NEUERBURG - Last official day

GERMANY

Well, things are wrapping up quickly here. Maria left yesterday, I'm juggling clothes and odd bits and pieces and the students are finishing the remnants of their last assignments. The end really is nigh. Like I said in my last post, all things said and done, it's quite bittersweet. I've made massive progress in some areas, fallen back in a fair few others, made a point of pushing myself to reassure myself that I did something worthwhile and yet I'm still finishing up with a bit of remorse where it counts.

Friends came and went, connections were made and rekindled, some of them a little better than others; lessons were planned, finished successfully, some rushed, some left as-is, brought up a notch, and some pushed over and kicked because they were so weak and crap, sometimes all in the same day. There have been more highs than lows, I learned a little bit about humility and humanity, oscillated between feeling like I was 17 all over again and then damned near 20 years older than I am. It was a tour de force in every respect, one that I used to barely believe could be recovered from in a mere couple of days doing nothing and relaxing only to end up feeling pangs of wanting to hurry up and return to the action.

So what did I gain in these last 9 months? Did I get my money's worth (remember kids, the year abroad is essentially free, but it only counts if you pay the £9000 for the other 3 years) when I consider my general work output and improvements and whatnot?

I'd say so.

I'm a lot more interested in teaching abroad, specifically in Germany, which is fucking amazing considering my ignorant disdain for the idea that I had when I was shipped out oh so many months ago. It's given me some kind of direction, which is something that I've been desperately hunting for. I've made mahoosive language improvements, as well as learning a lot of slang.

I'm still terrible at using certain fairly simple yet multi-contextual verbs properly, but at least now I'm functioning disabled in that regard, as opposed to dead in the water. Despite that though, fuck adjective endings. Seriously. 9 months on those cheeky little bastards and all I've learned is that I. Can't. Remember them.

If nothing else, I learned more about the types of people to avoid, which is a valuable thing to get right and proper, and that I love living by myself. Failing that, I saw 9 new countries, which has done nothing short of encouraging my travelling buzz.

These are pictures I took from a balcony waaaay up in the woods which I've searched for all year. Went down well with a fat cigar and some Jägermeister I was given as a present.



I guess it's also worth showing a few more pics of school.

Main building of our school. The whole thing is just a square with rooms going round the edge on two levels. Not being able to find classrooms was never really an option.


And the staffroom. My usual workplace is 2nd PC from the window in the middle picture.


German Year Abroad, SEG-Neuerburg 2010 ~ 2011, I raise my glass to you in remembrance.

NEUERBURG - 2 days to go

GERMANY

As my time here is coming to an end, today me and Maria bought cake and other such nibbles for all the staff and did all our thankyou's and whatnot. This is because she's leaving on Monday, earlier than me, which in an act that I swear is going to become one of my permanent legacies, I'll turn up again on Monday after going through 100 heartfelt goodbyes and be all "hey there .. I'm still here."

However it has been vaguely humbling, since we both got gifts and cards and books and our official certificates and the deputy head said nice words about us both. Maria's section was noticeably longer, as a few of the English teachers pointed out somewhat symapthetically to me afterwards, but Masha is one of those crazy power Frau's who strives to do everything ever conceived ever and her german's good enough to discuss literature and current affairs, something which I tried but simply couldn't keep up with.

And then as if to prove my point, she accidentally dropped me in it by delivering a thankyou speech worthy of Oscar night. I was expecting her to thank her family, friends and the academy at any time. And then she sniffly finished gushing like an artery wound, with a tear in each eye, and looked up at me, and then slowly all 30 other pairs of eyes turned to me shit shit cock bollocks in awaiting expectance.

I think I actually opened with "Uhh, ja, was sie sagte", yeah, what she said, before I regained a little composure and managed to throw together something that just about flew. I didn't quite manage the awards night tears though.

Apart from 2 pretty sweet books, I was also given a bottle of Jägermeister which is gonna go down oh so well next tuesday when I party in the park with my students for the last time. Oh and two teachers bought me hair styling gel "to control my storm hair". Turns out they didn't even know the other one was buying the same thing. I don't know how to feel.

