because mummy's a feminist

Pink

2010-08-10T11:25:00.003+10:00

I've been complaining a lot lately about dressing my daughter in pink. I've been arguing that it's limiting, it's narrow, it's only one way of being a girl. The more I think about it, the more I see it's about more than just performing femininity. It's about how women and men still do not have equal access to opportunity in this country.

It's not as if my daughter has any obvious disadvantages. She's rich - by world standards - fed, loved, clothed. She has two parents, seven grandparents and doting aunts and uncles. She's healthy, breastfed, no allergies (yet). She's living in one of the world's most developed and prosperous nations. No war, no famine, no violence, no sickness. Just wealth, comfort and security.

It's not enough. It only seems like enough when you compare it to what so many girls in the world don't have. But does the fact that so many girls are suffering make it okay that my daughter will grow up in an Australia in which inequalities still exist? Yes, it's better than many places. Yes, it's better than it was. But does that mean it's good enough?

This report shows that women in Australia still earn less than men, and the gap is widening, not getting smaller. More than a third of women in this report said that they had experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner. Less money, less power, less freedom, fewer opportunities and more chances of being a victim. This is not what my mother wanted for me and this is not what I want for my daughter.

Little girls get dressed (and choose to dress) in pink to mark out their difference from little boys. But if that difference means my little girl is going to grow up in a world where her genetics are a handicap, forget it. She's a person first, with all the rights every person in the world should have, and that's what I want to remind people when they see her. That it's just not enough to give us pink tutus. Girls and women everywhere deserve much, much more.

New look, new title

2010-05-01T19:49:00.002+10:00

As an unanticipated consequence of my subject about using technology in the language classroom I decided I should try to use my blog more often, more often that is than once every ten months which is how long it's been. I do have a good excuse, but I thought it was time to delve back into the pleasurable vanity of blogging as a handy procrastination tool. I am studying again, I have had a baby. Both these things mean I have no spare time (mostly the second one) and therefore it follows that I need something to do in all the spare time I don't have.
Clear as mud.

The reason for the new title is that I feel having a daughter has sharpened those feminist instincts I had as a feisty teenager and were dulled by early adulthood and other distractions. We live in a sexist world, sometimes so much so it hurts to look too closely at it in case you throw your hands up in despair and go and live in a cave. But a blog is a good way for me to point out all the things I don't like about the world without boring my loved ones to tears, and without sending myself to the asylum by keeping it all bottled up. Which is bad for you.

The first thing I would like to rant in a very unstructured way about is: breastfeeding. Not the act itself, which is pretty damn fantastic, but its sheer invisibility in the world. You never read about it, you never hear about it, you never see it in movies and rarely in life. I can't express milk in public because it's weird. Why is it that I can blow my nose, but not express milk for my baby? This Facebook site was a result of women reacting to the decision by Facebook to randomly delete pictures of them breastfeeding because they were deemed obscene. So, not only is it invisible, when it is out there it's seen as flashing your breasts. The fact that there is a baby involved is somehow so irrelevant to the primary issue which is of course, women as sexual objects. Get over it, world.

On holidays

2009-07-23T17:16:00.004+10:00

Spent the weekend in Canberra after spending the previous one in Cairns - my half-hearted attempt to tour places in Oz beginning with 'C'. It was lovely and cold, as well as cultural and Mum looked after me very well. Putting up with my self-centredness and even buying me lots of purple maternity gear, since the belly is growing and kicking away. I have booked my bed in the hospital and there's no going back now.

My favorite part of Canberra was the National Museum, which was free (excellent), vibrant (excellent) and pretty inoffensive (amazing). I was a little annoyed that the short film introducing the Museum and the story of Australia had no subtitles for speakers of other languages but I hope that eventually Australia will realise that our langauge is not always easy to follow, even if you speak fluent English. The First Australians exhibit also impressed me, as well as teaching me that the Tasmanian Aboriginies are alive and well - always good to actually learn something at a museum.

Funnily enough though, the best exhibition was from New Zealand about the journey to conquer the Pacific by 'the ancestors'. It was really well done and quite thrilling, to think that they had the navagational techniques to sail a canoe across the Pacific to find all those islands, some of which are tiny. I feel I have acheived something by managing the grocery shopping. Makes you wonder if we've really gone forwards at all.

http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/vakamoana/

Up the duff

2009-06-24T20:23:00.003+10:00

Sooo I'm pregnant. The I can't believe it stage has given way to a weird kind of acceptance. It's a bit like being told you're going to the moon. You have seen it on TV and you have a basic idea about what it involves but actually doing it is extremely remote from your life experience. I keep looking warily at screaming children and wondering why I am doing this again. I suspect my desires and needs had nothing to do with it, this is my body just doing it's thing.

Which is pretty exciting really. I can't think of another time in my life when I felt so at the whim of the physical. Every day the bump gets bigger and I'm watching it like a facinated gardener watching their seeds grow into seedlings. Amazing that all that stuff I learnt in year seven biology is happening in my body. It works! Who would have thought all that life giving potential was lurking beneath.

Unfortunately, as thrilled as I am to be pregnant, I don't really look it, I just look rounder than usual. There is a sign on buses and trains for the people you should vacate the seat for and the prego lady is thin with a big bump out front. I am beginning to realise that that is not going to happen to me. I am slowly acquiring a waist that otheriwse copious doughnuts would give me. At the end I think I'll look more like a large bell than a stick with a bump. As a bonus, I also have enormous breasts and keep accidently flashing my students cleavage in tops which were previously quite chaste. So not only am I more voluptuous than usual, I'm also a bit of a poser. Not the serenly maternal look I was expecting.

The daily grind

2008-12-09T21:03:00.002+11:00

After much frustration, thanks to the lovely computer guy at work, I think I've finally worked out what the problem is with my computer being so agonizingly slow I have barely written an email over the last six months, let alone on this blog. And what do you know? It turns out to be the bloody anti-virus software that's slowing me down. Which, like a sucker, I paid eighty bucks for. I don't care if I'm invaded by hackers who destroy the hard drive, anything is better than staring at that little rotating circle and wondering if you should give up or just wait a few minutes longer to send that one email you've been trying to send for ten minutes...

The only reason I bought the software was that I accidentally deleted the software that came with the computer in a misguided effort to speed the damn thing up. Which proves I should not be left alone with a computer and a plan. Anyway cross my fingers, it all seems to work now.

Only two weeks till Christmas, which means two glorious weeks off work. Can't wait. I plan to ride my bike, cook, go out, celebrate and spend time with people in a relaxed frame of mind, with no work peering over my shoulder. Oh, and I also plan on watching a lot of TV, and a few movies. I saw Australia last week and loved the sheer excess of it. Wonderful scenes, music, comedy, drama. It was an all you can eat buffet and I gorged myself, even when I knew it wasn't good for me. Ah Hugh.

Today I was in Roseville paying my lovely dentist $10 a minute to take care of my teeth. Just before I had that privilege, I wandered into a shop which seemed to be entirely filled with upmarket party products. No waving Santas here. A woman in the shop with her toddler was discussing the difficulty of sending her kids of different ages to one of the states most elite private boys schools. "It's so hard when you have two boys," she said "because you've got to drive them to two different campuses." And people think the rich have it easy. Personally I went to a school when I was six, rather than a campus. I wonder what the difference is? Possibly the quality of the lawn on the tennis courts.

The more I see the less I know

2008-10-15T18:13:00.003+11:00

Last night I went to see Micheal Franti and Spearhead at the Enmore Theatre and had a fantastic time. I'd forgotten how fabulous the theatre itself is, all deco and shabbiness, and we sat up the top so had a great view. The band came on with so much energy and never stopped, they are a combination of high-energy, inspirational lyrics and raw sex appeal. I haven't enjoyed myself on a Tuesday night like that for ages.
And they had many sniffer dogs, which gave me the sense of being part of some underground drug-fuelled anti-establishment swarming mass. A far cry from the staid English teacher I am during the day. Which is always nice.

http://www.spearheadvibrations.com/

Three things

2008-10-12T20:51:00.002+11:00

There are three things which have been a large part of my life this week. They are The Flight of the Concords, hay fever and two books which have made their way into my mental landscape. The Flight of the Concords is a wonderful show. I love it because it satirises many things I like to make fun of, such as men, women, pop music, homophobia, Australian nationalism, American culture and the idea that consulates do any real work. It also gives me hope that in the USA there are many who have an excellent sense of humour and couldn’t possibly vote for a female version of George Bush. The tracks are quite catchy too.
The hay fever is less welcome. I have itchy eyes, a snotty nose and every morning I wake up feeling unrefreshed and lethargic. The only thing the medication does is dry up my nose for a few hours. Every year it feels like my hay fever is getting worse, and for someone who’s never been allergic to anything, being allergic to spring seems incredibly unfair. I love spring. I also love plants and pride myself on my ethical diet and lifestyle. It seems like nature’s way of saying I’m not a real environmentalist. A real greenie surely wouldn’t have to medicate against flowers.
The books I’ve read are The Book Thief and Reading Lolita in Tehran. One novel, one autobiography. Both beautiful and a little self-indulgent. I loved The Book Thief from the first page when I realised it was written from the viewpoint of Death. There’s something about this device I find incredibly comforting. The idea that Death has a consciousness makes it so comprehensible and less alien. It would be so good to believe that Death cared about us, that when we die in terrible ways or simply when we die, that there is some being who notices it and registers the horror of it. Anyway I loved the book from then on. The other thing about it was that it was an unashamed celebration of books, as was the second book I read Reading Lolita in Tehran. Both books reminded me of the power of words to make life bearable, in fact even to give it meaning.
Now the lovely Kate B has given me Persepolis which is a perfect sequel to Reading Lolita in Tehran. There’s so much I don’t know about that part of the world. I love the way that learning about it is like watching a map become detailed while I look at it, things are illuminated I didn’t know were in the dark. I’m starting to understand something about Islam and women. The benefit of knowing very little about a subject is that it’s a perfect excuse to spend hours reading about it.

Work life balance

2008-08-23T15:33:00.002+10:00

It's been a very long time since I last wrote anything on this blog and unfortunately I don't have an even moderately exciting reason for my virtual absence. Just bloody work, work and more work. I have no patience with new jobs. I'd like to go from the awkward, first days when you don't know anyone and have no idea what you're doing to the chummy familiarty and weary repetition of tasks in a few months. I've been working at my new place of work for over four months and it's still so damn exhausting and I still don't have any friends. Well, not really. So I can't even whinge about it with the regularity I'd like, I have to come all the way home and complain to S, which he unsurprisingly doesn't love.
What makes it all the more irritating as well, is that I suspect my job isn't actually that hard, and that I'm doing fine. This seems to be the feedback I've got from other people. Which makes it even more illegitimate to moan about how I'm tired all the time, can't keep up with the work and want to go and live on a kibbutz. Now. Today.
The one bonus of all this is the amount of reading I'm doing on the commute. I'm going through three books a week and loving it. In Germany I didn't read much out of a sense of guilt about the fact I was reading English rather than German and even when I did, the supply of cheap books was limited. Luckily for me I've forgotten all the plots of my books so I'm happily rediscovering my entire book collection. It turns out I have quite good taste.

Warning: self-indulgent rant

2008-06-01T15:19:00.001+10:00

Today is one of those blah days where my body seems to be inhabited by a black hole, located pretty much dead centre of my chest. Anytime I try to make a decision about what to do with myself a surge of hopelessness and lethargy jumps out of me and sweeps that desire away, replacing it with an aimlessness and restlessness which has seen me waste a whole day on doing small pointless jobs that are a distraction from my own inner monologue.

It must be the weather. It’s a grey day, with the occasional drizzle (like right now when I want to play frisbee) and a sort of heaviness in the air, like before a storm. There’s just enough wind to need a few layers. The noisy birds continue to chirp, but somehow it seems ominous to have cheeping birds without sun. Dreary, dreary day.

At times like this I wonder how reliable my own perception really is. Obviously, the world is coloured by my emotional state more than I’m willing to believe. If birds seem creepy when I’m feeling down, who’s to say that my assessment of what’s great when I feel good is any less crazy? That said, how am I supposed to evaluate anything? Through a serious of tests that have nothing to do with how I’m feeling? Ultimately I have to set benchmark based on my experience, but my experience when? When I feel good, as if the world if full of joy, or when I feel demotivated and lifeless?

I guess the difference between happy and troubled people is what they choose to see. Someone once said to me “But things are basically good the way they are!” and I thought they were wrong. I still think they were, but I understand the need to believe it.

Learning English

2008-05-26T20:16:00.000+10:00

In front of me sit a class of eighteen defeated, demoralised students. Their faces register shock, their slumped postures show their defeat. I flit among them, trying to reassure and clarify. “Teacher, teacher!” “Hanna, Hanna!” each time I stop and talk to one, the others cry out like baby birds.

The reason for this chaos is my attempts to follow the program, which requires that they make a poster based on the excursion we went to last week. I have just spent ten minutes explaining that they need to make a poster and give a presentation, enunciating each words like I’m speaking to the deaf. I have asked them to form groups of three. The result was this village of the dammed. In the middle of trying to put a group of eighteen adults into groups of three (“four? Why no four? We can four?”) which will not result in any cultural clashes but will result in some English being spoken I feel like a kindergarten teacher without the height advantage. As I dash from group to group making suggestions that are greeted with strained silence – did they understand or are there tensions I don’t know about? – a student asks if he can ask me a question. I look at him. Is he blind? Can’t he see I’m in the middle of something important? (He can’t). I say yes.
“When this class finish?”
I look at him in blank disbelief at this apparent rudeness and disregard for all my effort. In fact, I snap. “What kind of a question is that? What do you mean?” He repeats the question. In disgust I tell him it’s the same time as every day, what does he think? He looks upset. I continue with my efforts to make a group of unwilling adults do what I want. The next time I move past him he grabs me again. By this time my patience is paper-thin – they have known about this poster from the beginning, why all this reluctance? He starts to tell me his English is no good. I think of my yoga teacher and breathe through the rage. I try to listen through the blood rushing through my head.
“ I mean, how long the week? When this class end?” With a sudden rush of guilt there is deadly silence in my head. Oh no.
“The course, you mean when does the course end.” Blank. I try to explain. It is too late. He is hurt and upset by his teacher’s failure to be patient with his English. I tell all the students when the course ends, and what the word “course” means as a way to assuage my guilty conscience. It doesn’t work.
Welcome to the world of beginners.

