldn't be bothered to understand. It was ten past nine and I was sitting uncomfortably, and hung over, in a suit and tie, trying to find pictures of hot camping chicks in Das Outdoor Magazin, a German magazine for people who hate attractive women but love to read about the specs of an 800 quid sleeping bag. After an hour in this waiting room limbo, goggling in amazement at the enormous and groteque forms of people twice my age and thrice in need of physio than me, I was finally admitted to a kind of anti-room with a cheap-looking physio's couch (bed? bench? You know what I mean). Following another 45 minutes, thirsty and alone, watching the Windows XP screensaver ping around the screen turning from cube to sphere to a kind of siamese conjoined-testicles arrangement, I decided I'd had enough. I left the room, went back to reception and gave the receptionist a piece of my mind. My heart wasn't really in it though because she (belatedly) told me that one of the doctors was ill and the other had had to foreshorten her holiday to come and reinvigorate the fat lumps still in the waiting room. I left with a new appointment for 7:40 in the morning next friday. Apparently I'm "only the second patient" that day. I had no idea German doctors offered a night-service.

I wobbled into work at around noon and was almost immediately invited for lunch. Quizzed Chinese colleague about what Chinese communism is really all about (disguised capitalism, but without the unions or the voting) and how it feels to know that the feeble Europeans around him will soon be slaves to his people (apparently we won't).

I was then told, confusingly for those who like their tales to be either all bad news or all good news, the emotional thread here becomes a bit tangled. My boss took me to one side (over one of the aforementioned one-too-many coffees) and told me that following a discussion with his boss, he'd not only managed to agree the extra money I'd insisted on having for my labours, but he'd managed to more than double what I'd asked for. No idea if this is some kind of German custom whereby I'm supposed to politely refuse and, in exchange, offer a basket of beef sausages for his wife. Anyway, if it is, I missed the politeness boat and went instead for the quids. Nice.

Having missed this opportunity to feel triumphant and wonderful (opting instead to not quite believe what I'd heard) my bike started acting up on the way home from the office. This is something I really can't bear, and it always fills me with thoughts of how all beautiful things must, eventually, fall to bits. (Incidentally, I always say that one of the nice things about going bald early is that you get all the aging-phobia and existentialism out of the way earlier, and can from then on go merrily into decrepitude without any further shocks to the ego.) I flipped the bike upside down to indulge in an in-depth bit of scrutinising exactly which link in the chain was not correctly settling into the gear, an exercise as pointless as my insistance on always trying to look at a spot on the back of my neck, or peer into my mouth to look at a bleeding gum. As if seeing the thing will somehow allow me to do something about it.

Anyway, this particular pointless exercise led me to have grease on my hands, bird-shit on my finest (only) tailor-adjusted work trousers, and the afore-mentioned clenched teeth that my dentist and I so despise.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, even in the face of a massive pay rise, life has a way of making you kneel in bird shit that no amount of unexpected cash can protect you from.

Having said that, I'll see how I feel about it when I hand my trousers, guilt- and overdraft-free to the dry cleaners for them to sort out the mess.

Until next time loved ones,
Rob

Back behind the keyboard

This is what all desserts are like in Germany

Prompted by several unrelated comments about what happened to the relatively regular blogarithm I'd established when first in Germanland, I decided to get back into the swing of occasionally anecdotalising my life. I think I've come to the conclusion that unless I relate something to someone in narrative form, it doesn't play any part in my assessment of how my life's going or what my life is like.

When something interesting, wonderful or touching happens (or, equally, something boring, painful or downright disgusting) and it's not converted into he-said-she-said form, then it just doesn't stick as a memory or contribute to my opinion of myself and my existence as an experience. So here goes...

My last post saw me awaiting a trip to the Middle East, wild with the impossible expanses of free time afforded by a Semesterferien; an improbable 6 weeks without lectures (and, hence, with essentially nothing).

Since that time I've taken a job copy-editing a European finance magazine (the fact that the mag is called "Finance Europe" gives you an idea of the tendency for german descriptions towards the prosaic: I was incredulous to learn that the German for 'protein' is 'Eiweiß' lit:eggwhite) and quit it, having found that having two jobs was seriously damaging my ability to learn anything about Economics. While I was in the business of quitting things, I also quit my teaching job, something that, although the students were great, I just wasn't really enjoying as much as I would have expected to.

Actually, as an aside, the fact that I got carried away with playing the earning game, to the point of being distracted from my studies, is a neat little microcosm for something that's been bothering me recently, it having had an impact of late on the lives of some of my favourite people: The need to constantly have money coming in is a serious source of distraction if you're trying to get anything done. The reason I'm here in the first place (as oopposed to being in London having a job) is that I wanted to get a masters and give myself a chance to get out of IT and into something more socially acceptable. This time in Germany is imbued with a very clear and specific purpose, and is funded by an extraordinary windfall of free cash from my redundancy from Accenture. And if even now, when I've got one clear goal to achieve, and (theoretically) enough money to achieve it with, I'm still distracted from that goal by the need to see the old bank balance going up instead of constantly down, what chance have I got in my 'normal' life of getting anything meaningful done? The problem with having savings is that you either keep them (in which case, in the long run, they're no use to you) or you spend them, in which case you have to learn, at some point, to deal with the feelings of dread, guilt and denial which lead you scurrying for the value brands and upping your hours at the grindstone. Or is this just me? Emotional reactions towards mechanical processes do seem rather to be my thing (cf. my feelings of resentment towards a just-spilled glass of water, or dispair that my newly-repaired bike can, as of now, only get worse with riding and the passage of time. I never enjoy things when they're new. There's just too much shininess to lose. Much better to be amazing that something old and knackered is still functioning).

I think if there's any point to having more money than you're currently planning to spend, it's that you can stop worrying about money for a while and get on with doing whatever it is that you want to be doing with your time. In my case that's almost exclusively playing the piano, sleeping and eating fried egg sandwiches, but I'm assuming that some people out there are foregoing genuinely worthy and worthwhile things because of a fear of their next bank statement being lower than their previous.

People of the world: Let it not be an issue! I say: work out how much you've got and how much you are going to need-If the sums work out, turn down that extra shift! If the budgets balance, say no to that next promotion!

I pledge allegiance to the idea that I'm not going to let the sensible goal of ensuring there's quids in the bank enough for eggs and ketchup, mutate into a constant need to see the money piling up at an ever-increasing rate, to the detriment of my ability to do what I want with my time.

Good lord. What a stream of consciousness this blog entry has become. How appallingly un-Twitter. I had plans to tell all about my failed attempt to get a traineeship at the European Union and my hilarious tales of threatening my current employers with moving to London lest they up the stakes compensation-wise.

I think for the sanity of those who are just trying to get to the end of this meandering piece of nonsense before their laptop battery gives up exhausted, these tales are best left for another time.

Liebe Grüße
Rob