It's been quite a bittersweet day, really. I could actually stay here quite a bit longer.

On a less emotional note, the cake was fucking awesome. We'd actually promised we'd make a couple of salads for today; Maria was going to make a Russkie one with herrings and I was being trusted with another, presumably more boring one. We scrapped this idea in favour of cake, and we bought a kind of strudel with icing, and then a pretty huge block of, basically, apple crumble baked on top of a sponge cake.

Seriously though, salad or cake?

BUT, this was quite a late decision (I picked the cakes up at 8.00am on my free day, that's commitment for you) and since the salad idea was already quite far down the line, would anyone like to buy a lettuce off me?

NEUERBURG - reward and German telly.

GERMANY

Today I helped a girl in the 12th grade prepare a presentation and a handout for tomorrow. She made me curry and sticky rice with a side salad and gave me a snickers and a 6 pack of Corona. I've travelled to nine new countries this year and I still think that reward's gonna be the highlight.

I'm watching a great deal of telly recently. I lamented on facebook last week the curse of continued repeats of everything on German television, which can range from the same film 2 consecutive weekends, all the way to the same film twice in the same evening.

What I am enjoying is Spongebob Squarepants, which is one thing that simply hasn't suffered from being translated. Apart from the title; here it's Spongebob Schwammkopf, or Spongebob Spongehead, which makes me laugh every time I say it aloud.

Last night I went through all 400 channels just to see which ones I receive and which I don't. Disappointingly all the British channels are blocked, but I do get Al Jazeera.

The best thing after Spongebob, Family Guy and American Dad is the German version of Candid Camera or Just For Laughs.

The victim on last night's episode was a 50-or-so year old receptionist in a surgery, who also doubled up as an assistant for the doctor. An actor in makeup playing a doddery, eccentric old gent (called "Mr. Kovak" or something similar) came in for some kind of scan. After 5 minutes of getting the guy to lie on the scanning bed, during which the guy kept getting back up, telling the nurse about his pen and generally just causing innocent doddery old person trouble, the woman (getting stressed out) manages to get him under the scanner and tells him she'll be back in 5 minutes.

While she's away, the actor leaves the scan bed and just leaves his clothes where he was lying, and the production team turn on a smoke machine. The woman comes back in to the room, now full of smoke and realises the guy has gone. Getting even more stressed out, she starts calling the guy's name, looking for him behind cabinets, under the bed, everywhere. The doctor (another actor) arrives and tells her to sit down outside for a second.

While she's out of the room, the production team bring in a chimp wearing the old chap's T-shirt and just let it wander round the scan room. The doctor leads the woman back in, and obviously she's visibly weirded out by this point. You couldn't write this stuff - she leans towards the chimp and says, tentatively: "Mr. Kovak?" It was as good as the Jeremy Beadle prank with the alien.

I thought it would end here, as the woman was freaking out and running her fingers through her hair and asking the doctor how it could have possibly happened, but the finish was just fantastic. A third actor comes in, also in old person makeup, and tells the woman that she's Kovak's wife and is here to pick him up after his scan. The woman looks at the 'doctor' for assistance, but he doesn't say anything. The perfect finish - the woman takes the 'wife's' hand in hers and says, very slowly, deadly serious "We think he's turned into a monkey".

I don't think I've laughed as hard this year as much as I did at that.

NEUERBURG - Spam mail. Pub. Milk

GERMANY

One thing that I am not going to miss is the amount of spam mail I keep receiving in Neuerburg. By that, I mean actual paper mail, old school spam mail. Emails would be easy.

I think my grand monthly accumulation of mail is a result of being guilt tripped during my first visits to major cities in Germany. In England, in any city, when you're approached by someone asking for change or one of those brightly-T-shirted people with the clipboard and the optimism, they're easy to shrug off.

Here, and certainly in the first month or two after arrival, meeting these people in the street was terrible, purely because language confidence wasn't particularly high and as a general rule, hobos and charity collectors are a little more persistant in Germany. I'd give in after about 8 seconds with a tear in my eye, begging them to take what they wanted and leave me be.