Today I spent twenty minutes trying to convince a student he isn’t ready to go up to the next level. In the end his friends had to translate for him. His belief that he should go up even though he isn’t able to communicate with his teacher is astounding. There is an expectation out there in the world that learning a language is linear, like learning how to drive, that it’s a matter of checking the boxes. First, it isn’t. Second, get used to it. It took me years and years to learn German and I’m still learning. It will never be easy. It can be freeing and wonderful and help you to grow as a person, but easy? Forget it. A beginner student will need to do at least 100 hours of face to face teaching plus 50 hours of self-study to be able to express basic needs in English. In fact, it is unlikely that an adult will ever be able to express themselves in their second language as well as in their first, particularly about the things that are really central to their idea of themselves. They may become better at talking about a specific subject, if they learn about that subject in the second language. So for beginners, learning English is as much about learning to be realistic than actually learning new words and ideas. Beginners is the coalface, where expectations inflated by who knows what agent’s promises and a fancy school website, along with misguided notions of how easy it is, get deflated by the guardian at the gate. Who happens to be me.

After a day of feeling like a harridan – “you need to do your homework and stop speaking Vietnamese in class!” – it is important to reflect on the students who succeed. Another student who I told last time to wait is now ready to go up a level. He has improved out of sight. When I first taught him I asked him if he had a question. “Kwe-stion?” he said, completely bamboozled. Now he is one of the better students in class. It takes time to learn to deal with a new language, a new country, and I understand why people fight it. It came as a shock to me how difficult it was being in Germany, and I was with my family and I already had an intermediate level of German. It is important to remember that.

“Teacher! Teacher!” I smile, take a deep breathe and listen. They might have something important to say.

They say the darndest things

2008-05-05T19:38:00.002+10:00

From a student's listening test today:

When bushwalking you need to take a head.

I believe he meant to write `a hat´. Who knows? My German friends never picked up on any ironic use of my German, perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt here?

And along come the tourists...

2008-04-26T17:59:00.003+10:00

... is a great film. Also The Edge of Heaven. Both the kind of German films which remind me why I go to film festivals.

Rain rain rain

2008-04-26T17:57:00.000+10:00

It rained all day today, in heavy sheets that made the gutters and drains overflow. I drove Mum’s car, which was such a luxury given that it is usually me who is drenched by the spray of passing cars. Although it’s my week off, I went into work today to prepare a few things and leave myself free and easy for the weekend.

In fact it’s been raining all week, perfect sleeping in weather, making my eight o’clock wake up a distant memory. It’s been a mini holiday in Sydney, thanks to Mum’s gorgeous house, and it’s been great. On Sunday we saw Lars and the Real Girl, which I liked, despite the obvious fantasy of the whole thing. I also wondered about the politics of it, is a sex doll in and of itself a misogynist object? From my vague memories of the minimal philosophy I encountered in English lit I seem to remember that its what we invest in an object that makes it so. Seems eminently plausible, especially when, in the film, the Bianca figure becomes slowly emancipated as she is taken on by the various women in the film. She even acts as the catalyst for an argument about the role of women, active versus passive. Lars is furious she isn’t going to be there for him one evening and his neighbour berates him for not letting her have a life of her own. I think that was my favourite moment in the film.

Overall I don’t think I liked the politics much. Especially the contention that Lars was a good boy at heart. Surely it’s how you behave that makes you good or bad? And is inflicting a sex doll on your entire town really the sign of a caring, selfless person?

This weekend I’m going to see a couple of films from the German Film Festival, one with the obligatory WW2 related themes, the other a rollicking feel good comedy. Can’t wait.

New job thrills

2008-04-13T14:37:00.004+10:00

I haven’t blogged for a while, for which I largely blame work, work-related activites and the resulting stupour I seem to get into once I have done too much work. That being said, I have been working full-time for four weeks now and the shock to the system of only having two days a week for me is beginning to seem like a lame excuse not to write a few words on how things are going.
Last time I write I think we were both still on holidays and I was looking for work. Well, I found some.
My new job is as a casual – of course – English teacher at a language centre at one of Sydney’s largest unis. I don’t want to seem too paranoid but I also don’t want any current or future students to google me so I’ll leave the name off for now. Suffice to say, it’s the uni that’s pretty much as far away from the inner city as possible, which means a three hour a day commute time there and back.
That’s really the only thing I can complain about, however. Everything else is just spiffy. The school is professional, interesting, has a huge support network and seems to be run largely by extremely socially competent women. It’s like a dream come true. I even have my own desk with a brand new computer on it. There’s also a library for the students, as well as a big kitchen for the staff. And that’s just the facilities. The best things are the courses, which seem to be pretty well-run, well-planned and well-supported.
At the moment I’m teaching beginners two days a week, which is a massive challenge. It’s a little daunting when your students understand nothing you say and you start to break out into a cold sweat any time a difficult concept like say, the word aunt, comes up. I took them to the Aqaurium last week and tried to explain the concept of the Great Barrier Reef. Their puzzled looks told me I didn’t get through. Oh well. I can only improve their skills right?
The other class is a group of young adults who want to study at uni. They’re hilarious. Last week we had an afternoon of bush dancing with them and they squealed like kids when we told them they had to hold hands. I never thought I’d be demonstrating the heel and toe polka for two hundred international students but weirdly, I enjoyed it. It was a lot easier than trying to teach the word aunt, that’s for sure.
We also had the animal man in to visit, which has made my new favorite animal a green tree frog. They have such wisdom in their bulging eyes.
But the strangest experience so far has been having a fuly veiled woman in one of my classes, something I’m going to have to get used to. It’s amazingly difficult to connect with someone when you can’t see their face.
A couple of union veterans at work warned me off teaching English last week and said I should teach in high school, more job security, time off in the holidays to see your kids etc. It just didn’t resonate with me. I love the friction between cultures, I love teaching language and I love working with adults. It makes the lack of job security almost seem worth it. Almost. That said, I've joined the union.

Home easy

2008-03-22T15:12:00.000+11:00

One of the strangest things about going away is the difference between what you remember a place to be like, everything from the smells to a friend’s job, and the reality of what you encounter when you return. It’s even more interesting to realise what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. But perhaps the most revealing is what’s changed about you, in the ways you interact with the world around you. Travel opens you up in ways quite unexpected and freeing.
I expected to dislike the messy streetscapes of Sydney’s west, and to remain unmoved by the glittering showiness of the Harbour. I thought I’d find talk of the future depressing, expecting everyone to be so much more together than I am. I wanted to be somewhere new, make a new life in Australia as far removed from my old one as possible. Mostly, I thought I’d find it difficult to adjust to being so isolated again, so far away.
I was pretty much wrong on all counts. I walk the streets of Marrickville, Leichhardt, Petersham and the lack of tidy German streets doesn’t get to me. I know there is no beauty in the cracked pavements, dirty awnings and traffic jams but I see it elsewhere; in the lorakeets on the bottebrush trees, the sunsets, the sunlight. I love housesitting for Mum and walking home under the eye of the Harbour Bridge, sitting on top of every hill on it’s bed of sparkling blue. I love the views of the cars sitting on the docks and glinting in the sun as I slowly climb the hill of the Anzac Bridge on my bike. I talk easily of the future, certain of finding a good job, a nice flat, a great life. Reconnecting with friends is surprisingly easy, over beer or dinner jokes are made, histories are told. I’m doing a few weeks of relief teaching at my old work, where the students seem the same, the colleagues are all new and my old colleagues are now somewhere else or running the place. I feel optimistic about finding new ways to make my old life interesting. Perhaps its just the summer never seems to end. Or maybe it’s the knowledge I brought back with me about the importance of being at home with yourself to feeling at home where you are. Whatever it is, I’m finding it surprisingly, marvellously, easy to fit back in to life here. Who knew I was carrying the capacity for joy with me all along.

Heading south

2008-02-08T13:05:00.000+11:00

Given that we’ve just arrived, it seemed only logical to leave Sydney as soon as possible for somewhere else. Simon’s Dad helped fullfil our escapist fantasies and took us down to his caravan on the south coast of NSW for a few days to reconnect with a few Australian essentials. Like the fact that it rained for two days and we spent most of them sitting in a caravan looking at sheets of water pour onto the bush. Or the fact that every meal was barbequed. Also going out on a tinnie (small boat) and running out of petrol (false alarm thank god) and drinking beer on a lake. Seeing roos on the way to the toilet block. Being woken up at all hours by screaming birds. Having insects fly into you as if you’re in their way. Seeing a wave of silvery fish flying through the air towards you. I suppose it’s not all bad, this place.

Kiel’s not the only town to have ludicrously large boats in the harbour.

They’re like cows only bouncier.

Birds on bikes…

Hanging with the locals

Home is where the shoes are

2008-02-01T11:27:00.000+11:00

After eight weeks of holidaying we’re finally home – and so are all the boxes I sent from Kiel. The last one, which I sent first, arrived only yesterday, presumably after some similarly convoluted adventures through the globe, containing my fabulous red Camper pumps which will come in handy if I get around to applying for any jobs in the near future.
It’s very nice to be home. The day we arrived it was raining in sheets, but it quickly cleared up and then we had a week of heat, not unlike Thailand but with a little less crazy-making humidity. The skies were blue, the sun was beaming, there was a long weekend, and Mum threw us a party. The only things I could have wished for were fewer Australian flags about the place – since when did flag waving become cool?- and perhaps a front page without cricket on it. Fewer huntsmen in the bathroom staring at me with their multiple eyes while I'm taking a shower would also be nice.

Simon, meanwhile, was in seventh heaven watching cricket on a real television for five days in a row. Ah the Australian summer.
It’s also a joy to hear “Strayn” again wherever I go, and to speak it. To be able to say Chuck that over here will ya? and be met with comprehension rather than bewilderment. I really do think we’re only a generation away from becoming completely unintelligible to the Brits and the Amis. Some of the things I’ve overheard I’d almost forgotten existed. I’m thinking of carrying round a notebook and writing them all down for a new dictionary.
So far, however, the only work I’ve done is rewriting my resume, trying my hand at a cover letter and glancing at the jobs section very reluctantly. My bank balance says it’s time to go back to work but my heart says no. I think it’s time to remember what I like about living here and maybe then, but only maybe, find a job. All in good time. There are a couple of movies I want to see first…

Thailand

2008-01-15T22:39:00.000+11:00

On top of the Golden Mount.

Who needs celebrity cooks?

The big buddha and us at Wat Pho.

Hanging in the hammock, Bush style (George, that is).

Our beach. Need I say more?

Sitting on a tropical island, listening to the waves softly breaking and voices coming from the neighbouring bungalows, both Australian and German, I can’t help but reflect that there’s nothing quite as weird travel wise, as leaving the minus five, sleeting, Ordnung-filled world of Germany and arriving in the 30 degree heat, plus god knows how much humidity, chaos-filled streets of Bangkok. The list of contrasts is mind-boggling; the smells of German Christmas, marzipan and cinnamon plus the crisp smell of cold air versus a cacophony of food smells, rubbish smells, exhaust fumes, fruit, sweat. Not smiling versus smiling at everyone. Eating inside insulated, heated rooms versus eating on the street. Christmas markets versus Bangkok street markets. Potatoes versus rice. A well-organised transport system versus a constant traffic jam. Overpriced versus underpriced.
Jet lag is about more than just the time difference, it’s about the mid trying to work out what is going on, where am I, and more importantly, why is everyone smiling? Luckily, the reflex came back quickly. After all, I still used to smile at Kielers even though the response was often either cold disinterest or the striking up of conversation, assuming we must know each other.
The first three days in Bangkok, it was pretty clear that I didn’t know the people whose smiles I returned. We stayed in the backpacker nest, right near Kaoh San Road, a wonderfully mad area filled with stalls, tourists, massage parlours, travel agents, tuk tuks, restaurants and hostels. We bought fresh fruit from a vendor for breakfast, ate the best pad thai I´ve ever had from a street stall and shopped till we dropped. By far the best thing we did was a half day vegetarian Thai cooking course, where we made ten dishes including the world’s best green curry. Every curry we’ve eaten since then has come up a loser against ours.
After our Bangkok experience the thought of an island getaway was enticing, and we’d had enough long train journeys in Italy to last a lifetime, so we went for the luxury option and caught a plane to Koh Samui and from there a ferry to the Browne and Holmes island of choice, Koh Pangan. It’s amazing, there’s nothing to do but eat, lie in a hammock, read, swim, play frisbee and basically reflect on how excellent your life must be to have ended up here.

Grand tour part 1

2007-12-14T07:18:00.000+11:00

As I write this, I'm sitting in a gorgeous hostel in Rome, in an elegant white entrance hall and I have the computer all to myself. It's been a week and half since we left Kiel and I'm still processing it all, so much so that I haven't really noticed all the places we've been, apart from having to order coffee in Italian. I think perhaps a week doing nothing in Kiel would have been the cheaper option but at least I have enjoyed the Grand Tour element, if only in passing.
We started in Vienna, where we were both so buggered after our move that the first two days we mostly slept, with the occasional trip to the shops for food (that was Simon's doing, I was too busy catching up on what felt like a month of sleep). Then it was another few days of kitsch Christmas markets and apple strudel, before we embarked on an overnight train to Sienna. Terrible idea, don't recommend it in the least.
The only redeeming feature was watching our fellow travellers enact a very funny Italian/Turkish panotmine which began with the Italian man coming into our compartment and placing his jacket lovingly down on the empty seat beside him, stroking it now and then and straightening out the fur collar, or his pants, or polo neck every five seconds or so. Then, at the next stop the Turkish (I'm guessing his nationality I must admit, but it was definitely more emotive and less Teutonic than we've been used to for a while) man launches himself into the ever-smaller compartment, causing Mr Italy to hurridly sweep up his beloved jacket. Mr Turkish ignores them both and begins energetically attempting to pull down the bed, also ignoring his Italian fellow traveller's attempts to illustrate that this was impossible without the conductor's magic key. He then, seemingly spontaneously having come to the idea that the conductor was neccesary, proceeded to fetch him and demand his bed be made available although it was only seven thirty at night. Once the bed was down, being a rather short man, he threw his luggage onto the rack, which only took about five goes and narrow misses of Mr Italy's jacket. The latter meanwhile, was making amazed gestures at me and speaking energetically to the conductor who was making simliar, aren't all foreigners crazy gestures back. Then Mr Italy dissappears for the rest of the night. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
Mr Italy: This man almost messed up my jacket!
Conductor: What!? NO, no no! This must not be! Why don't you just pop into one of the completely empty compartments next door?
Mr Italy: Yes, I will do that. These foreigners are crazy!

Funnily enough, once he had settled down and the other bloke had gone away, Mr Turkey was quite friendly and let us watch movies one the laptop all night without bothering us. Maybe he did just object to the jacket.

