You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2007.
Just read about a truck bomb in Iraq. Utterly awful.
Mostly, Bonn is exactly how you’d expect a (West) German town to be: clean, well tended (I’ve even seen the patches of green you get between sections of pavement being gardened) and notably elderly, though by no means exclusively white (I saw a man in a proper fez today!). Germany has an exceptionally low birth rate (the lowest in western Europe, even: see these stats and these) and high proportion of over-65s, which explains the number of retirement homes, superannuated athletes and horrifically ugly fashion boutiques that are common on the tidy streets of the Playmobilviertel.
(Incidentally, I find it annoying that economists and politicians meet the news of low birth rates with alarm. In Germany, there have been changes in legislation and financial incentives to encourage more women to have children. To me, it’s good news. I’d say overpopulation, not falling rates, is the real demographic problem. I have never understood how economists square their goals for ceaseless growth with the fact that we have only one planet to sustain us. Maybe they know something we don’t about Mars.)
But in Bonn’s main train station, this order is replaced by quite unstereotypical chaos. All around the station, but also down in the concourse and subways, are drunks – absolutely stacks of them. This might not be very surprising, but what has struck me is the number and the mixture. Whereas in the UK you might get some homeless people on one street and some cider-mascerated youth on another, here everyone mixes in a great railway-flavoured bierfest: a truly social democratic party. Take some homeless unfortunates from Charing Cross, add some lairy wide boys from Bristol city centre, invite alcohol-inclined punks or goths as you wish, and then throw in a handful of strangely dressed men with Andy Warhol hair and dead-fish eyes for good measure. (The true tramps are out rummaging through waste bins for bottles that can be redeemed for a few cents.)
I would have thought that the police or someone would move everyone on, but then drinking in public is absolutely acceptable here. Students or professional types wander around drinking beer, and late at night the subway trains ‘clink-clink’ with the sound of glass bottles rolling up and down the aisles. Thanks to my fearless reportage I can publish here some rare photography of this phenomenon:
I find it very odd, but then maybe I’m the one with the problem. At least the drinking is very open and relaxed, and it reinforces the impression I’m getting that German is less socially stratified than the UK. I need to do more social research before publishing this in a peer reviewed journal, but I have noticed that in shops, customers talk to shop assistants as though they are friends. Shocking. Wouldn’t happen in England. Lording it over shop assistants is one of the few droits du seigneur that are still legal in 2007.
I think that if Germany had better pubs, in fact any pubs, this public drinking would be less common. As for me, I’ve been in one cool bar, where apparently all the journalists used to go when Bonn was Important, but mostly I’m happiest in places like this:
Maybe I need to start hanging out at the Hauptbahnhof more often…
Ooh, went round a colleague’s house last night to watch The Lives of Others, a well-received film about life for a Stasi officer and a bourgeois couple a few years before reunification. Haven’t watched anything since the rather strange late-night version of Call My Bluff I saw three or so weeks ago, and the film itself was great. I think so, anyway - as it was in German, I understood about one word in 50.
But who needs to understand dialogue when there is east German fashion from the early eighties to enjoy? Apparently, a Stasi officer in Berlin who wanted to go places needed to make an important life choice: should he wear the trenchcoat (brown) or the inadequately padded ski jacket (grey)? Both would go equally well with beige slacks, but I tend to think that if you could pull it off - if you had a Teutonic Blue Steel look and a nice way with “Kommen Sie bitte hierher” – a trenchcoat would be the way forward. But could you get away with a Russian fur hat? That’s the real question.
I really want to blog about how awful Madonna’s new song for the Live Earth concerts is. Ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if she misunderstood and had written a track all about wiring? But no, instead it’s about how you have to love yourself first and how “none of it’s real, including the way you feel”. Yes, that’s quite right. The glaciers aren’t really retreating, species aren’t really becoming extinct, and that guilt you feel when filling up your car is an unreal emotion to be shrugged off. Why is it that with Madonna, even a song about the planet becomes a song about loving yourself? Unreal.
Anyway, I can’t sit here writing mean things about her decline and fall because I am off tonight to check out a couple of new places to live. Yes, despite rather enjoying living in my Playmobil suburb (twinned with Windsor and Maidenhead, I discover), I have decided to make a break for the bright lights of Bonn (twinned with, er, Belfast and Tel Aviv) to meet some people who don’t require a rotating seat to get in and out of the bath. This is where I must employ all my guile and cunning to pretend that (a) I speak very good German; (b) I am actually a kinda hip and happening frood who plays in a rock band and bakes pavlova for her housemates while tripping on acid; and (c) I won’t really spend hours in my bedroom trying to pick up The Archers on BBC World Service. Wish me luck!
* I am trying to stop swearing; doesn’t really go down too well at work.
