Show off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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.