Saying goodbye

2007-11-19T08:19:00.000+11:00

A few shots from a small party we had to commemorate our leaving...

Action shot

2007-11-18T06:31:00.000+11:00

Our farewell event with our five flatmates was an evening of skittles, which I've taken to like a duck to water, as you can see from this shot.

A goose a day

2007-11-13T18:31:00.000+11:00

On Sunday it was Saint Martin's Day in Germany (possibly in other places as well) so we did the traditional thing and went to eat goose with my family. Or, to be more exact, watched them eat goose, with brussel sprouts, red cabbage and dumplings. Apparently the story comes from the fact that, when the people wanted to make Martin a bishop, he was so shy he hid himself in a goose stall. But the geese kicked up a fit and they found him and made him bishop. Which makes it, in my humble opinion, rather unchristian that you have to eat goose on Martins Day. But there you have it.

Random acts of meanness

2007-11-13T18:23:00.000+11:00

In all the recent excitement of telling everyone we're leaving, receiving gifts and guilt galore from students and packing up my life of the last two years, I haven't really taken the time to reminisce about the things I won't miss about the lovely city of Kiel. So here I go:

On the weekend I was running late and jogged across the (deserted) road on the red and two young whippersnappers on bikes yelled at me to the tune of: Oi! Don't you know it's forbidden to cross on the red! Little tykes.

One morning last week riding to work in the early morning darkness with a broken headlight I rode past a lady on a bike who yelled after me once I was safely past her: Where's your light? Lovely way to start the day, I always think.

Mind you, there's a certain smugness one can assume when living in another culture which is much more socially acceptable than being smug about how crap your own culture is that I will also miss. Complaining about how the Germans complain all the time has become a favorite pastime, and it just won't have the same ring to it back home. I may well be faced with the question: well, why did you go there, if it was so bad? Which just misses the point completely.

Winter blues

2007-11-02T19:30:00.000+11:00

It's that time again in Kiel, the dark creeps in at four thirty, the days aren't really light and it drizzles all day without stopping. It's enough to make me want to leave. Which is convenient, since I am.
It's quite amazing really, I've been here for two years, met different people, taught numerous students, travelled around (not enough of course), sprained my ankle twice, lived in three houses and now I'm heading off home. Incredible how much you can experience in a small town on the Baltic Sea.
The reaction among my students has been shock and disbelief, and I've been asked what it would take to make me stay. If I knew the answer to that question I'd be sitting on a mountain somewhere, dolling out wisdom. But I don't say that, I say that it's time to reconnect, it's time to be in Australia and see my people. Maybe that's the real answer after all.
I will miss lots of things, the transient lifestyle of living with other people's furniture and cookware, the excitement of fulfilling the most mundane task (I rang the real estate agent!), the fresh bread available everywhere, the changing of the seasons from winter iciness to spring flowers to lazy summer to the colours of autumn. I'll miss speaking another language, learning new words and expressions, discussing cultural differences endlessly. I`ll miss dressing up. I`ll miss riding my bike to work, and everywhere else. I`ll miss the cheese and the beer.
But this is life after all, changing, moving on. The Sydney I go back to is not the town I left, and neither will Kiel be the same if I ever come back for a visit. Nothing stays the same, everything changes. Not even the most powerful people on the planet can change that.

I heart Autumn

2007-10-14T23:36:00.000+10:00

At Laboe...

...the only beach I know to have a submarine for tourists to go in on it.

This weekend has been glorious - sunny and still with the blue skies contrasting nicely with the red, orange and brown leaves which meander gently to the ground all over the city. We went to the beach yesterday and enjoyed what will certainly be the last rays of sun in Kiel this year (prove me wrong Kiel, prove me wrong)...

Techno haze

2007-10-14T23:20:00.000+10:00

I used to be good at computers. I can still remember a certain boss I had when I was sixteen saying behind my back "Hanna'll probably have a few problems with the new computer system" and the feeling of satisfaction I got at proving him vey wrong - in fact I was much better at it than he was, having grown up with computers.

At uni I used Word to write and format essays, and Excel to calculate and present my biology stats. I made graphs, tables, added whole pages worth of footnotes without any problems. When I edited the uni magazine I learnt the basics of photoshop and front page. I arranged pages, edited photos, flipped between programs, dealt with a cranky old network and crappy printers. No worries.

Then, somewhere along the line, I got stuck. It has taken me this long to work out Windows XP, and they've just released Vista. The other day I couldn't get my internet to work and was ready to throw the laptop out the window when Simon and my flatmate both said: "Check the antenae." What bloody antenae? Simon clicked a button on the edge of my laptop I'd never noticed before and voila, the internet is working.

This is not an isolated incident. At work my computer wasn't playing sound flies and my boss asked me: "Are all the latest updates there?" Huh? He changed a few settings and again, problem solved.

I would like to know when are these people learning this stuff? Do they read the whole manual or what? Or am I just missing some underlying social knowledge that others pick up effortlessly? Since when are these things common knowledge and why wasn't I informed? And also... how do I upload pictures from my camera through bluetooth?

Thai tips

2007-10-07T23:41:00.000+10:00

In January we're going to Thailand for two weeks - and as yet I have no idea where. Tips and recommendations urgently needed.

Mountains of strüdel

2007-10-01T00:28:00.000+10:00

Well I'm 29 and after a very long day of going to two social events with my lovely swiss cousin, who knows how to enjoy an evening well beyond the point it actually is evening, as well as flying back to Kiel, I feel it. But it's a nice feeling.
We spent the last week in Vienna and Zürich, establishing beyond doubt that German sounds stranger the more southerly you go, and adding kilos to the waistline with strüdel, chocolate and ,mmmmm, swiss cheese.

Sweet peas

2007-09-07T17:16:00.000+10:00

One of the great things about living in a pokey little city of about 200 thousand people is that everything is next door to everything else. Right around the corner from my flat is a square, which still has quite a few elegant apartment bocks surrounding it and was obviously a bit of a civic centre in centuries past. These days it houses a car park and a playground, as well as being flanked by the usual collection of German shops; a chemist, a doctor’s surgery, two bakeries, a bookstore, a luxury tea shop, an ice creamery, a newsagent and a supermarket. On Sunday the bakeries are only open until midday and the queues stretch out the door. I imagine the entire neighborhood sitting down to fresh bread rolls and pastries for a Sunday brunch, chuckling about scoring the last poppy seed roll.
The nicest thing about my square, however, is that twice a week there’s a grower’s market there. Literally fifty metres from my house I can buy fresh produce, cheeses, olives, flowers and bread, as well as the occasional handicrafts. It doesn’t matter how much money I take to the market, I inevitable spend it all.
Yesterday was typical, I intended to buy myself some flowers and maybe some stone fruit. Unfortunately, the moment I wandered in I was caught by the idea of buying some Gouda for Simon, since it’s usually him who buys the cheese. A the cheese stand I tasted some family cheese and two kinds of Gouda, one of which was described as caramel/walnut and which was exactly that, an odd combination of cheese and caramel tastes. Then I was entranced by the cream cheeses on offer, some with tomatoes and herbs, others with chives. I got about eight euros worth of 12 month old Gouda and a container of cream cheese with bear leek, a kind of garlicky chive which I love.
With my wallet feeling a little empty I went back to the flower stand I had spotted on my way in, where I thought I had seen something interesting. I was right, sweet peas and plenty of them, in all sorts of incredible colours. I had never seen sweet peas at the market before, and since they’re one of my favourite flowers I had to get them, hang the expense. At first the lady didn’t want to bargain with me, but after I hung around pathetically for a few minutes she gave me a euro off and I got three beautiful colours for a measly five euros. Then I asked her what they were called: Wicken. A rather harsh name for such a pretty flower. I told her in English they were called sweet peas and she couldn’t quite believe it, telling the boss: hey boss, these are called sweet peas in English! What! He grunted, Sweet peas! What do you know! He told me that these particular colours only grow in the “four lands”, that is the area just south of Hamburg. The reason I’d never seen them before is that there’s only one grower, who has four greenhouses just filled with sweet peas.
After that it was two pineapples from Ecuador and I had no money left, a full basket and the knowledge I had bought nothing very useful but had enjoyed it thoroughly anyway. Can’t wait for next week.

Deer and scuba diving

2007-08-07T04:08:00.000+10:00

Last weekend was another a normal weekend in Kiel. I checked out some deer and wild pigs that live in a park up the road and went for my first open water dive. Just the usual.

The place where we went diving.

Stormy weather

2007-07-30T21:49:00.001+10:00

The view from my window. Note the lack of blue sky. In fact, it's pissing down but, as I have just discovered, the rain doesn't photograph so well.

So much for four seasons, this year I think I've only had two so far: drizzly winter and slightly warmer autumn. This is now the fourth consecutive week where it has rained at least four times in one day almost every single day. I now have full sympathy for the insane drop-everything-and-have-a-barbeque behaviour of people in the north when the sun comes out - I didn't think it was possible to have an entire summer with no sun. It turns out it is.

Luckily I have a ready collection of melancholy music, most of my music being already quite melencholy. At the moment I'm listening to the dulcit tones of Holly Throsby, earlier I had some Staring Girl, a band from Kiel that my flatmate put me onto, and next shall be the Howling Bells and some Jolie Holland. If I'm still here and don't have to go to work Kasey Chambers'll be next. With a cup of tea in my hand I could be back in Sydney at the this time of year.

Hanging with the Czech ladies

2007-07-23T05:13:00.000+10:00

Last week I had the glorious pleasure of accompanying my two cousins to their grandmother's holiday house near the German border, in the Czech Republic. We drove for seven hours across Germany with a four month-old baby in the back seat, his devoted mother breastfeeding him every two hours or so, and the three of us (or rather four) singing maniacally to a CD of English children's songs I brought back from London. If I ever have to hear "If you're happy and you know it" again my head is going to start spinning. We arrived at a little wooden hut facing a lake, surrounded by other wooden huts, to an enthusiastic welcome from the Czech-only speaking auntie, twelve year old baby crazy cousin and grandmother, as well as their mum who had arrived a week previously. And fruit-filled dumplings, hot, with powdered sugar. And a hammock, which became my second home for the week while the four adults (I don't count myself) discussed their lives in Czech, only to occasionally ask me a question through my cousins, about my plans, my family, my eating habits, my ankle.
Actually not speaking Czech was a really strange experience - having to nod and smile with half the inhabitants of a very small house was a little stressful at first. But by the last day Eva was talking at me in Czech in the kitchen and I was happily not comprehending anything she had to say. At first it was weird though, especially when the grandma asked me within the first five minutes why I wasn't married and why I was a vegetarian. But obviously there were also benefits - she couldn't ask me directly for example.
It was so lovely to spend time with all these energetic and positive women, as well as a cute baby. I came back to Kiel with so much good energy - it's lovely.

The spa town near to the hut we stayed in, Fransensbad in German. Gorgeous yellow and white buildings, in the style of the Austro-Hugarian empire, surrounded by parks, fountains and the springs themselves.

One of the springs, I'm not actually filling up the bottle because my cousin said she'd throw up if she had to smell it. It did smell a bit like a year eight science room.

My aunt goaded all young women of childbearing age without children into touching this statue, which is supposed to increase your fertility.

The view from the hut.

Susie and Junus looking lovely.

Little Junus looks like his granddad.

Adult content

2007-07-05T04:48:00.000+10:00

I've been an ESL teacher for a few years now and I've heard some pretty funny things. One of my favorites is the German tendency to confuse wife with woman so you end up with sentences like: me and my woman went to the football (mind you I still confuse the words humid and gay in German to everyone's amusement, so I'm not one to talk). Japanese and Korean students had many other errors which were odd, or interesting, or bizarrely sexual. However, the best mistake I've heard yet was made by my 18 year old elementray student today.

The background is this: we were doing an activity where we had to guess what each other does at particular times of the day. As in: at two o'clock you work, at ten o'clock you sleep etc. In German the words for eat and food are the same, so you say I cook eat. The word for cook is kochen, pronounced with a soft ch in the back of the throat. So the activity is going very well and we're almost finished when my student has to guess what I do at seven in the evening.

My student: you eat c*ck at seven.
Me: (best poker face you ever saw) Nooooo... I think you mean cook?
Him: Yes, c*ck.
Me: COOK. C-OO-K. I cook my food for dinner.
Him: You c*ck your dinner.

And so it went on. I'm looking forward to the other teacher tomorrow being asked about her nighttime activites. If his English wasn't so bad I'd almost suspect him of knowing what he was saying.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

2007-06-28T20:48:00.000+10:00

For avid readers: I asked some students about the whole du/Sie thing (see blog entry from last week) and surprise, surprise, I got it completely wrong. Apparently the random stranger was doing me a favour by calling me du, and inclduing me in her special club. Silly me. What ?!

Gerstralia

2007-06-28T20:40:00.000+10:00

Last week I posted off an application to renew my driver's license, which as a lucky citizen of NSW, is possible as long as you're not away for longer than five years and your license hasn't been expired for too long. Yesterday I got an email saying that, unfortunately, they couldn't renew my license because I had an outstanding fine which had gone to the state debt recovery service (didn't know we had one) and my license was suspended until I paid it. This was all very confusing given that a) I've been out of the country for two years and b) I don't own a car.
Anyway I sent off an email to the nice folks at the SDRS and they got back to me pronto telling me I had a fine because I... wait for it... didn't vote in the 2005 State by-election for Marrickville. So, to summarise, I can't get my license renewed because I didn't vote in a by-election. I'm torn between being really impressed with the speed with which I got this information, as well as the depth of state control in NSW and really, really frightened that Australia has TURNED INTO GERMANY.

Anyway the next step in this whole ridiculous process was to email the NSW Electoral Service telling them I was out of the country, which I just did. Stay tuned...

High tea

2007-06-26T05:12:00.000+10:00

Currently in my, for want of a better word, larder I have the following teas: rosegarden (containing whole rose buds), ginger chai, Lübeck marzipan, Niederegger Marzipan tea (black), digestion tea, black current leaf tea and a clove and cinammon tea I picked up at the chemist.

Overall a rather girly collection. Perhaps I need to get more of the sort of tea which puts hair on your chest. Sailors' tea? Tea for men who drink too much?

Recent Kiel pics

2007-06-24T21:57:00.000+10:00

The curse of missing words

2007-06-21T05:11:00.000+10:00

My friend Judith when I was complaining about not having the word I needed in a shop:
"Because you have a good accent you don't sound foreign, you just sound stupid."