Out on the streets of Bonn playing consulate bingo (three Horn of Africa countries constitute a yahtzee), I suddenly realised that I hadn’t seen any German forest since arriving two weeks ago. What an oversight. So I trekked up Winterstrasse and, er, Waldstrasse (Wald meaning wood) to the Kottenforst, which is, er, a forest. I did mean to read up about it. Well, there can’t be much to read about: basically, there are lots of trees, animals everywhere and plenty of well-tended tracks pounded as ever by middle-aged exercise fanatics (this time with those ski pole things rather than bicycles).
Animal Watch: I saw several birds including one chaffinch-coloured thing bathing in a puddle, a deer running away from me (must improve my deer befriending skills) and some wild-ish horses who looked a bit skittish (probably afraid I was going to try and ride one of them).
The white one is telling the others to look away and pretend they can’t see me.
Lunch (I shouldn’t blog about meals, but I must) was eaten sitting on the ground looking at the following tree-related items:
Perhaps a view like this doesn’t ping your pants, particularly, but a nice dark forest is to me what a big Spanish onion is to an Oniomaniac. Hansel and Gretel, The Company of Wolves, The Woodlanders, Will O’ The Wisp, I love it all. But I’ve done a quick recce of the neighbourhoods in Bonn with easy access to the forest, and have concluded that they make my much-derided genteel neighbourhood look like the Amsterdam red light district. Unless deadly suburbia is the way forward, I don’t think I am going to be able to live near the woods. Tant pis.
Even more exciting than getting some forest action is the magazine I found on the way home. Germany’s magazine sector seems to be ridiculously verdant (if you know what I mean), and you can find in the average newsagent magazines on a vast array of subjects, be that art, trainspotting, Linux or military equipment (great bivouacs). Well, consider my fjord-like depths of pleasure when I spotted a magazine ALL ABOUT SCANDINAVIA, lit up on the shelf like the aurora borealis. Here it is:
Norr blimey. True Scandinavian pornography.
I haven’t read it yet: I am making myself wait until getting through my to-do list of A Level study (done!), editing work (done!) and indulgent-perusal-of-international-edition-of-the-Sunday-Observer-when-I-should-be-reading-German-newspapers (to do, tsk). I shall read it tonight, Sventence by gorgeous Sventence, meanwhile hoping not to hear any bad news from London or elsewhere regarding nutcases wreaking violence.
I have had my first horse riding lesson in Germany! Consequently, I also have my first post-horse-ride arse ache this morning. The adventure began by my taking a bus to a village called Niederbachem, which despite having plenty of timber-framed houses like this…
… feels rather built-up. The state where I’m living, Nordrhein Westfalen, apparently has 18 million people, or 22% of the entire German population, so the population density is rather high. Anyway, fortified by an excellent bread-and-seed roll from the Local bakery that must have deprived some unlucky budgerigar of his lunch, I left for the hills above the village where, dodging several enormous dogs (people seem to keep wolves and Baskerville-esque hounds here as pets; very scary), I came to my new riding school.
Here is a picture of me cooling down after doing a few jumps:
I’m joking of course. Actually I was inside clinging to a horse on a lunge (essentially a horse on stabilisers). I had a lesson along with what looked like a seven-year-old girl, which illustrates my aptitude, I think. Actually it wasn’t so much a lesson as an endurance test: trotting like buggery (not literally) and trying not to fall off for 30 minutes. At the same time I was trying to understand what the teacher was saying to me (basically “kick the bastard”, I think). Maybe my poor language skills were a reason for the lack of instruction, but I hope they teach me a bit more next time, because without learning delicate equine skills to build up an intimate relationship and be at one with the horse (again, not literally), it feels a bit like I’m using the horse as an exercise bike. Oh well, I have a lesson booked for next week so will consult my German ‘riding for seven-year-olds’ book and try to learn a bit more of the parlance. I should buy some proper riding boots too, but I am not sure if you can buy knee-high black leather boots in this country any more…
I also had my first German lesson this week, held in a building near this quite high tower (something to do with the German postal service):
It was a group lesson with people from Spain, Bosnia, Chile and Burkina Faso. It was OK, but I’m afraid I found other people’s German accents super annoying and nearly impossible to understand (no doubt they felt the same about mine). So I am wondering if I should get individual lessons instead, if I can afford them. It’s not so social, but then I’ve never found language evening classes to be a great way to meet people. No one ever seems to say, “Enough declension of German nouns: what say we get out of here and go listen to some cool jazz in a smoky underground bar I know?” I did, however, learn the extremely cool word ‘Oniomanie’. This is not, sadly, onion mania but shopping addiction. I cling to the hope that it could mean compulsive shopping for onions.
