I’m going to the Ostsee and may be some time. A weekend, to be exact. In the meantime, here’s an oddly N’y’Orleans-sassy translation of a sign I found in a hostel bathroom. Catch you after the break! They just ain’t useable, Benjamin, ya hear?
6kbps maximum upload speed. That’s what you get for annoying O2. Thus from now on blog post will be accompanied by the best thing I can scrawl on Windows Paint using my Wacom. Apologies in advance. Now that I’m over ‘hump-week’, the week the language school warn you about where everything is terrible and you think about quitting every minute you aren’t trying to stop children killing themselves and each other, my actual physical hump is starting to grate like NEVER BEFORE. What I mean, of course, is the rucksack which is an essential part of the kit and without...
The Internet is not happy with me at the moment, and henceforth for the time being I can’t upload any photos for this post. It’s probably a good thing, because the photos I have ready to implant into this post are heinous proof of the shameful thing of which I am about to write, and I would under no circumstances post the second one on the main page of this blog at all; oh no, that is relegated to the ‘after the jump’ bit, the huge and crusty underbelly of each blog post iceberg. So the first photo is a scarf....
This week my lucky primary-schoolers (Grundschüler) get to learn the months of the year. Well, to be perfectly honest, this won’t be their first try, nor my first try to teach them. The months of the year are one of the hardest things to teach to very little kids; they don’t quite yet understand what the months are doing per se, they don’t really see the difference between the months and the seasons, and they don’t really know what the months are called in their own language let alone a foreign one. Furthermore, in a lesson jam-packed with activities, interactive...
Flat number 3, bed number 4, cat number 2. Since I last posted life took another sudden lunge into intense difficultness; I finally moved out of my old flat, which was unpleasant in more than just the ‘moving a whole life’s worth of stuff halfway across Berlin’ kind of way; I moved into my new flat and discovered that the place I had sorted to use as my base while I search for something more permanent does not have the internet, the lack of which honestly feels like a loss equivalent to suddenly not having any fingers; I found a...
Hallowe’en is such a brilliant occasion. Lots of people hate it because it’s hackneyed and teaches kids to harass adults when they don’t get given sweets for free after having already harassed them. What I love about Hallowe’en is that there’s no subtext; there’s no spritual or moral message, no serious thing behind it, no history to repeat monotonously at school (I’m looking at you Guy Fawkes)…you can just dress stupidly, drink/eat a lot of fun things and at no point have to have the discussion about capitalism taking over what used to be a meaningful holiday. After all, capitalism...
Desperation, n : sitting in Landsberger Allee Netto reading Das Glasperlenspiel Sit down to begin writing a blog post about coffee; decide to make a pot of coffee before starting in earnest; put kettle on; watch cafétiere slip off kitchen counter and explode into a million skin-ripping smithereens; spend half an hour sweeping and hoovering, before eventually settling for a mediocre cup of Redbush. Well, at least my dumb bad luck has a sense of irony. Anyway, what I was planning to write this evening was to do with the fact that life at the moment revolves around coffee. Not...
Yes, so I may have mentioned this briefly at length in my last post, but it is hard to find a place to live in Berlin. Let me give you an idea of the process: 1) Wake up. Immediately put kettle on. 2) Whilst the kettle is boiling for the strengthening cup of what the Germans think Earl Grey tastes like, immediately turn on laptop and open the internet. 3) Go to WG-Gesucht.de and spend the following hour and a half writing approximately twenty application emails to various room offerers, drinking your body weight in tea in an attempt to...
Hi everyone! I am a student studying German and English Literature, and as a direct result of this perhaps unwise life choice I have ended up moving to Berlin for almost a year to ‘practise my German’ and more importantly immerse myself once and for all in this mad, tiring, hilarious, weird and endlessly changing place. I have now been here for a month (almost to the day) and already so far I have accumulated far too many stories and musings for me to torture my friends with over the occasional Skype conversation. ‘Oho,’ thought I, ‘this is the perfect...