You and you

2007-06-21T04:53:00.000+10:00

I've made quite good progress in German since the days I was too scared to open my mouth in conversation class at university. These days I'm more likely to talk too much, or too familiarly so that the other person thinks I'm either rude or ignorant. My accent is not strong and if I'm really lucky and the person I'm speaking to is a little absent-minded or busy they might even think I'm a native German speaker. But I always give myself away when it comes to saying you.
German isn't as complicated as some language when it comes to the polite forms. On paper it's simple: with strangers, superiors, university professors or anyone else you want to show respect to use Sie. With friends, close colleagues, children or people you meet at parties and other cool and relaxed places use du. If only it were that simple.
To give you a good idea of the complexity of the Sie/du divide here is a recent scenario. At the bank where I work a department has a new board member. He insists on the du form for everyone, regardless if secretary or manager. All of my students mention this fact when I asked them about him. Their opinions, however, on the relative merit of this radical move were vastly different.
Some felt it was a great break with the past of the bank and the rigid hierarchy which led to some colleagues being dutzt and some Sietzt. They thought it showed an appreciation of all members in the department, regardless of how closely they worked with the boss. Sounds good to me.
But wait. Others felt very differently. This shows disrespect for the traditions of the bank, they said. It's an unrealistic and insincere intimacy. And above all, it's an emotionally charged act, to require everyone to use the more familiar term. For those who aren't used to it, it makes them very uncomfortable. Is this a good first move?
I was left fairly baffled by the whole thing. I could appreciate the logic of both arguments but thought it was placing a lot of emotional value on to one little word. Surely, I thought, they can realise that objectively it's not that important? That it means the same thing in the end, if you say Would you be so kind (Sie)or Do it (du)?

And then, this morning someone called for my boss while the secretary was out so I answered the call. It was all going well when out of the blue this complete stranger calls me du. She must have thought I was a lowly secretary or just very young, because I obviously didn't know the rules of phone etiquette (but why? I'll never know) and so wasn't worthy of the respectful term. I was outraged. It seems I have picked it up after all. Now if I could only remember to use the appropriate verb form which follows...

Go Bonnie go!

2007-06-18T01:46:00.000+10:00

It's Kiel Week. This, in case you don't already know, is the biggest sailing festival in Northern Europe. This small, provincal town fills up with drunken Poms, Scandinavians looking for cheap alcholol, sailors in ridiculous costumes from the other side of the Baltic, Isreali jewellers, English fudge purveyors, the Dutch, the French, even the Aussies have a stand at the international food market, decked with Fosters umbrellas and selling prawns on a stick. On every street corner there's a stage, a bunch of badly dressed over-fifties and a man selling sausages and beer. Oh and then there's the huge techno parties and cocktail stands selling caiprinhas for five Euros a pop.

So last night was the official opening of this great event and I celebrated it by going to see the highlight on the main stage near the town hall... Bonnie Tyler. Man did she rock. Not only did she look about thirty (but was that a wig? We'll never know) she bagged Axel Rose, name-dropped like it was going out of style and croaked her way through all her friends's hits as well as her own. I have to admit though, when Total eclipse of the heart came on I loved every minute of it. It made me feel like I was eight years old all over again.

Injuries talk

2007-06-10T23:11:00.000+10:00

I torn my damn tendon again, this time by playing frisbee in the park after doing aerobics. Thanks to the wonder that is the German health system I didn't have to pay a dime for the x-ray and the specialist, but I did spend two hours of my life in an emergency waitng room watching daytime television. So, the upshot of it all is that while the sun shines and Kielers bake themslves doing all manner of boistrous outdoor activites I'll be limping around, pasty and plump, reading my way through my friend's libraries and watching many TV series'. Actually now that I put it in writing it doesn't sound that bad.

But the real unforseen bonus is that I have discovered the secret of making small talk up here - limp! People who have never bothered to talk to me before, the post office man, the security guard, the baker, are suddenly friendly, sympthetic and personable. I feel like an explorer who, after almost two years of fruitlessly searching for the lost gold of the tribe of something or other, and who had begun to doubt it's very existence, waking up one morning to be told by a friendly native in perfect English that, actually, the gold is over there and they were wondering when he was going to ask.

When I mention my find to Germans they say, "Oh yes, we love to talk about illness, especially the old people." I think I should put this in a guide book as to how to put people at ease:
Some people find the German manner a little stiff and formal but a sniffle, cough, some bruising or a limp will soon reduce them to the amiable, intelligent and interested people they are.

I ?!%$ London

2007-06-03T03:18:00.001+10:00

Tube of vomit

2007-06-02T00:42:00.000+10:00

I always thought I was a big city kind of person. I love the energy of cities, the different faces, the anonymity, the strange and wonderful corners, the history, the scars. I felt at home in big cities, slipping easily between the crowds, finding my niche of where to shop, eat, drink, learn and marvel. Something has changed.

London was completely overwhelming, noisy, vast, ugly, beautiful and above all, filled to the brim with stuff. I felt suddenly like someone had squeezed my surroundings into a tiny little box and then piled up thousands of other boxes until there was no empty space left in my entire visual universe. Mental either, for that matter. I hated the tube, it made me want to vomit, walking around was a matter of head down, elbows out and somehow even the vast array of food left me cold. What the hell has happened to me?

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy parts of it, like hanging out with a couple of cool ladies, or visiting the (extremely overcrowded)Tate modern filled with amazingly engaged kids and their parents, and some quite cool art. I just didn't love it the way I loved visiting Budapest last year, or going to Hamburg. Either London isn't for me, or I've become a small towner. Help me.

And of course it rained.

Show off

2007-05-24T03:56:00.000+10:00

Today I had the great pleasure of acting like a world-travelling, freewheeling, free-spirited and adventurous soul, rather than the stay-at-home in jamys type I really am most of the time. It was lovely, and went something like this:

Friend: Oh, hey we're having a party tomorrow night, it's going to be a surprise party. Want to drop by?
Me (sucking air through teeth): Awww Id love to but I can't...I'm going to London.
Friend (obviously a little taken aback given my usual lethargy): Oh right, great, what are you doing there?
Me: Oh, you know... visiting friends (inaudible whoop of glee).
Friend (backing away from obviously body-snatched Hanna): Well... have a great time.

Yay!Yay! It's true I'm going from a city no-one has ever heard of to one many have, and that makes me cool. For once, I'm actually living like I'm living in Europe. Of course, I will come back from this weekend of debauchery with a big debt to the nice people at the Commerzbank, but hey. That's how we live here. In Europe.

Ps the above picture was taken by a lovely student of mine when he visited London recently. For my trip, add rain.

Trash talk

2007-05-14T22:33:00.000+10:00

On Saturday I had the dubious pleasure of hosting a Eurovision event - three screens, one of which was a projection onto the wall, showing the night of all nights, the Grand Prix of Entertainment, the Eurovision Song Contest. A few weeks ago I was in raptures at the idea of seeing the thing live, in Europe, with the possibility of voting (even if I knew I wasn't going to) for every country except the one I was in. Which, given that Germany usually sucks, wasn't too much of a problem. On the day, however, I lost all of my enthusiaism and couldn't remember why I'd wanted to watch the damn thing in the first place, as we shopped for booze, food and rearranged our entire room in its name.

In the end I quite enjoyed it, even after a whole day of trying to get the digital projector to work and failing (my techhead surfie flatmate wandered in about three minutes before showtime and fixed it, using a handfull of cables I don't know what to do with and would certainly never own. Then he proceeded back to his room to boycott the "Shit festival"). It's just so glorious in its mix of deadly serious chicks in sparkly dresses, camp dance routines and rich countries like France and Sweden seemingly taking the piss while Turkey belly-dances pop-stlye and the Ukraine takes the piss out of the Germans.

Actually that was the favorite of the night at our place, because it combind sparkle, satire, men in tight shorts and a man dressed as a woman while pretending to be some kind of disco nazi - his song went "Eins, zwei, sieben - TANZEN!" while boys in silver sparkly bike shorts did some kind of pogo dance.

Another favorite moment of mine was the oh-so-crap British pop band Minogue-esque song, which looked and sounded like a Virgin commercial (although I appreciated the camp "Would you like something to suck on during the flight?" they threw in).

It was, however, kind of tragic how no-one likes the Germans. During the voting when the Danish presenter said gushingly "And X points for our neighbour Sweden!" one of Simon's friend's said "But we're your neighbours!" in an agonized tone. And when another country deigned to give Germany five or so points the German commentator said on behalf of his country he was "surprised and delighted". Pathetic.

Square eyes

2007-05-08T23:05:00.000+10:00

In case it's not hugely obvious, I'm home sick with a cold and a swollen foot today (from tripping over while wandering around in a daze with a head cold) so I've revamped my blog, added some new bits and pieces and even read some German newspaper which I usually avoid because it's too depressing realizing how many words I don't know.

I've recently been watching the following excellent American shows: Scrubs, Veronica Mars and Heroes. Highly recommended. I was so upset when I got to the last Scrubs available - it's completely addictive. And John Dorian reminds me of my brother. Ms Mars, on the other hand, reminds me of who I'd like to be, although a little less underweight. And perhaps not in California.

Spring

2007-05-08T20:28:00.000+10:00

When I think of spring, I think of birthdays (mine and those of friends), of the September holidays, of a slow, delicious warming up until the long, lazy days of a hot summer. When I was a child spring meant endings of things, the school year, wearing stuffy woolen jumpers, huddling around the gas heater. The older me was relieved at the end of studying with a hot water bottle on my lap, or paying exorbitant heating bills. Spring means the days get longer, no longer dark at six o'clock, the scarves are packed away and the city comes alive with festivals, celebrations (Jewish New Year), chairs in the sun, picnics in the park.
A spring in May seems right on paper - hence the Maypole dance I did in September when I was ten - but it feels wrong, wrong, wrong. The flowers come out, they are suddenly everywhere in all colours. There are hyacinths, tulips, magnolias, bluebells, daisies and everywhere there are daffodils. In German they are called Easter bells, because they bloom over Easter. There are tulips growing in gardens and on nature strips which I would pay good money for back home; they're lush pink, lipstick red, violent purple, vivid orange or canary yellow and perfectly formed. The trees blossom, and then, too quickly, start to grow back their leaves, the daffodils die, suddenly the air smells sweet and mild and the sky is full of jet streams. It's a brief, beautiful European spring and it feels a little like walking into a film of how spring is supposed to be.

Here, when the sun comes out and it's twenty degrees there's no waiting for next weekend. It's time to head to the park, with your portable barbecue, your array of outdoor games, a case of beer, your bikini and eight to twenty of your closest friends. If you're a homeowner with a garden it's time to lacquer your garden furniture, repaint the garage, remove your winter tyres and crack out the barbecue in the backyard. Time to go on cycling trips, to play tennis, soccer, to take the kids to the sandpit. In our case it's time to play Frisbee without getting wet feet, although trying to find a patch of grass to play it on is difficult. We can play until almost ten o'clock, because it's still light, and still find time for an ice cream on the way home. The best flavours here are of course the ones made with the rich, creamy milk they drink, hazelnut, chocolate, caramel, vanilla. For risk takers there's nutella, plum, egg liquor and miracle flavour (tastes like lollies).

As far as food goes, that's also seasonal. It's asparagus season, not the green but the white variation, the one that needs to be peeled before consumption. Last year my cousin was lovely enough to cook it for us, with butter and salt and ham for the meat-eaters. It's also strawberry season, which means a kilo of strawberries for an eighth of their winter price, sweet and fresh and delicious. Manuela maintains that these are the only two foodstuffs that still have a season here, but I think otherwise. To me, child of a Großstadt (big city), everything seems so seasonal here, and not just personal seasons but communal. People seem to know when it's time to eat beet, or which kind of potato is the best this year, when the canola fields are in bloom or when to buy tulips. There's flea markets every other weekend to get rid of the products of spring cleaning or acquire new objects to sell next year.

For me it's a new kind of spring. It doesn't have that sense of things ending, rather of something new and different, strangely out of whack with my inner seasons but nonetheless familiar. There are no insects on the grass when we picnic, no hole in the ozone layer to worry about, no sharks or dangerous jellyfish when we go to the beach. It's a bit like stepping into one of those European fairy tales I read as a child, or a book by Enid Blyton, or Anne of Green Gables. Nature with it's claws removed. I'm not sure if I should, but so far, I'm enjoying the fantasy.

Recent history

2007-04-11T02:53:00.000+10:00

Today a student asked me what `recent` meant and I had a moment of blank native speaker idiocy - what the hell does it mean? I gave up and gave them the German. What a cop out. At least after sixty seconds of pressing my fingers to my forehead I remembered the word `sustainable`. Why can't we just say afterholdable like they do here?

Now that I'm home and have access to dictionaries I know that it means `a time close to now in the past`. In that vein I thought I'd put up some pictures from times close to now in the past.

The recent addition to my extended family with his dad - poor Yunis is a little upset that this isn't his best angle.

The other slightly less-recent addition, in fact Yunis's cousin, the gorgeous Milan who is the happiest baby in the world. Even with me.

Random Kiel festival I stumbled across recently, convinced people I was American and that they should let me photograph them.

Since the World Cup it's okay to have German flags hanging from your window. Apparently.

At Manuela's birthday Simon is suitably adorned.

Chilling out in Bremen for a weekend - very happy that it's sunny.

A windmill in Bremen - the question is why? What is being milled? I never found out.

Please take off your clothes

2007-03-15T05:17:00.000+11:00

I recently had my first experience at a gynocologist here in Germany and can safely say I was terrified. Mostly because of the chair. Let me explain.
I am not averse to going to the doctor. I'm fine with the dentist and I've never had any problems giving blood or getting needles. Like a good breeding machine, I'm sorry, I mean woman of childbearing age, I go and get a pap smear every year or two years or whatever it's supposed to be. And I'm cool with that.
But in Germany they don't just get you to lie down on a bench, no they don't. They have a special gynocological chair. Now it may well be that I'm showing my ignorance here, having only ever been to my GP for the procedure, and perhaps gyno chairs are way old news in surgeries across the nation. For me, they are a new, and rather scary thing. The fact of the matter is, rather than lying back comfortably and staring at the ceiling while the doctor does their thing, I was quite perturbed at the prospect of having to sit up, with my legs strapped in and hanging in the air in a ridiculously undignified fashion and chatting to the doctor between them. I imagined it being like a Monty Python sketch where the woman's legs are encased in fishnets and heels and lots of very unfunny puns are made about carpets and so on.
It didn't help that when I mentioned this small but growing anxiety to a friend, her reply was something like Oh yes they're horrible and do you know they're always in pornos? Well, now I did, and I had another set of reasons not to want to sit in one. Although I must say I've always thought there was something kinky about the way everyone here is harbouring a hyperchondriac just waiting to come out. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but if you say you're not feeling well, you're foot hurts, you've cut yourself or your throat tickles to anyone here they're pretty likely to say that something's going around and you should take a day off. Stiff upper lips are for those Poms with a crappy health system across the water, here you don't need a doctor's certificate unless you take more than three days off. Imagine all the things you could do in a gynocological chair in three days...?
Anyway the point is I was nervous, so nervous I left the ring I was wearing in the bathroom and still haven't gone back to pick it up. When the nurse came to get me I immediately though she was the doctor and took umbridge at her wanting to measure my blood pressure straight away without asking me why I was there. I had visions of waking up and being told that I'd lost one of my ovaries. When she told me that the ultrasound was free this time only I almost jumped down her throat: why do I need an ultrasound? I think she thought I was crazy. I think she was right. However, I still maintain it's a bit weird to offer eveyone an ultrsound just for the hell of it like a complimentary pen.
Once I finally got into the doctor's surgery everything was fine. The chair turned out to be quite cool, it tipped back so it wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I'd imagined and the leg rests were absent of straps. I was so relaxed I even said what the hell and got the unneccesary ultrasound, which led to my seeing my womb for the first time ever. It was so exciting and looked just like all the pictures in books, except cooler, because it was mine.