Thus, 8 months on, I am still opening the little postbox outside my flat, seeing what's in there and sighing aloud "man, you donate to one fucking earthquake .."

The moral of this story, and a retrospective piece of Year Abroad Advice, is don't give money. Or do, but stick to one charity and to hell with all the others who try and strong-arm you into a guilt ridden cash payout. Otherwise I can pretty much guarantee that you're gonna spend the rest of your time abroad getting leaflets with pictures of homeless children eating homeless guys poo. I know, I thought that picture went a little too far as well.

Consider yourselves warned.

This is Neuerburg of late, from my flat and from the top room of one of the boarding school buildings where I have nachhilfe.


I went to the pub the other night with a few of my students. I didn't get stared at this time like the first time I went. Obviously being with Germans gives you some kind of legitimacy, which I was quite happy with; when I went with Maria the Russian assistant in my third week or so, all conversation stopped and the music may as well have fizzled out. "Two foreigners in one pub? At the same time? Not in this town." I thought we might have been lynched.

But, as I say, last night it was fine. I drunk a little more than was suitable for such an early start the next day. I remember trying and failing to play darts with the guy who runs the kebab shop at about half one, and Paul opening a bottle of champagne. Either way it was well worth it.

I think I'm definitely going to aim for more of this 'down' time with my students; as in, more so than before, because I'm probably not gonna get a great deal more travelling in these next two weeks, and I'm gonna miss quite a fair few of them whenever it is that I decide to go home.

To give you a brief scope of how excitement has dwindled of late, the other day I accidentally spilt some milk onto my desk while making a bowl of cereal. The splash looked like this. I was genuinely impressed with it. I was so excited I took a photo.


But really, that is awesome right? That's like one of those 'hidden beauty of nature' photos, except with milk, like when you see an amazing snowflake up close? It's cool, right?

It's really cool.

NEUERBURG - 21 days to go

GERMANY

I think I drove home the significance of how much time I have left here in the previous post below, but since the only other alternative is sitting in my room drinking Innocent Smoothie and watching Two and a Half Men in German, I think I'll just throw out another entry for your perusal while the staffroom's still unlocked.

Today I started doing actual 'end of year' stuff, such as asking my bank and local council office when I need to think about closing bank accounts and de-registering as a foriegner working.

The bank thing seems pretty sweet, from what I understood I just need to go in a couple of days before I leave, they cancel the account but the card is still useable for as long as I need in Germany. I'm still not certain exactly how this works, and will probably make the woman explain it all again, but this is still probably better than if I was in the UK, where I'd most likely have to give 6 months notice and pay interest for every day I don't visit one of their cash machines or something.

Apart from this, I've been sorting through crap in my room and have come to the conclusion that I'll be paying excess baggage on a flight back, which doesn't exactly make me as happy as that chirpy bastard Larry, but even with a good 30% headed for the 12 or so recycling bins, there's still a heck of a lot.

The computer's just flashed up a box telling me it's gonna automatically shut down in 2 minutes. Guess it's time for Innocent Smoothie and Two and a Half Men.

NEUERBURG - counting down

GERMANY

This post feels strange, mainly because I think one of my last posts from England last August was also entitled "counting down". This isn't to say I'm feeling all "Oh my goodness gracious that feels like it was only yesterday", cos it doesn't; it feels like an absolute fucking eternity, but for that reason, it feels somewhat bizarre that it's all coming to an end.

I recently lugged my suitcase out of my wardrobe in my room, took a look around at my belongings and ended up looking back at the suitcase slowly shaking my head. I think with a bit of manoeuvring and a couple of days pondering what I need to take home and what I can leave to die in Neuerburg, it should be alright, touch wood.

This month is going to be particularly taxing on the entertainment front, which for Neuerburg is saying something, because my laptop adaptor has conveniently decided to die on me, meaning the old girl can't be charged up anymore.

Close inspection shows the wiring visible through a tiny tear in the rubber casing; I genuinely have no idea as to how this could have happened, seeing as the laptop hasn't travelled anywhere with me in at least 3 months. Whatever the case, it increased boredom levels threefold this weekend just gone.

