Saaga

Not to be overly dramatic or anything, but Steve did point out that I haven’t posted anything, ever, even though having a blog was my idea! Well, what can I say, I’m full of great ideas, but Steve has to do something too!

Anyway, I thought I’d just give you a brief up date of what we’ve actually been up to. So, here goes:
- we arrived in Duesseldorf and stayed at the Ibis Hotel for about a week before finding a nice apartment in a suburb called Pempelfort. I’ll put up a floor plan and some photos of our apartment soon(ish).
- we’re pretty much settled in to the apartment now, although we don’t have a computer yet. That’s next.
- I’ve found a job teaching English. It’s part-time to start with, building up to full time over the next few months. I’ve got an induction session on Monday, so hopefully it will all go well.
- we’ve been to visit Steve’s school a few times and it seems really nice. He starts his orientation there on Wednesday.
- last week we went to Brussels for 2 days and one night. It was a very nice city. I was a bit dubious about what we could really see in 2 days, but we saw quite a lot and without too much stress. We’ll have to go back though because there is a lot to see!
- now we are at my sister’s house near Frankfurt. My niece had her 9th birthday yesterday, so we had a nice day celebrating with her and her family.

Although we’ve been really busy, I’ve managed to sum it up into a very short list of things… I wonder what we’ve actually been doing…

well, actually, I know what we’ve been doing - standing in queues. You can’t do anything in a hurry here, see Steve’s previous post. Going to collect our unaccompanied luggage from the airport was also another saga that took a good 5 hours of our lives (due to very long queues and conflicting appointments, we had to go twice!)

Anyway, better go, but I hope you are all well and enjoying Sydney. So far we are enjoying ourselves here, but of course, we are looking forward to you all visiting us ASAP.

The motto for Germany (from recent experience) could be; If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing really slowly… preferably using lots of water.
We went to visit Alex’s uncle and aunt last week in a very posh area outside Düsseldorf. I noticed as we strolled around the grounds of his estate that there was a hose sticking into a hole in the lawn, pumping water furiously into the earth. I asked our host what that was for and he said to me,
‘Yah, zat is for ze mole.’
OK, no problem I thought, he’s just helping the mole fill up a swimming pool, because as far as I know, moles don’t have their own water access. This still struck me as kind of strange though, so I pushed a bit further and found out that moles are protected animals in Germany and so are not to be killed. However drowning them is apparently different to killing them and is therefore quite legal. Our host was quite proud of the fact that he had been pumping water into his yard for 11 hours, but he bade us move on to see more, which I was glad to do as we were beginning to sink into the mire that now occupied the whole front area of his property.
Coming from a country stricken by drought, it is sometimes shocking to see people here casually using water inappropriately or even wasting it for no apparent reason. Yesterday I almost told an old lady to sweep the steps in front of her house rather than hosing them, but then I remembered I wasn’t in Sydney, so I relaxed and just watched as she sprayed water into the air for a while.

Setting up our bank accounts took quite a while. Ordering a sandwich from the bakery is quite a process. Our washing machines short cycle is two and a quarter hours long. Everything here seems to take at least 50% longer than what I remember and so being used to it now, it was no surprise that to get a phone we had to line up for an hour and then spend two more happy hours chatting with the man from Deutsche-Telecom. The icing on the cake was that while it has now been all set up for a couple of days, we have to wait until the middle of next week before the phone will actually be connected…Cool!

After spending a long time with Oliver in the Telecom store, he realsied as we finished up that our transaction did not include any water usage…so he sprayed us with the hose and bade us farewell.

Every now and then in Sydney I would notice a middle aged person dressed up as though they were 19 years old again and while this is a slightly sad attempt to hold onto their youth, it is also funny in the same way a fart during an interview is funny. Over here however it has been taken to the next level. Parading along the Rhein in the early evening is an endless stream of 50+ women completely inappropriately attired and with make up that looks as if it were applied by a team consisting of a transvestite and a clown. Accesories are always part of the colour scheme and so too are very small dogs. Invariably the man that is accompanying them has an enormous moustache and a pale coloured suit a la Don Johnson in Miami Vice.