Diving into work

2007-03-03T21:39:00.000+11:00

Lately I've been enjoying work a little too much – this week I clocked up almost fifty hours in the office, at least a third of which, I have to add, I could have chosen to do at home or put off. Since I have gained more control over things, I've discovered so much satisfaction in seeing things come to fruition, even something as mundane as getting a course organised, or helping out a teacher.
The upshot of this is, however, that my evenings and weekends are increasingly spent in bed watching movies or reading. This is okay in winter, when there's not a single moment in the day when you get direct sunlight. But the last week has been increasingly sunny and as I write this I can see a few straggly beams breaking through the grey clouds. Suddenly, spending all my free time either eating chocolate in bed or doing sport so I can justify eating more chocolate is starting to seem a less viable option.
Despite all this I did find time last weekend to go on my second diving lesson, which Simon also came to. I enjoyed it just as much as the first, in fact, possibly more since I wasn't calmly convinced I was going to drown. My trainer told me I stayed under for half an hour – half an hour! - and I felt very proud of myself. I even practised taking the regulator out of my mouth and putting it back in under water. I found not thinking about the possibilities helped.
The other, slightly less sensational thing, I've done of note lately is formed a book club. We had our second meeting this week, talked about the book for exactly ten minutes and then got on with the business of talking about everythng else but the book. It was great. The one glitch was that I decided to make humous and during my very rushed preparations I managed to cause the motor in the handmixer to burn out. Luckily I turned into a Stepford Wife on the spot and proceeded to make the humous with a fork, which meant slightly more texture but the same taste. I now have unbounded admiration for the generations of women who made do without kitchen appliances.

Aaayyynnnee!

2007-02-11T02:43:00.000+11:00

My favorite Coloradian (a shared title) is back in town which is just super and last weekend we hung out at her place drinking wine and eating pizza while she showed us pictures of her latest sojorn into Tanzania. They were amazing and quite moving too; she went hiking on volcanic mountains jealously guarded by armed Massai warriors who recently killed two tourists; delivered babies in the local hospital (she was there on an intership so this isn't as amazingly generous as it might otherwise sound, although still pretty damn amazing), dealt with dead cows in the laundry room and had countless other life-changing adventures. In fact, I think she wins on the risk-taking side - for now.

Risky business

2007-02-11T02:42:00.000+11:00

Something must be in the air. Since I've got back from holidays I've been taking more and more risks - most unlike me. Good risks too, risks like leaving work on time without finishing the ten gazillion things which I could stay and do and leave two hours later, tired, hungry and near tears. I've joined a gym and started doing aerobics (is there a bigger risk than allowing an aerobics instructor into your life?) with the result that I can do more than two stomach crunches without collapsing in a heap and I come home cheerful and content instead of grumpy, tired and starving. I've started eating far more often than I used to, with the handy result that I no longer get headaches at work and have much more energy for all the sport I seem to be doing.

I have enlisted a new teacher with no experience and he seems to be doing fine. I've been frank with my boss about the need for working tape recorders. I've winged lessons that went extremely well, I've sailed past stuff-ups in class that would have made me hyperventilate six months ago. I've started an English book club with Germans and native-speakers. I've ignored letters from the television fee people threatening me if I don't reply to their questions about if I have a TV and if it's registered.

Yesterday I had to teach a tae kwon do class in German – admittedly there were only three people there and I had done it once before with Simon – but managing to get through an hour and a half of giving instructions in German and thinking of good activities to do left me feeling very pleased with myself. Even if I did make some embarrassing grammatical errors.

And today I got a short lesson on scuba diving from a lovely student who needs to improve his teaching in English skills, and learnt how to breathe underwater and bob up and down and do lots of things I was utterly terrified of before doing them. It was so exciting under the water – we were in a big swimming pool at the uni and there was a polo game going on in the other half of the pool. I was concentrating so hard on my breath that I got a shock looking over at all their legs and bums shaking round in the water, above me. It was still and quiet and magical; I can see why my student turned it from his hobby into his job. I think I'll have to reconsider never going scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef.

So clearly there's something about my holiday that's made me more adventurous. Perhaps it's going home, filling up on all that love and security and then feeling confident enough to take on the world. Whatever it is, it's bloody great.

Proof it happened

2007-01-24T03:25:00.000+11:00

A non-typical pose

Family portrait by the beach.

Fireworks off the Harbour Bridge for New Year.

Two spunky frauen.

Pick the atheist.

What wig?

Smiling Kate.

Welcome back

2007-01-24T03:15:00.000+11:00

This morning as I was riding down a gently sloping hill to a class at the bank, I realised my back brakes weren't working, ditto with my lights (although almost eight am it was pitch black) and my back tyre was verging on flat. When I took it to be fixed the man at the bike shop said the brake cable had frozen. And so I return to winter.
The funny thing is it hasn't actually been that cold, the day I arrived it was about twelve degrees, unprecedented for this timeof year. The florists are still putting their wares on the street, the bulbs are sprouting up everywhere (poor little buggers think it's spring) and I was beginning to think we may have avoided the nose-streaming, finger-numbing, ear-stinging cold. Ha. That said, it has only been the last two days that, in the words of Kielers, winter has “finally” arrived so perhaps it'll be short.
Kiel is as it always was, although I've been here long enough now to have some regular everyday contacts, like the aforementioned bikeshop man who uses the informal you with me and charges me far too little for all the repairs I'm always bringing him, or the lady in the overpriced fruit shop whose homemade soups I often buy who joyfully exclaimed to me today that they recently got cherries from Australia which were the size of her fingertip and cost thirty five Euro (about forty bucks) a kilo. I've even found people have been smiling back at me. Perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough before.

Home on the range

2007-01-08T13:14:00.000+11:00

It's been three weeks of hayfever, Coopers beer, bodysurfing, long drives, fireworks, mangoes, monolingualism and sunburn. Home is somehow always the same- even though I felt like an alien for the first week or so. Everyone was so smiley yet overworked, every gorgeous cafe was staffed by underpaid international students and the glorious franginpani trees and blue skies framed streets whose unbelievable ugliness I had never noticed before; with their rust-coated roofs and long, dusty, overcrowded roads. The best thing about being here has been my new eyes, apart from the fact they are constantly itchy, which have seen my home city in a way I'd never seen it before. The harbour sparkles and the new suburbs sprout, in between the villages of the inner west abound with life, queer parents and alternative living.

On my second day I went to the doctor who I've had since I was five. He typed my details into his spanking new iMac and was shocked to discover I was 28. "Don't wait to have children" he advised, as I quietly nodded, amused but appalled. It's time to run away again...

I've met two beautiful kids since I've been here and have to admit the urge is getting stronger again (it's defintely time to go). Perhaps the best antidote is to offer to babysit little Milan when I get back.

My island home

2006-12-17T21:30:00.000+11:00

Alright I admit it- I got teary when the Sydney skyline came into view. But after a thirty hour plus journey surrounded by young families I think a tear in the eye is more than understandable. It was amazing though, to fly in, the sun over the wing, the sky looking like nothing more than every perfect summer's day from my idealised childhood memories.

I left Kiel and Simon also with a tear in my eye, because the weather was dreadful and it was already getting dark at three pm and I knew I wouldn't have Simon's voice in my ear for another whole month. Perhaps it's just leaving though, leaving and coming back which makes me emotional. Luckily on the plane I was sitting next to English people who are used to pretending emotions don't exist so politely ignored my stifled weeping.

Everything is the same- the pedestrian unfrienldy streets, the slight grottiness of a big city, the cafes, the miles of suburbia stretched out for, well, miles. The incredible friendliness of everyone is so relaxing, from the Qantas staff to the lady in the cafe, everyone is pretty damn chilled out. It's like walking into a parallel universe from the cramped everyday nastiness of Europe.

Although I'm deranged from tiredness I'm going to try and stay awake until at least 10pm so that I don't

Thoughts

2006-12-09T03:26:00.000+11:00

It's Friday evening, finally, and I'm at the end of a long week. This morning in my first session talking to an overworked, highly paid banker who has no private life (but was kind enough to give me xmas biscuits) who is paid at least eight times as much as me I thought: today is going to be a long day. This afternoon while looking at a diagram of a militay machine being presented by a student of mine I thought: I can't believe this is my life. Being here for so long is taking its toll, I feel exhausted from fittting in, from daily banging up against difference, from the bruises and bumps I carry around all the time. It's been such a long time since I've heard my old voice, telling a story to a group of friends in a way I used to know. I think it's time to go home for a while.

I thought as I was walking to my bike this morning how much being here has brought me, living in this narrow world of work and weekend has taught me so much about the way I react in situations I never imagined finding myself in. When I'm snubbed in shops, talked around at work, totally over my head, it's all become mundane. Not easy, but predictable.

2006-11-19T23:04:00.000+11:00

It's that time again, my second autumn in Europe. Kiel is beautiful this time of year, albeit in a all-the-joy-and-beauty-is-rapidly-dying kind of way. It's the time to read lots of books, watch films on the laptop and eat rice pudding with berries. I'm celebrating in my usual way, by catching a head cold and spending three days reading crime novels. Ah autumn.

Last weekend we went to Hamburg and spent a night with a friend of Simon's watching the German version of The Office, called Stromberg. It's fantastic, he's almost as hideous as David Brent but in a teutonic kind of way. I couldn't help noticing that even on television, however, the Germans have more worker's rights.

http://www.stromberg-fanclub.de/

Tonight my cousin rang me to get her lover's cigarillo slogan translated into English. Apparently he has a shop. It ran: The best product in the last two years, with a great design. She wanted better adjectives. The best I could do was outstanding product and magnificant design. She wasn't too impressed.

At the immigration office

2006-10-27T20:19:00.000+10:00

Getting working permission in Germany is a simple process which begins at the Immigration Office. The Kiel immigration office is a fairly typical German administrative building, with a friendly atmosphere and an easy to find location. You simply turn off the main street and go down a small alleyway opposite an Italian restaurant. There you will find a number of driveways with trucks being loaded. Go past these driveways, watching out for cars which lurch out of them at regular intervals, and you will find a driveway with no marking on it. Turn into it and you will see a small door on your right with the words Administrative Offices Schleswig-Holstein on the glass door in white. Go straight in, if it is between 8:30am and 1pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. If it is a Wednesday or any other time you will have to come back later.

On the first floor you will see a building plan that is indecipherable, a small lift and a flight of stairs. Finding the office you need is no problem, simply take the stairs to the second floor and go into the door marked Found Property. This takes you past the lost property office to a waiting area where a group of individuals from other countries are staring at screen showing the numbers of those being served in red, and a pair of double doors. Go to the machine, which has seven buttons with various letters of the alphabet on them. Choose yours and sit down. Letters such as X,Y and Z are located together, which is a slight disadvantage for those of Chinese or Japanese background but the machine was made for Germans by Germans and it is simply not logical to have a special machine for foreigners (my name begins with T, which is a common German letter to start a name, so I often get in before those unfortunate enough to have names that begin with less popular German letters; this always makes the atmosphere in the waiting room especially interesting).

After about half an hour to an hour you will be called into the double doors by a flashing red number. Once you are in the office, you will be greeted by a typical German bureaucrat, with the flexibility and adeptness which they are so famous for. No matter what language you speak to them in, be it English, German, Turkish or anything else, they will always reply to you in German, demonstrating little understanding of what you have said. No matter what you think you are there for they will unfailingly make it clear that you are wrong. After repeated visits to the office and waiting periods of different lengths you will find that, after all, you are there for the right reason and will be given your piece of paper, or your stamp. You may or may not have to pay depending on who serves you. All processes which take place in order for you to get your stamp are out of the control of the person you are talking to. All necessary papers to get your work permission or whatever else you may be requesting, are available at a different office in another building with different opening times.

The best way to greet a worker in this office is therefore to say nothing and hand over your papers. Answer any questions they ask you with as little information as possible. The more information they have, the longer the possible waiting time for it to be processed. Don't smile in your passport photo. Above all, don't tell them how to do their job. You may think you know why it is you are there and what you need, you don't. Their job is some other quite different thing of which you have no idea.

Once your request has been delivered to the relevant authorities by mail, which can take up to ten days, they will process it. If they don't process it you will discover this because nothing will happen. It may be that nothing is happening productively, that is, they are processing it, or it may be that they are not. Once you have visited the Immigration Office three or four times to check, each time pulling your name from the German machine and waiting in the friendly waiting room and waiting for a different bureaucrat to look at your file and ask you why you are there if your application is being processed by the relevant authority which they have nothing to do with, it will become clear if it is being processed or not. If not, a quick phone call from the Immigration Office will remind them. Then it may take up to weeks for your application to be considered. The main question is, naturally, are you taking the job of a German?

Then it becomes the task of the Employment Office to look at your case. They send a number of emails to your employer asking, for example, why a German cannot be an English teacher as is the case in their school system. The issue of your qualifications may be raised and you may have to provide them to the Employment Office. Surprisingly, they are not required to be translated, possibly because no-one realizes they are in English because no-one looks at them, they are simply filed into a drawer. So there is no need to pay for a translation. Then you may have to provide a job description so that the job can be advertised to the local community at the Employment Office. The question of particular qualifications which may only be available to foreigners may be raised. In my case the term 'native speaker' proved a sticking point but after a mere week of emailing and telephoning and a meeting with the case worker and my boss the issue was resolved nicely, with both sides agreeing that although there may be such a thing as a 'native speaker', we were certainly not going to stop that getting in the way of the bureaucratic process of advertising the job to the German population.