I think tomorrow I'm gonna haul some of my students down to the park to drink beer and go on the swings, probably whether they want to or not. It stays light until about 9 now, and the weather is absolutely great, so it seems a pretty valid idea.

Holy nuts, two A-10 Thunderbolts just flew over our school. Is the war still on?

Where the fuck's my camera when I need it?

VIENNA

AUSTRIA

Well, hot damn. The third and last leg of Eastern Tour was Vienna, and though Bratislava and Budapest were pretty sweet and awesome and charming in their own special ex-communist way, Vienna pretty much teabagged them both into submission before raising it's beautiful-architecture laden fists above it's head in barely disguised German triumph and chanting.

It's really fucking good, like.

Me on an appropriately named street. Getting concerned about one-sided nipple exposure.

This post is gonna be by far the longest, purely because every day was so jam packed full of tourism there wasn't time for much non-blogworthy material.

I think half the novelty of Vienna came from arriving by boat. By plane is exciting the first few times, but after that boat trip it was somehow better.

I'll hit you with a few pictures of buildings and the average Vienna street.

Vienna's version of the Dom. Not bad, but not a patch on Cologne.

We found our hostel after a little bit of hunting. Experience is slowly teaching us that while Dora will always lead us to our destinations, her need to occasionally clarify the difference between left and right can make this a challenge.

Anyway, we found our hostel, and a pretty wicked hostel it was. I've played more pool and table football in the last week or so than I think I have in my life. We divided into two rooms and picked beds, though I switched my choice of bed for the top bunk after finding this written on it.

Well played, Scott and Ash. Glen ended up with this bed.

I vaguely remember talking with Ali to a German girl who worked at the hostel, to whom I bullshitted something to the tune of "Oh yeah, we've only lived in Germany since, oooh, January or so and we've pretty much picked the language up ourselves. We'd never studied it before, y'see?".

Apparently my tipsy self still finds it depressing dealing with the crushing knowledge of still being shit at something after 7 or 8 years of study. Retrospectively I may as well have gone the whole hog, as Ali suggested, and told her we were Jason Statham's stuntmen filming The Transporter 3. Oh, and we jet ski for the British Olympic team. In suits of armor.

One of the special highlights was the Hundertwasser House, named for the artist. It looks like this and is truly wicked.

We ate at the cafe. This is how the Austrians do soup.

The only disappointing drawback is that for the bread to be solid enough to contain gloopy soup, it has to be dry and seemingly stale as hell. I think we all had a bit of excitement about the eating of the soup-soaked bread at the end, but it was as disappointing as the Pakistani intelligence service.

Then we went into a little bit called 'Hundertwasser Village', I believe, which was essentially just a barely disguised tourist trap, albeit the coolest looking and most charming.

Sheeran having forgotten trousers in this photo.

What did catch our eye was "The Toilet of Modern Art". Nothing says fun like having a postmodern abstract wee.

But this is one stage I wish I could have taken back. Imagine you're eating a fantastic cheeseburger. It is the best burger you've ever tasted, and then, on the very last bite, you get a huge fuck-off slice of gherkin. It ruins the entire thing. If Hundertwasser House was the burger, my toilet experience was the gherkin.

Firstly, they charged to get in. This peeves me usually, but 60 cents for an Avant-Garde toilet trip seemed fair do's at the time. I went in after Sophie, and immediately some crazy Austrian woman wearing fairly normal clothes and carrying a handbag begins waving her hands and effing and blinding in German that I didn't pay my 60 cents.

My first reaction was "she doesn't work here, she's just passionate about paying for the loos" and I told her truthfully that I'd paid. She didn't buy this, and to cut a long story short I was physically pushed through the exit turnstile before she went off on her merry bitching way. I've still no idea if she did actually work there or was just a fat lump of crazy, but either way, anger had pretty much defeated any previous need to piss.

They say a real man never strikes a woman, but I would have gone SEAL Team 6 on her if I had the resources. Have another toilet picture.

Whew.

We found this gent outside Hundertwasser House just by the exit. There's obviously less social stigma in Austria attached to being a businessman and doing this.

