Saaga

We have had summer here and it looks like we are back to winter again. After almost 8 months of awful weather, it looked like we were finally in the clear, but no. The temperatures are in the teens again and it is raining all the time. If it was the good (but rare) Aussie kind of rain, that tells it like it is as it pelts down upon you like a horde of Prime ministerial eyebrows, I could cope, but unfortunately it’s the sneaky pseudo rain that seeps down all day long, making everything take longer and feel slightly less appealing.
For a change of pace we are going to visit Alex’s sister and the kids in Frankfurt this weekend, where the weather is cold and it is raining.

I was checking out the site today and couldn’t help but notice that there were 22 spam advertisements in the comments section of various posts. I have been deleting between 3 and 5 of the damn things every day this month, but 22, that is starting to go beyond stupid.
How the hell does spruiking cat valium on a travel blog sound like a good idea? I wondered if I left the messages up how many people would click on the link…none was my immediate answer, because I am pretty sure I didn’t hand the url out to anybody without a brain.
I also wondered how the guys that run these spam generators sleep at night and then I realized that because there are a lot of stupid people in the world, the guys probably sleep with their discretely pregnant, Brazilian lingerie model wives, on huge piles of money.
I have decided to add the spam guys to my list of people I need to hurt to fix the interweb. They are on the list just above guys that write computer viruses and just under 47 year old men, pretending to be 14 year old girls playing online fantasy games.

The ads are stupid too. Look at this one that I removed;

cat valium
midget’s your into member stick a heart giant

Despite the dumbosity of the spam guys attempts to fool my spam guardians, they still make it through. This is largely due to the spam filter that comes with wordpress being ever so slightly stupider. It is supposed to look to see if the stuff coming in looks like a person who read the post wrote the comment, but the stupidest stuff makes it past. The cat valium guy wasn’t even trying and he made it through.

By the way, f I find out that anyone buys Valium for their cat, they go straight onto the list.

Saturday was Alex’s birthday and so in the evening we went to Baan Thai, a Thai restaurant in the Altstadt. The food was good, but designed for the German palate, so dishes that were supposed to be hot were only mildly tingly.

We also hired an Irish ex-track-and-field star to come and give a speech after dinner, but he only got as far as;
“On the anniversary of your manufacture, congratulations…Wife-ulon.”

We met up with some more friends after dinner at ‘Zur Eul’ which is one of the traditional pub/bar/restaurant/café things that are sprinkled throughout the Altstadt. Our waiter was fairly unimpressed with the size of our group which was able to consume his whole tray of beers in one go, which meant that he had to keep trooping in and out to get more. Seeing as how trooping in and out is what he does all night anyway, added to the fact that his wage is dependent on the amount of beer he sells, I can’t see what his problem was. Possibly he was just an arsehole.

After drinks we went to Stahlwerk which is an old steel works that has been converted into a venue to host parties and events. The event we were attending was an Industrial/EBM night club that I can’t remember the name of, but it was probably something like; ‘Vampire Angst Hell’ or ‘Dark Blood Wave Night Hunter Children’ or some such.

The place is huge and was filled with goths, although every person there would have denied being goth. Even if you walked up to one and said,
“Hey goth”, as you tugged on their cape.
They would reply, “Oh I’m not a goth”, as they glared at you out of black mascara-ed eyes, and slapped their pvc gloved hand upon their fishnet stocking-ed thigh as they laughed at you with the scorn of one born to eternal torment in the shadow of uncaring, faceless gods…and the women are far more critical.

The difference between this place and the ones I have been to in Australia apart form the size of the venue and scene, is the style of the Goths themselves. Of course you have the standard lapsed goth, wearing a band T-shirt, black jeans and boots and the standard Ele-goth in his Victorian splendour, but what the place lacked was enormous women clad in figure hugging PVC and bosom heightening corsetry. It was disappointing and at the same time refreshing not to see even one boob shelf; Disappointing because I had to rest my beer on a table like some kind of pleb and refreshing because at no point did I feel inclined to set my eyes on fire.

I enjoyed myself greatly (although Weissen beer doesn’t lend itself to dancing) and the only criticisms I have of the place would lead me into a spiel about the problems inherent in the “goth scene” as a whole…I will not rant about that here and now.

Spring here is only partly about the trees ‘springing’ back into life and animals ‘springing’ back into their ecological niches, that had until recently been filled with frozen hobos. No the most dramatic effect of spring is it’s effect on the German psyche. The weather is shit for seven months, so once the temperature is in the double digits they bang on a bikini and head for the park. Across the city, tables and chairs spill out of restaurants, bars and cafes and onto the streets because no self respecting German would consider, even for a moment, being indoors to eat.
The first week after I got back here, we had that really interesting early spring weather, where Father nature can’t make up his mind about what he wants the temperature to be. Wednesday the 26th of April the temperature was 28 degrees, but Saturday the 29th it snowed…hmmm.
I played my first proper 11 a side outdoor game of football (soccer to Americans) yesterday and we won 7-2. It is a weird short season that is played in the warm weather rather than in winter when the rest of Europe (excluding Ireland) is doing it. It was also strange playing outdoors, since I haven’t done it for more than two years.

Last night I went out with a bunch of Alex’s workmates to a pub that is a Düsseldorf institution. Why they have a bar in an Asylum I’ll never know. On the way in the Bartender said,
“One of the waiters is a cannibal.”
We looked at him with blank expressions as the German words were painstakingly translated inside our brains. The bartender mistook this pause for something else. I’m not sure what he thought we were thinking but he followed it up with,
“Try and guess which one, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” *
The place is called Schalander and it is a bit of an oddity because it has 13 different beers from the tap. Normally a typical Düsseldorf Kneipe has one kind of Alt (dark beer) and one Pils on tap and then a few other kinds in bottles in the fridge.
Schalander has three different Alts, four or five kinds of Pils and various others. They of course have the obligatory Weissenbier (The Giant Bavarian Beer that the world has stereotyped all Germans as drinking) in the fridge along with another 20 or so others. This was all surprising as I really thought that at some point someone must have made a rule about only having a small selection of beers in Düsseldorf pubs, because they each follow the same format and we all know how a German person’s bloods sings Beethoven’s immortal ‘Ode to joy’ as it’s owner obeys a rule. The most surprising part however was that they actually sell a brand of Kölsch (The Cologne beer) which every Düsseldorfer I know derides.
Now that my German is beginning to show signs of being a useable language, I use it whenever possible and for the most part the message is received and understood without delay. However in this pub I managed to run across Zerschmeißenendeherrin, the German goddess of making things slow, overly complicated and more than a little frustrating. Disguised as a waitress, she worked her foul magics upon me by not understanding me when I spoke the first time, thereby forcing me to repeat myself. Not normally too much of a problem, until she stares at me blankly the second time, only to have someone else at the table, irritated by the seemingly retarded woman, say what I said word for word and have her instantly comply. Without exaggeration, this happened four times during the night and was a source of some amusement to the rest of the table.
Despite the few negatives though, the food and beer were fantastic and because we were to hell and gone away from the centre of town, everything was cheap.

I really shouldn’t read Australian news websites, because every time I do, I run across an article that makes me bless my woollen socks that I am over here.

*Sections of this conversation may not have happened