Once you have then waited a few weeks to see if any German native speakers of English (for example) would turn up and take your job you then receive no word from anyone for a further three weeks. Then, a wonderful letter turns up from the Immigration Office telling you to bring A) this letter and B) your passport to the Office between 8:30am and 1pm Monday to Friday (but not Wednesday) to pick up your stamp. Then it is simply a matter of going into the Office one or two times in order to find a worker who will bother to look into your file rather than just photocopying your passport and telling you to come back another time and you have your stamp. It's as easy as that. In twelve months, you simply need to renew it.

Hanseatic Lübeck

2006-10-14T18:48:00.000+10:00

An hour and a half from Kiel on the train; a city with medieval buildings, little narrow alleyways, nineteenth century facades and nightlife. It's moments like these that I realise just how crowded Europe is. Lübeck is lovely, charming and interesting, with a sense of the past and the future which Kiel lacks.

Yesterday Mum and I went to the Thomas Mann house and saw an exhibition about his children, all six of them. It was really the first time I've read about Germans who renounced theircitizenshipp and actively helped the Americans and British in WWW2. Erika Mann was a warcorrespondentt and one of her brothers served in the army. She wrote and article about how the reason there were no anti-Nazi spies in Germany was because their were none- anti-Nazis that is. Her articles all had beginnings like: It takes a German to understand the Germans: Returning from six months at the front the daughter of ex-German writer Thomas Mann explains the German soldier. You have to put the forties voiceover on it to get the full effect. Knowing what was happening at the time made reading her chipper, we're in it for the boys type articles even more creepy.

On a lighter note, one of the other daughters, Elizabeth Mann, who lived the longest, had a dogtypewriterr and samples of the script her dog had written. It was mostly nonsense with the occasional bad cat and good dog slipped in. The audio guide also had a recording of her singing and her dog playing on his dog piano. There's a play in that somewhere.

It's a baaaaaabbbbby!

2006-10-12T18:45:00.000+10:00

Baby with his oma and his first koala, exported by my Mum

So Mum's here, and we're staying with my uncle and aunt, who are new grandparents. We went over to my cousin's place last night to pay a visit to the new parents and I asked my aunt how she felt being a nana. She shrugged and mumbled something about not seeing them very often (the baby is eight weeks old). I turned to my uncle who agreed, and said something about them living far away (they live about a forty minute drive away, in the same city). So I thought, ok, the only one who is going to go gaga for my gorgeous cousin is my Mum, who hasn't met him before. Ha.

So we get there and my cousins's wife greets us at the door with the baby and suddenly my aunt is grabbing for him and talking to him in nonsense German (note that she is Czech, I didn't even know she knew baby speak in German) and my uncle has a camera in his hand which I didn't even notice him bringing and is snapping away at a hundred miles a minute and my cousin is organising lighting and a backdrop and then my other cousin, who is pregnant, is holding the baby and being photographed and my mother and I are sitting in a corner and looking at our previously sane relations, and suddenly I feel that my mum is a very balanced and calm woman. Which is not something which often occurs to me.

Birdy days

2006-10-03T22:19:00.000+10:00

Birthday drinks Hanna and Simon style: Manuela rang to ask when she should come and I said, whenever. Slightly perplexing for German sensibility.

The day before my birthday I got two packages in the post, and a few days before that I got two more. A mountain of presents for me, me, me! (to quote that Jones woman) Among them a DVD of much merriment, a gorgeous wallet, not one but two cds, three books, a digital camera, much wine and a lovely, lovely night. Oh and some tasty olive oil. Did I mention the digital camera?! Amazing. Manuela gave me some excellent Norwegian gloves for riding my bike in winter, Maren gave me an enormous bag of Chai. I'm not sure I deserved quite so many things.

Today is the day of German unity (sorry, I mean ze DAY OF GERMAN UNITY) and Kiel is the chosen city. The Chancellor is here and all sorts of important digntaries, so let's hope that the train bomber they arrested last month doesn't have any keen friends. Last night we went and checked out the scene, it's pretty much the usual thing sausages, expensive beer, loud music and oompah bands. It was pretty though, the lights on the water and the flags from the ships fluttering in the wind. If only I'd remembered my new camera.

Sporty spice

2006-09-28T00:55:00.001+10:00

After a series of not very hilarious mishaps, including back problems and an improbable summer cold, I've started doing tkd again at another school. It's a family school, run by a bloke and his brother in law, and most of the students seem to be related which at least solves the problem I had at the other school of the trainer shagging the students. I hope.

The best part about it is that it's full of kids, German kids obviously, who seem to be somewhat different to the ones I'm used to. Firstly they aren't afraid of being cheeky to adults, one kid told me I had a big bum without us even being introduced. Another looked at me in shock when I turned up with my black belt and asked incredulously: how long have you had that? Conversely they seem to love orders and are actually pretty good at hitting the targets, unlike me. They also don't seem to understand that although my German is good, it's not good enough to understand a ten year old with a sqeaky voice making what they consider to be small talk. I just nod and smile and hope they're not saying anything about my bottom.

The other thing about it is that after not having done any sport regularly for about six months, I'm utterly exhausted after two weeks of training three times a week. Today I could barely keep my eyes open while my students were talking about a data quality managment and non-reurning loans. Although actually reading that sentence again I'm a little worried that this is not the normal state of affairs.

Handy German expressions

2006-09-21T02:22:00.001+10:00

A list of things that you can say with one verb in German:

fill your car with petrol tanken
get to know someone kennenlernen
take the piss verarschen
change a nappy windeln
crack onto someone anmachen
drink to get drunk saufen
go out/ have a party feiern
get dressed anziehen
bitch and moan zicken (literally: act like a female goat)
go in the wrong direction verfahren

Danish delights

2006-09-06T23:31:00.000+10:00

The exit of Christiniania, where EU and Danish laws don't apply, a wonderful place full of American tourists, happy hippies, big dogs and the occasional police raid.

Two happy tourists on a boat trip.

A church and fountain near Mary's- I mean the Danish royal family's- palace.

Our groovy Copenhagen apartment.

The church from the other side, it backed onto a moat around the world's oldest still used military fortress.

A photo exhibition around town: Images of the Middle East.

Hanging out after a stint of frisbee in the park.

Hopefullness

2006-09-02T19:15:00.000+10:00

Our last day in Copenhagen; heading back to a new house and job (officially) in Kiel. Just read this piece in the SMH; I loved it. I agree utterly about hope and the role of government being there to provide it, at least foster it. I look around the streets of Copenhagen; hope is what you see on the faces of the smiling, happy, healthy people. The belief that it will get better, not worse. A group of older Asian people drinking in the square, looking happy and hopeful rather than the bitterness I see on the faces of many Germans (but that's changing too- what was the joy in the World Cup if not hope?).

Yesterday we saw two men fighting drunkenly on the street, one calls the other a Muslim cock-sucker, tries to beat him with his belt. The other lifts his crutch to fight back. People stopped to watch. I wondered why, what's the point? But it's better to watch than not, just watching shows you expect something to change, to at least witness the worst rather than run away in fear of it. It's hope again, that in watching you will help, somehow. The fight broke up pretty quickly after that.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-grave-new-world/2006/09/01/1156817102748.html

C for coincidence?

2006-09-01T20:02:00.000+10:00

It just occurred to me that one interesting thing has happened to me since I've been wallowing in Copenhagen's delights. Perhaps it's just because I watched V for Vendetta and am in the throes of, admittedly pretty justified, paranoia but I don't think so.

The day before yesterday I went into a random bookshop, desperately attempting to do something with my mind, or at least try to convince myself to. After about ten seconds we both got bored and my mind, clearly trying to assert itself through the fog of decadence, grabbed a book from a display and so I bought it. The book, which was shortlisted for The Orange Prize, is called A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka. I loved it, it's funny and sad and well-written, and quite exciting in a family drama kind of way. All that aside, because this is a book about family secrets they mention the war. And a labour camp in Germany, where Ukranians were sent.

The camp was called Drachensee. In Kiel.

I couldn't quite believe it when I came across the name. Mum told me there was one there, and I meant to follow it up and I didn't. It made me think: why didn't I follow it up? Why haven't any Kielers (people from Kiel) mentioned this to me? And even more importantly, if I am living in Germany, I need to confront this. I need to understand more than just the beautiful side of Schleswig-Holstein. Because if I don't it's a betrayal of myself.

So we'll see where that takes me.

Danish dreams

2006-09-01T18:41:00.000+10:00

Take one designer flat. Add two Aussies, a laptop and a fridge. What do you get? Sloth.

We've been in Copenhagen for one week and seen a total of zero museums, been to no famous landmarks (apart from sailing past them on a canal tour) and even fewer famous restaurants. In short we've been utterly lazy and spent a lot of time sleeping, eating and playing frisbee. This could be a sign of Europe fatige.

Copenhagen, on the little that I've managed to pick up, seems to be the coolest city I've been to so far, although this is pure speculation. I think if I could speak Danish I'd get more out of it. That being said, everyone, from the guy at the bakery to the random helpful at the train station, seems to speak perfect English. If everyone in Germany was this billingual I'd be out of a job in no time- and it's no wonder the Germans are embarrassed. The Danes are damn good.

The city is easy to get around, a bikers paradise, full of trendy little shops and cafes (and *sigh* museums) and happy, smiling, good-looking people. There seems to be a lot of multiculturalism, I've seen girls in veils on bikes, which I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anywhere else.

The other aspect which I find quite charming is the fairy tale heritage; they really seem to take it seriously and a lot of buildings, public art and space seems to be influenced by fairy tales. Yesterday we stumbled on a gorgeous park in the middle of the city, long avenues and fountains and sculptures everywhere. The old stock market has a tower of four dragons with their tails intertwined.

And of course the one place we did manage to visit is Christiania, the squat community tunred tourist attraction full of peace, love and mungbeans and a lot of lovely hippie housing on the side of a canal in the middle of the city. The kind of place every big city needs.

Today is our last day and I'm pretty sure we have a full plan of riding our bikes, playing frisbee and maybe, just maybe, seeing the last sights of lovely Copenhagen.

Working my way... somewhere

2006-08-09T00:25:00.000+10:00

I have my own office. I have my own office. I feel slightly ashamed of the fact that the thing that is the most exciting for me about this new job is a white and grey room of about sixteen square metres. I guess it's the thrill of feeling like I have power over something, after years of being at the bottom of whatever ladder I happened to be on, even if it is just which pictures I have on the wall.

Today I bought two plants (my power is ever-increasing- who knows what I will do next... first pictures, now plants, next the world!) and they are making this space seem a tiny little bit less corporate. I look at them and feel the rising panic dim.

It turns out that having responsibilty is slighty queasy-making, even if your boss is very relaxed and there's really no-one to check up on you. At any time there are five or six things I should be doing running through my head and it's going to take a while before that feels like normal background noise.

A normal day for me seems to be: I come into the office, say hello to the walls, sit down and check my email. Halfway through doing that I realise I need to check something from one of my classes, get up to find it, notice a job I didn't finish from yesterday sticking out of the large piles of paper on my desk, pick it up, go to the photocopier to copy something, get back at my desk, check to find an email I should answer, get up to answer the bell, speak to a confused German about something I have no idea about, tell them I'll do something about it, sit down again and realise I don't know where the document I just picked up is, get up to look for it, find it, look at my watch to realise I have a class in an hour and should prepare, get a phone call about a translation and have no idea where my boss is or when he'll be back, sit down to my desk, get a call from my boss who is in the office next door (since when?), discuss something fruitlessly with him for half an hour, scrape something together for my class and then arrive with thirty seconds to spare realising I've forgotten my folder and my presentation cards and have to make up a lesson on the spot.

But as you can tell, I'm coping with the chaos quite well. It'll only be a matter of time before I manage to get at least one thing done each day.

Kiel is somewhere

2006-07-29T23:06:00.000+10:00

Well my first month of being an acting Director of Studies is almost over and it hasn't gone too badly. This is mainly because I've only been teaching about ten hours a week, which makes it a lot easier to do other things like hire new people, reorganise the library and throw away about four years of accumulated paperwork and dead plants. The two people I interviewed on the phone appear not be axe-murders, drug addicts or maniacs of any other kind. This is hopeful.

It could all go pear-shaped very quickly, however, because the secretary has gone on holidays and I have always suspected she ran the school. Unfortunately she is not being replaced so our customers will have to deal with my boss, who's often teaching, or me, who knows nothing. This is in the fine tradition of temporary staff, who inevitably can't help you with what you need, don't know what you're talking about and will have to refer you to X, who is on holiday.

This weekend I'm in Berlin- as usual I love it, love it, love it- and on the train on the way here I gave myself a treat and bought an English paper. I was enjoying understanding more than headlines and keywords when I came across an article that stopped me in my tracks. It was about a German/Turkish writer who has done very well and was doing a book reading in Berlin. Not so thrilling? But wait. I start reading the article about what it was like for him, being the son of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and how in his home town of Kiel... what?! I almost fell off my plush inter-city train seat. The man is from Kiel? And is now famous? And rich? Hurrah! I left the train with the sense of arriving in one literary capital after leaving another. I knew there was more to Kiel than the suit-wearing, seasonal-vegetable eating, non-jay-walking crowd I know and love.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/27/news/author.php

I'll have some torshy thanks

2006-07-18T00:45:00.000+10:00

Apparently torshy is another word for pickles in Arabic. Who knew. And how did we survive wihout Wikipedia?

The end of a rather small era

2006-07-18T00:13:00.002+10:00

Can you tell we're in northern Europe...?

Too cool for school (not me)

Last week I officially finished my short teaching job at the vocational school and it was very sad. Things I'll miss: students who are younger than me and who I could make blush, the very polite secretaries, calling myself Frau T*rsh, shaking hands with everyone in the mornings, working at a big school and being able to play games in class. Things I won't miss: being eyed by every male student as I walked down the corridors, having to trek upstairs to get the damn dictionaries and then to put them back again, having to remember all my colleagues by both names, watching my favorite students get paid out by their mates for stuffing up their English and being called Frau T*rsh by everyone else.

Summertime I get around

2006-07-06T19:57:00.000+10:00

Summer in Kiel.

It is thirty degrees- that's why Germany lost the match, according to one commentator. It was the same excuse the lady at the bank gave me as to why the printer wasn't working- too hot. The queues at the ice-cream shop are enormous and rising by the day, it opens at eleven and as I rode past this morning there were forty people standing outside it at twenty to. And three groups of teenagers making their way towards it, I heard one yell to the other group, the ice-cream shop is closed! Groans from everyone.