On one day (I forget which, they're all melded into one) we went to a theme park called Prater, which brought back so much childhood nostalgia it was untrue. We went on dodgems, rollercoasters, log flumes, all that jazz.

Concept of "put face through hole, look like part of picture" lost on Sophie.

Spassilisk. A giant retard snake.

Purportedly the biggest / highest swingy thing in Europe or the world, I forget which.

Log flume.

The piece de resistance of Prater theme park however - a funhouse, complete with moving floors, mirror rooms, shifting staircases, the absolute works. It was in here that we filmed the second parts of our take on Cloverfield.

More questionable ice creams! Having already discovered in Cologne that the German equivalent of Feast chocolate ice cream is honestly something like "Wogwog", we found these delights in Prater theme park:

The first two could have been designed by Prince Philip. Whoever thought of "Bum Bum" was having a bad day.

One cool part of Vienna is an island that runs about 11km down the length of the Danube. We chilled here a bit with chocolate brownies and all the blueberries that were left after Ali dropped them, and saw how long we could hide from the Plod Squad (the girls).

Because we're British and were therefore contractually obliged to give half a shit about the royal wedding (though still less than most foreigners), we showed our commitment by wearing royal wedding bunting that Dora had been given as a birthday present from the poundshop. This came out with us through several Tube stations to an Austrian club, where I'm sure it was appreciated by all who saw us. I think we also sung the national anthem in the Hundertwasser House cafe, at the time when the big kiss was scheduled to be.

On Sunday we headed to a park rumoured to have pandas, because God knows if you don't love pandas and make time for them then you don't have a heart. This was the mentality we went in with anyway; we left after we saw it was €14 entry. So yeah, sod the pandas. What we did do was go to the gift shop, where Glen almost had heart failure because of the multitude of cuddly friends he found. I found these, and couldn't really work out how to feel.

Why have an iPhone when you can have a fucking MONGO GRINDER?

We got some nice pics of us in the gardens though, and of Dora's almost saddening attempt to blow the seeds off a dandelion (I'm sure there's a 'thats what she said' in there somewhere).

And then after this, we decided to get a bit of culture in our lives, and went to a famous cafe somewhere in the city centre. This cafe was apparently visited by various well known historical figures, including Sigmund Freud and even Hitler before he got anti-semitic, and was apparently where Lenin and Trotsky often played chess together.

Considering this, it was surprisingly cheap, especially given the look of some of the clientèle (not to mention the looks they gave us), the fact that you waited to be seated at a little podium, and the waiters wore suits. Our waiter was pretty awesome, he was almost the kind of stereotypical waiter who leans backwards a little bit when they walk.

I went for the Strudel option, because When In Vienna, right? Went all the way and had the classic vanilla sauce with it. Ohhhh, it was good.

There should be a mint leaf on there which made it look even better, but I ate it. So, yeah. Soph went for a pretty special looking chocolate pud, and Dora had a kind of mousse with raspberries, with gold shaved on top.

Good pudding plus beer is a fine end for any holiday.

As always, I'll finish up with signs.

One of my favourite sex shop names I've seen in Europe. I'm Spartacus!

We saw this first one about 10 minutes after arrival, and everybody immediately clicked the resemblance.

Dora (lower left; looking special) found a sign with "Nom" written on it. Had to be done, really.

And continuing the theme of "Dora's favourite words on signs" ..

You either get that last one or you don't. God really does have a sense of humour.

This next one I can identify with, having done the exact same thing the other way round and told some German people that "the foot was very tasty".

And why have normal tea when you can have IMMUNE TEA?

I want to post this next photo for no other reason than I want you to appreciate Austrian schnitzel. Best. Meal. Ever.

And then we jumped on a packed and sweaty train to Vienna airport, because there isn't a lot of boat access to Germany, and took the hour and a half long flight back to Cologne, where me and Ali shared the fabled GermanWings 'happy picnic' and watched Glen, Sophie and The Boon across the aisle having a silent headphone disco all to themselves.

We rounded off Eastern Tour by making foreigners of ourselves by sitting on the floor in the middle of Cologne Hauptbahnhof eating pizza.