It is heartening to see that cities over here hate each other in the same way that Sydney and Melbourne do.
I committed a faux pas on Tuesday whilst we were visiting Köln. I had no idea that their rivalry with Düsseldorf was so intense and by ordering an Alt bier (a style from Düsseldorf) I was on the verge of reigniting a civil war that had been settled centuries ago. The waiter pointed to a sign on the wall whereby it was clear that in Köln one must only order the strange, faintly baked beany smelling beer available from the local breweries and that to even mention the dark coloured Alt biers made by the foul Düsseldorfers could end up with one being forced to leave town via catapult.
*Part of the above paragraph may in fact be exaggerated

Everywhere is now security crazy after the explosions in London last week. On the TV here they are talking about Germany becoming a target for international terrorism and at the local Hauptbahnhof there are warnings every few minutes not to leave bags unattended. Everywhere a terrorist might strike has become completely paranoid.
At the airport it is a jailable offense to make a joke about having a bomb on your person or in your luggage. There are warnings about it all over the airport. I don´t get how this has come about. Possibly it is believed that a terrorist might happen to casually mention that he has a bomb in his luggage while he is checking in. Why would he do this? Clearly the answer is that he does´t want to incur any extra freight charges and needs to make sure that his luggage with bomb will not weigh more than his 30kg weight allowance. The conversation with the check in clerk may go something like this;
Clerk: Do you have any carry on luggage sir?
Terrorist: Only this bomb. *Holds up bag*
Clerk: Sir could you put your bomb on the conveyer please.
Terrorist: *Puts bag on conveyer*
Clerk: Sir your bag weighs 12kg which is 2 kg more than your carry on weight allowance.
Terrorist: Oh, ok. Wait I will take out my spare pair of jeans and my Disc man. *Fiddles with bag*
Clerk: That´s fine sir, your bomb now only weighs 10 kg. Have a nice flight.

Possibly it is also an offence to make light of the security attempts made by various governements and their agencies.

The above title could possibly refer to me. For instance if someone was to follow me around the city when I was on my own, they might detect that I have slightly varied the noble form of communication that is German. I normally start in German, switch to grunting non-commitally and when that does not illicit the response I am after I then revert to English. At this rate I am going to be learning German for 20 years.

It is heartening to see that Germany (parts of Düsseldorf at least) is swarming with bogans. I was afraid that the bogan was an English speaking tradition, but I have seen enough mullets and tattoos on hands and faces to see that Germany is following the trend.
It seems that bogans are even encouraged in many instances, especially with the drinking of alcohol. You can buy beer and wine and spirits everywhere here. Supermarkets, petrol stations, cinemas, even train stations. Not only can you aquire the stuff all over the place, you can also drink wherever you like. There seems to be no law against public drinking and so the bogans may frolic as is their want.
Possibly bogans here are their own seperate culture like the Gypsies and are given special allowances to behave in their own unique way, because when I think about it, I have really only seen bogans partaking of the on the street drinking. The Euro trash (who I will come to in good time) seem happy to stay in the on street bars to drink and they never eat the dirty ice that is dumbed on the promenade by the ice skating rink. I’m not saying that all the bogans in the city eat used ice off the pavement, that would be a massive generalisation, because I only saw about 150 of them enjoying the privilege.

Having only five hours of darkness is really taking some getting used to. It is really strange , almost cool, walking home from a restaraunt at 10:30 pm with the sun still up. On the flip side it is kind of annoying having the sun shining on your face before 5 am. I suppose that this is also strange… unless you were some kind of sun exploring astronaut, in which case the sun would be shining on you the whole time. I suppose you could hide out in your intense heat proof space vehicle to get away from the glare, but what would be the point of that? You are a Helionaut for gods sake!
All of this sun and the hot weather (I know I said ‘hot weather’) are combining with our jet-lag to create some super Voltron like sleeping disorder, not unlike seasonal affective disorder that plagues areas of the world where the sun doesn’t go down.