I am the only person in Kiel wearing a hat, apart from Arianne, another Aussie friend of Simon's, and a punk wearing a cap, probably for the freak value. Road workers turn and stare, children point. I ride on, knowing I won't get skin cancer.

The gummy bears Arianne bought are melting, the posters are falling off the walls at work, the chocolate in the stores is mush. Not many companies are air-conditioned, this morning I went to the bank I teach at and the student's office was heating only, no cooling. The only shops which have cold drinks are some major supermarkets and the petrol stations.

Today I have bought a singlet in Germany for the first time ever, and a natty pair of knickerbockers. It is hot.

Berlin! Berlin!

2006-07-01T08:10:00.000+10:00

Oh thank god, the Germans won. The national mood has never been this good, and I don't have to listen to all my students complaining all week. Hurray!

A thousand words

2006-06-29T02:53:00.000+10:00

Paul and Alex in Hamburg watching a game.

Schanzenviertel, Hamburg, World Cup fever

Some crazy fans after the Australian: Japan game.

Paul and I being tourists in front of the Town Hall in Hamburg.

Paul stuck in a revolving door.

The coolest siblings in the world.

The helpful notice at the railway stations in Hamburg and Kiel... and the reason I have a job.

The Kiel Week poisoning

2006-06-28T03:14:00.000+10:00

I can't wait until the Kiel Week has been the refrain from every single person I have met in Kiel so far, oh you'll love the Kiel Week they said, irritatingly adding an uneccesary definite article wantonly, even the English speakers (I have even caught myself doing it), it's great, it's international, it's the only time of the year when the city is really full of life and there's lots happening.

Ha. So on Friday night I go to the International Market at the Town Hall Square, which boasted many admittedly quite cool stands from countries like Finnland, the Czech Republic, Mexico and so on, but which also has an Australian stand which sold Fosters, barbeques prawns on a stick, strawberries and cream and some little sandwiches which looked decidedly Danish to me. Oh, and Akubras and Blunstone boots, as well as many hilarious road signs like beware crocodile, world's best nan and so on. And I bought a crepe, my second of the week actually, and I'm pretty sure it made me sick. My feeling has been confirmed by all the people who have said, oh yeah that often happens, by the way we forgot to tell you don't eat anything at the Kiel Week. Especially near the end. Ha.

The upshot of all this whinging is that I got to watch Australia lose, lying on my coayh feeling like I was going to vomit. Strangely though, I feel kind of relieved (not about wanting to vomit). Being ardently nationalistic felt a little like watching myself through glass, it just didn't feel right. Especially when the last game I watched was with a bunch of other Aussie screaming abuse at the screen everytime anything didn't go their way. It was a bit of an eye-opener. Sure, I'm more sypathetic to sports fans now, but I'm still pretty sure I don't want to be one. Not more than once every four years anyway.

It's actually a week of goodbyes this week. Patricia left yesterday for a new job in Munich and Mat's leaving on Thursday. It's terribly sad. I can't quite believe I've been here with him for just under a year. I look back on my first weeks here and it seems like a million years away.

Mat and I went on a last bike ride and found this cool pond in the middle of a big park not twenty minutes from here. There were hundreds of people jogging (alright, maybe twenty), people riding horses and the sound of aircraft overhead but it was still nice and peaceful. I just hope I can keep my adventuring spirit alive when he's gone.

What a lovely way to burn

2006-06-20T00:58:00.000+10:00

I got yelled at for crossing on the red today. A nasty old man called me the equivalent of a bloody idiot as I was rushing across the road to grab Paul from a bus as he got off at the main train station. He was about to leave after hanging out with me for a week, I hadn't slept well, it was hot and sticky, Australia lost against Brazil, it was a highly emotional moment and I was not in the mood in the slightest. I told the grumpy old bastard I didn't understand and I was sorry (why do I persist in this annoying anglo habit. I'm not bloody sorry and I'd do it again) and he cut me off and called me nasty names. So I snapped thank you in German in an extremely pissed off voice and he was so surpised he shut up. Honestly. Although it's kind of lame that even when I'm being rude it's just saying a nice word in a nasty way.

Awwww it was nice to have my little brother here for a week. Despite the unseasonal heatwave, the lack of privacy and the craziness of the World Cup and Kiel Week and the resulting sleeplessness, it was lovely. I only wish we could have done more together. Next time.

I have finally made a decision and agreed to the job at my dodgy company and thrown caution to the winds. Who needs it. Especially when I can always bludge off Simon who looks like he has a lot of work up his sleeve, while I won't have much for another two months. Which is great, because it's finally really summer here and all I feel like doing is lying around, possibly trying to do some exercise and enjoying a little time for me. Maybe I'll think about doing some cheap travelling. All I want now is to sleep for a week but unfortunately I still have some work to do this week, along with a few very important games to watch, and of course some time consuming large amounts of beer, bread and (sigh) cheese.

Summer breeze

2006-06-13T17:56:00.000+10:00

Did I mention that it's finally summer in north Germany? Yesterday was the first day you could go swimming in the pool in Hamburg, and Kiel too, and last week I didn't see the darkness for seven days straight- it's just light all the time. The twillight goes for about an hour and begins at ten. Everyone says it could last a week, it could last for only days, so I should enjoy it. But the weirdest thing is how much it reminds me of home, without all the insects, and how much Germany doesn't seem that different when you don't have to put on ten layers of clothing and you can walk around in thongs. The biggest difference is how mad everyone goes when the sun comes out, which I now completely understand, and how everyone wants to be brown so wears their bikins at the park. Oh, and how when you say, but skin cancer...? everyone looks at you as though you are out of your mind. Which is fair enough.

Fever

2006-06-13T17:44:00.000+10:00

I have to say it- I'm enjoying the soccer. I went overseas to try to escape the sport-mad, ignore everything else vibe that we've got going and I end up screaming and pumping my fist in the air when Australia comes back from the dead with three goals in the last eight minutes. Call it the German disease, call it homesickness, I can't resist. It's just too damn exciting.

The game yesterday was just fantastic- I'd just met up with Paul and Alex and was pretty wound-up about seeing them and then the game looked like it was going to be all over for Australia. Actually, up until then I hadn't really cared much either way, and was sure the Aussies were going to lose, but then my students made a few smart remarks about losers and for some reason I got a little defensive... I didn't say anything of course but I have to admit that when Australia won a little voice in my head said: hah!

We were sitting in a tent in a big park in Hamburg with about eight die-hard German men sitting behind us, who were thrilled whenever anything was happening, and who I think were more annoyed with us than anything else when we spent most of the game chatting. Martin, my cousin, was biting his knuckles in frustration (in a show of family loyalty he was supporting Australia) and when the first goal got through he was devestated. It all looked pretty bleak.

But then, just as the coverage was starting to show footage of the Australian crowd looking utterly unimpressed, it all began to happen, and I found myself swept up in this incredible rush of joy and, weirdly enough, pride. Now I understand why people watch sport, it really is a substitute for an emotional life. When the siren went we were all overcome. It was beautiful.

Then the Czech Republic beat the US and my perfect soccer day with my brother was complete.

Piccies for Mum

2006-06-10T21:41:00.000+10:00

A recent weekend to Berlin, a visit to the new Jewish Memorial, me drinking a Berliner Weisser and a cool building Matt liked enough to photograph.

And me steering a sailing ship of a colleague from the technical school. I was so seasick afterwards.

A spring wedding

2006-05-20T23:11:00.000+10:00

Torshy, 27, witness.

The glamorous couple

My lovely cousin once removed, Tomas, father of the groom.

In the rain, unfortunately, but that wasn't going to stop me getting excited about being a witness and putting up my hair. We got on the train at eight in the morning and caught the train back at ten thirty at night- I had forgotten how weddings are so exhausting- and spent most of the day ducking between shelter and the rain, the parents of the couple met for the first time and the registery office was strangely formal and preoccupied with paper but despite all that the couple themselves spent the day beaming, entertaining their guests with incredible graciousness and generally making us all reach for the bucket.

One odd thing for me was that there were no speeches or anything about the people themselves and the parents weren't very involved, but since I'm not intending to get married at all I have to say they were more involved than mine ever will be. At least they got a wedding out of it all. Also the vibe was a bit stiff, I introduced myself to Friederike's brother and he looked at me like I was mad. Nice kids though.

There were kids everywhere (Simon was disappointed that they were quite well-behaved and not wiling to play with him and destroy the house) and not much drunkenness to be seen. Understandable from Friederike's point of view since she's up the duff, but on the whole kind of odd. Not sure if it was the sobriety or the well-behaved children which freaked me out- could there be some kind of link there?

Family family. What an odd thing it all is. My hair looked nice though, which is something.

It's a mad world

2006-05-16T17:01:00.000+10:00

Random crazy new life moment- doing ski gymnastics at the Uni yesterday to the I-want-to-kill-myself track, It's a mad world, from the film Donnie Darko. Me and fifty Germans rotating our pelvises to lines like "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had".

On the weekend we had our sharehouse party and it was surprisingly fun. I managed to stay up all night which was good, given that we had two DJs pumping incredibly loud music from two rooms away and sleep was pretty much out of the question. The whole flat filled up by about half-past twelve- they like to do things later here- and Andy was trying to kick out the last guests at six in the morning, when the police arrived. Apparently they were quite pleasant and offered to help. The girls from my old flat came and it was lovely to see them and feel like I had friends. Matt's flatmate Judith also came, who is lovely too, so all in all we weren't the sad flatmates without guests we thought we'd be. Some of Simon's new workmates came too, one of whom was hilariously uptight. She told me, while her German boyfriend was sitting next to her, that the continental Europeans simply couldn't be sensitive and were starting, slowly, to learn how to respect other cultures. Uh huh.

Yesterday I met our new English colleague for the first time- totally intense guy with a life drama situtation to rival the best of them. While chugging as much wine into himself as he could, he told me all about his awful marriage break up and his various successes and failures- including an MBA at a prestigious university and being bankrupt. He's only here for his son, which is sad and also kind of beautiful. Talking to him was so intense I almost had to go and have a cry afterwards, it was all so ghastly. Can't wait for September, when I get to manage him.

This Friday is Martin's wedding and the weaher is looking a bit dubious- grey and kind of wet. Hopefully some miracle will occur and the sun will burst out and bless the day. Now I kind of wish I had an alternative cold weather outfit, damn it.

Life is like, sooo hard.

Being a teacher is fun

2006-05-12T19:52:00.001+10:00

A lovely morning class at the technical school- although I haven't left yet so there's still a good chance I'll be verbally sexually harrassed on the way out. Actually that's only hapened once but given that it's spring, ninety percent of the students here are males between the ages of sixteen and thirty and I'm now wearing short sleeves, the staring and not so whispered comments have started to become a pretty frequent occurance. And also the whole building smells like BO.

I really like teaching the students here sometimes- it's fantastic to work with young people who think everything you tell them is cool and interesting, even if it's just 'in Australia it's really hot in December' and they just soak up the language in a way adults just can't, really. Also they've got that young persons's enthusiasm for activites, which is to say that sometimes they look at you like you're the most boring thing they're even seen and sometimes they have so much fun they forget they're learning at all.

Today I had the brainwave to mix up the groups so they were not sitting with their usual friends and asked them to tell the group how to do something, even something simple. Just the right thing to say to a German... I also told them that anyone speaking German in the ten minutes would have to buy me an ice-cream- in Spring they become the national currency- and amazingly, it worked. Even those who are reluctant to speak spoke, and some who are slow speakers but enthusiastic had the chance to speak with no-one interrupting them.

One group were laughing so hard, presumably at one member's attempts to get around my 'keep it above the belt rule'- totally ineffective I might add- that I almost didn't recognise them from the surly students I had last week. Another student called me Miss T*rsh, at which I told him off, and then he asked me heaps of questions, calling me Hanna. I think it's just so exotic to them to be able to call teachers by their first name- crazy kids.

One of my pre-reading activites was to write down four words connected with a country. Two samples of words for America:

Area 51, white house, war, Bush

highways, big country, Statue of Liberty, freedom

I have proof

2006-05-09T01:40:00.000+10:00

A lovely weekend talking to people at home and lying in the sun on our roof. I even have photos to prove that it was sunny.

Simon and I went to the market and Saturday and spent a small fortune on fresh fruit and vegetables that were actually tasty as opposed to the even more overpriced crap you get in the supermarkets here. We made asparagus with butter, roasted beetroot salad and pan-friend mushroom in bear-garlic- very popular here. Washed down with a lot of white wine. It was fantastic.

Budapest, Prague and Dresden pics

2006-05-03T20:22:00.000+10:00

So glad to be on holiday- our first evening in Budapest.

The gorgeous old Synagogue in Pest.

Inside the Synagogue.

The flooding Danube.

In Prague with my lovely Czech student from Sydney who took us out for a night on the town.

Matt after eating a pig's knee in Prague.

Drinking the world's best beer in Prague.

Exhausted but cool in Dresden.

Sunny days

2006-05-03T20:07:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I was invited to a colleague's house from the technical college in Gaarden (not a misspelling) and I was so knackered from the weekend I almost didn't go. But since it's almost a criminal offence to waste a long weekend I decided to drag myself off the bed and trek out to a village an hour away from Kiel.

The day started off like a typical Sydney day- at least as far as I can remember- sunny, a light wind and about twenty degrees. It was so lovely to sit on the train with the shafts of sunlight across my face, watching the green fields rolling off into the distance and the cows grazing. I don't think I've ever noticed that there were any cows up here.

Anyway then I got onto a bus which meandered its way through Neumünster and off to the little village where Monica lives. It had bus stop names like 'church' and 'school', as well as rolling past a traditional Mayday beer and sausage gathering (we call that a barbeque right?) sponsored by the CDU- the Christian Democrats in the town square.

When I got to their cosy house, a two storey semi-detached with a garden and a big living area, a nice change from pokey little apartments, I was immediately presented with a glass of champagne and given the tour. It has been so long since I've been in a house filled with books and art that it was like returning home. I was given a wonderful lunch, plied with wine and told all about the wildlife around here, which apparently includes wild boars and deer, both of which are on the increase. It was a whole other Germany and I really liked it. Especially the intelligent conversation with two very clever and interested people- such a relief not to have to be cool.

I arived home very chilled, quite drunk and in a great mood to face the week, which has so far been great, accompanied by sun sun sun and my new clothes which always cheers me up. Although some shoes for the wedding would be great...

There are swans in the lake in the centre of the city, called the Little Kiel, and dafodills on every street corner. People are wearing t-shirts and looking relaxed, there are cherry trees in blossom and I can't quite believe it is the same town.

Weekend in Hamburg

2006-05-01T03:11:00.000+10:00

The sun is shining, we just got back from a weekend in Hamburg hanging out with my lovely cousins in their glamorous apartments and I am exhausted- too much fun and travelling in a group always makes me exhausted. As usual, being in Hamburg makes me question why I'm in Kiel- and why I've now agreed to stay another year or so.

Hamburg is so chic- I might as well be in Sydney really- and Kiel really is a small town with all that goes with it. I guess that's someting I find kind of interesting, how different it is from my previous experience. Although if I were living in a bigger city maybe people who come to Europe might visit me...

It's overwhelming today- the choices that life offer- and I wonder if I will spend every weekend of my life feeling like this. A little lost, a little aimless and disoriented. It's the Sunday blues every time- that feeling of stretched out tension that goes with work and life. I don't like it much but I seem to constantly put myself in a position where I feel it. Perhaps because the positive side is that feeling of satisfaction that comes with work, of being spent and tired but knowing that you did your best, you put your all into something.

Weekend self-help. That should be a new section in the bookshops.

Brief moments of joy

2006-04-26T20:11:00.000+10:00

Well it happened- the sun came out in Kiel. Right now, of course, it is raining but yesterday it was almost twenty degrees. And I´m ashamed to say I was really too hot. It was lovely, the whole city came alive, cafes sprouted up from places I'd never noticed before and people were drinking beer outside, rowing on the fjord, jogging, fishing, you name it.

On the bus today a German lady tapped me politely on the shoulder and said something to me I couldn't hear because my headphones were on. I said "Sorry?" "Is that your scarf?" she said, using the polite form of you. I looked down and there was my Italian nonna umbrella I bought at the Vatican with its lovely blueflowers on a pink background sitting beneath my foot. I was so amazed at the act of courtesy I just said "That is my umbrella. Thank you." I guess I should have expected my umbrella to be too out there for Kiel.

I went for a jog on the weekend (lasted about ten horrible minutes) and had a lovely moment when I ran past a very fat grey goose waddling past me. There is something I have never experienced before. Every day here I see a new kind of bird, hopefully minus bird flu.

Whinge

2006-04-20T21:31:00.000+10:00

This is why I really hate being here sometimes:

I have had to pay, to date, including keys for Simon, over one hundred dollars for keys to houses which I am only living in temporarily. Not only did I have to pay, but I had to wait two weeks to pick one of them up and get a special permission slip from the housemaster (!) for the other one.

To renew my library membership I need to show my passport plus proof of address. To renew it.

I can´t make small talk in German, I just can´t. And that is because they don´t make it up here, in the north. I am so sick of going into shops and saying something like, nice weather we´re having and getting stared at like I´m a freak.

I forget, pretty much every single bloody time, to weigh my fruit and vegtables before I take them to the counter. Which means I can´t buy them without lining up all over again. Yesterday I went to the shops specifically to buy an apple, lined up for twenty minutes then realised I had forgotten to weigh it.

I can never remember the names for my bike parts, so every time I go into a bike shop I just have to point.

Everything is closed on Sunday, and most shops close at midday on Saturday. Nothing is open past eight o´clock ever. I am in the sticks, I know, but this is a town of two hundred and fifty thousand people!

No-one ever smiles at you in the street. Except for babies, who haven´t learnt not to yet. And the occasional dog.

Decisions decisions

2006-04-19T03:43:00.000+10:00

It´s just not my forte, making decisions. I have been umming and ahhing for almost two months about whether or not to use my ticket to go home. I´ve finally decided (almost... no I really have... but I can take it back!) not to take it and to stay in Europe for the summer. Not only is it a terrible thing to waste the untransferable, unextendable ticket but I was really, really looking forward to seeing everyone. But it doesn´t make sense, I can travel then and I´ve got an assurance out of my bossess that it´ll be possible to take three weeks off in December to come home. So I think I´ll do that instead and enjoy it even more. Argh.

Being in Kiel is just the same, kind of stifling and boring but also good if I´m in the right zone to deal with it all. My flatmates just had a house meeting about various issues, including a house party and the argument arose about whether or not a drum and base DJ was necessary to create the right party atmosphere on the dance floor. Dance floor. I felt like I was observing an alien mating ritual on the planet Zargon. Then it was suggested that we should buy about ten to twenty cases of beer, and put all the furniture upstairs in another apartment. It boggles the mind.

But just proving that all student cultures are the same, there was the inevitable argument about whether or not to have an invitation. Some things never change.

Holyday over

2006-04-16T20:43:00.000+10:00

It´s Easter Sunday and we´re recovering from a hangover, as is traditional on the last day of a holiday. Last night Simon turned into Mr Party, as he is sometimes wont to do, and charmed a group of Germans from Erfurt who are down here enjoying the Dresden vibe. We drank some absinthe together and went to a happening Dresden club called Flower Power. It was really interesting talking to some of the group, they seem very aware of the "wall in the head" phenomenon- they brought up the topic of the differences between West and East Germany as though the wall were still there. And I have to say, given one evening with a bunch of "Ossis" all my prejudices about Germans seem to be based on the North-west of the country. These people were open, friendly, almost naively so. Actually they reminded me a bit of Australians, except obviously they know where Poland is. It was quite amazing, and made me think I should spend some time in other parts of Germany so I don´t have a completely skewed and bitter outlook. As I am beginning to have.

Crossing the border

2006-04-15T20:02:00.000+10:00

I´m ba- ack. In Germany. It feels weird to be back, my tongue isn´t quite making it round the words and people don´t smile at me any more (except for the Aussie and Amis- I can pick ém cause they look slighty baffled that no-one smiles back) but it´s very cool to finally be in Dresden, even if it´s only for two nights. The German here is slightly softer and less abrupt, we´re on the other end of the Elbe from Hamburg and it kind of feels like another country, even though we´re less far away than Sydney from Brisbane. We´re staying in a very cool youth hostel with a groovy bar, surrounded by even groovier bars and designer clothes shops... very dangerous. It kind of reminds me of Melbourne which I was foolish enough to voice and got ridiculed for by Matt and Simon. I then said that the part by the river reminded me of Brisbane... Maybe I´m more homesick than I thought?

It was great being in Prague this time, after I got over feeling stressed out. I got to see places I´ve never seen before thanks ot being there with Matt, who studied there for a couple of months. It made me want to go back which is nice because the last few times it´s been deep winter and I haven´t done anything except sleep and eat.

Only one more sleep and it´s back to work... but somehow it seems more managable now.

Prague blues

2006-04-11T01:23:00.000+10:00

So I'm in Prague and it's RAINING. Damn it all. You'd think that bad weather for six months would toughen you up but in my case it's just increased my weather sensitivity to the point where it makes up fifty percent of my conversation and I don't decide what I'm going to do until I look out the window first thing in the morning.

The plus side is that yesterday was lovely and for the first time I sat in the old town square and drank overpriced beer and listened to a bunch of Scottish blokes talk about their wild night at the table next to me. I finally got to see this city in all its spring glory, and understood the appeal. Today, however, and probably for the rest of the week, I will just get flashbacks to all the other time I've been here and holed myself up in the flat because it was too cold or miserable to go outside. It's really no wonder I still don`t really know the city at all.

What's also kind of ruining my holiday is the big decisions I have to make at the moment- whether to sign a contract at work until June 2007 (can I do another winter in Kiel? Will I go on a killing spree?) and whether or not to fork out the money to come home for a month in July, and possiblity miss the only month of summer in a year and a half. I hate making decisions, and I especialy hate making them when I'm on holiday. My mushy, overslept brain just shouldn't be called on to do anything more taxing than decide what to have for breakfast.

Moan moan. Life is just so hard when you're a modern jet-setter.

City of spasz

2006-04-05T06:47:00.000+10:00

Budapest. The Danube is flooding, which was a surprise, although it made more sense than "maybe they just don't want any customers on the boat restaraunts and that's why all the walkways are under water" theory which we flaoted for a few hours on our first night. This is a great city, I feel really comfortable here, although that could be due to the ever-lovely Hungarians who work for the walking tours, pub crawls and our great hostel. Tonight we were too knackered to do anything, so we watched Ocean's Eleven on DVD and were given popcorn... so nice. Almost uncomfortable-making nice actually, given how poor this country is compared to it's rich neighbours like Germany.

We went to the very luxurious city spas today, which, when the tour guide asked us to guess what the building was I guessed a palace, look not unlike a Hapsburg royal residence. They had baths ranging from thirty-eight to twenty degrees, in various sizes, some outside and some inside, most from thermal springs. All of Budapest was there, fat old ladies and men, young wolf-whistling Italians and many, many school groups of various European nationalities. It was absolute decadence, and made our swimming pools look kind of lame.

Today I also met my grandmother's second cousin which was nice and awkward and also a bit sad. Not because of her, she was full of life even thought she is pushing eighty five, and she was correcting my German, but because of the wars that marred her life and killed all the people close to her. And everyone else too. On the tour we went on yesterday we had a fabulous feisty young Hungarian woman who said "I love my country but it's a shit country". Apparently next week there are elections, and she and the pub crawl guide were wearing orange to support the democratic party and oust the "corrupt arselicking ex-Soveit party members". They have only had a democracy for under twenty years and even that has been in name only. Agnes, the pub tour guide, was smiling alot with her mouth but not with her eyes as she told us how only those who had never experienced freedom knew its value. As I meet more and more young Aussies and Americans I begin to believe it.

On the tour last night there were four young American girls- one of whom was a Valley girl "I just can't deal with backpacking- I mean, sharing with other people, ew."- and three young Australian guys, one of whom told me he was going to Turkey and when I asked why he looked at me and said in serious tones, "for Anzac Day". Oh right, yeah. I thought he was going to ask me if I really was Aussie when I then asked when exactly that was. Needless to say the two groups weren't going to result in any romances. And does this mark the second time that I was scared- really scared- to discuss Anzac Day with a young Australian bloke? I have the feeling this is a trend likely to continue. Neither group really seemed to understand freedom, unless it was the freedom to be a fucking moron.

The idiot from Australia

2006-04-03T16:39:00.000+10:00

Getting from Hamburg to Budapest should have been easy- it's a two hour flight and we were travelling with Air Berlin who are not so budget they have their terminal in a little village somewhere like Ryan Air or German Wings. It should have been pain free. But it wasn't, mainly because I left my passport in my check in luggage and only realised half an hour before take off.

My excuse isn't so great either- I left my swiss army knife in my toiletries bag, which I then decided at the last minute to put in my backpack, which meant I had to re-check it in, which meant I had to take my valuables out and I forgot to take out my passport.

So then it got exciting. While I sweated like a drug smuggler the Air Berlin check in guy called eight different numbers while an increasingly annoyed queue of travellers waited behind me. Then I sprinted down to the arrivals and waited and waited for my bag to appear. No-one down there had any idea what I was talking about and I was beginning to think I would be trapped in Kiel and never see the sun again when my bag arrived. I pretty much threw the knife at the guards and sprinted to the departure gate- thank god Hamburg airport is so small. We made the plane with about four minutes to spare. As we touched down it was an incredible twenty degrees and it all seemed worth it, although I do kind of feel like if I ever see another check-in counter it will be too soon.

Spring sprung

2006-03-29T03:56:00.000+11:00

It´s true- there really are seasons in Europe. One day I´m walking around in a thick winter jacket with four layers of clothing underneath it, keeping my head down to avoid the snow which constantly falls and riding home in the dark at four pm and literally the next day the sun is shining, the birds are chasing each other around the park for lascivious reasons and it´s almost ten degrees. Boiling. The sun has been waking me up in the morning and it´s a wonderful thing.

Soccer soccer soccer

2006-03-23T08:23:00.000+11:00

It´s begun. I´m sitting in my room listening to my flatmate and his friends shouting at the TV screen while Germany plays the US. The World Cup is sooo not going to
be fun. Can´t wait for that one.

Today the weather was amazing- I was riding back from work when it began to snow- but the sun was still out so the snowflakes were spinning in shafts of sunlight. It was incredible. It´s moments like that which keep me here- the feeling of experiencing a whole new world of fundamentals- weather, language, diet, body language. Like being a child again but with the benefits of a full-grown body and brain.

I just hope Germany loses so I´ll be able to get some sleep...

Sun worship

2006-03-18T06:14:00.000+11:00

Last weekend it was actually sunny and we have proof. Every parent in Kiel was sledding with their children- it was so cute to see these rosy cheeked things wrapped up in layers of clothing being dragged up hills by ever patient parents.

Pictures of our new room... for Emma!

2006-03-18T06:01:00.000+11:00

Our new room is great- so much so that I actually dreamt last night that I had to leave it and was really, really sad. Odd, considering that the state of the weather lately has been making the entire state completely aggressive and depressed, always a happy combination, and I have been considering jumping on a plane to just about anywhere that´s got over five degrees. But having a laptop and a cosy room, and beer and potatoes, is holding me over. For now. If it´s not sunny by April I can´t be held accountable for my actions.

White daze

2006-03-09T20:16:00.001+11:00

It´s a miracle- I have seen the sun now for four days running. It has still been arschkalt (if it´s not to do with pigs, it´s to do with your bum…) but very pretty. There´s still snow everywhere and the combination of white covered trees, houses and pretty much anything horizontal and an endless blue sky is breathtaking. Where I´m teaching the apprentices has a little wood next to it with a disused railway track, and there´s a pedestrian bridge which goes over it quite high up. When I looked out on Monday it was white as far as the eye could see with two black tracks stretching out into the distance below me. Kind of reminded me of a British crime mystery, where an unidentified body is found in the snow. Creepy.

This week has been dull, Simon is recovering from having a tooth out and can´t entertain me and because I am broke from working so little over the last few months I can´t really indulge in retail therapy. Damn it. The nicest thing about this week has been moving into our new place, which is smaller than the old one but has many plusses. It is also a bit older and worse for wear, but has a very well-stocked kitchen with great knives, a dishwasher and some very lovely flatmates. We also have a great room with a much more comfortable bed that doesn´t squeak every time you breathe. And I finally have a bike again, which has been great in this weather.

I am starting to feel like all this shifting around is normal and that the life I have left behind is a bit of a dream- a normal reaction I suppose but odd nonetheless. Last night I dreamt I was unpacking boxes in my old room at Mum´s house- which has not been my room for almost ten years- and I kept finding all this stuff I didn´t recognise. It´s starting to feel normal to have only a few friends who live nearby, to never know where anything is, to ask for vocabulary all the time, to weigh the vegetables and print out a little price ticket yourself and to be really exotic. Actually that thing with the vegetables is a lie- I´ve never managed to remember and then I always have to hold up the whole queue. Bloody foreigners.