Learning Things

Evening all.
Being the nostalgic sausage that I am, I decided to look back on the things I learnt in 2015. And they're pretty much still useful a year on. With the odd adjustment here and there, they could easily be life tips. If what you wanted to do with your life was not annoy your housemates and avoid becoming Catholic.

But I've been pondering. Many of you will have seen my last post, claiming that I didn't learn much in 2016, and it's sadly true that there were no great revelations regarding pumpkin vampires, or locking the bathroom door. But did I learn anything in 2016 that contradicts what I learnt in 2015? Time to find out:


According to my flatmate, food (specifically a kebab) is better than sex
Said flatmate still believes this, as far as I know. The kebabs really weren't that good.

It's not the ringers that smell of the tower, it's the tower that smells of the ringersStill true.

Vegan cooking can be super easyThe key word here is can. It can also reeeeeaaaally easily go super wrong....

Lock the door when you're in the bath
Since learning this, nobody has walked in on me in the bathroom.
(I may have forgotten this once or twice, but Daniel is a gentleman, and still nobody has walked in on me in the bathroom...)

Tea and sympathy get you a long way
Just make sure it's the way you want to go.

If you reach the age of 30 in north Germany without getting married, you have to sweep the steps of the Rathaus until a young lady comes along and kisses you 
Well, we're going to find out this year, when Daniel turns 30...

"If it ends in 'e' it's probably 'die'" is a lie.
Still a lie.

If you lose one of your Beavers, they are probably in the tent
Still true.

You will get on better with your friends during a four day hike than you will ever in your life again. Ever.
I still get on better with these friends than I ever did previously. I think that working together like that makes it really easy to understand people. And everything we've done since then has been easy in comparison. So, I guess we're just stuck with each other for life now.

That's it I guess. Everything else on the list is either so obviously true it doesn't need repeating, or could possibly need reassessing in the future. But for now, I'm going to let sleeping dogs lie.
This is quite a short post, but I don't really have a lot to say. I just wanted to see whether I was still learning new things.



Emmatt update: Haven't done one of these in a while because there's very little to report. Matt and I are still together (3.5 years in February), and we're still making long distance work through a combination of phone calls, texting, and total, unquestioning trust. There's a plan in the pipeline to try and move in together once I've graduated, but money (as ever) is the key thing holding us back. And anyway, who knows what things will be like in six months' time?

Things I've learnt in 2015

Greetings dear friends and Internet stalkers. It's coming to that time of year again where I look back and ponder what I even did with myself over the last twelve months. As ever, the answer is "not a lot".

Still, I seem to have learnt some things. So here are the top twenty pieces of  ~ahem~ "useful" "knowledge"* I've picked up in 2015. I hope some of them are helful to at least one person at some time in the future.

1. According to my flatmate, food (specifically a kebab) is better than sex
2. It's not the ringers that smell of the tower, it's the tower that smells of the ringers
3. Vegan cooking can be super easy
4. The German for "a really big yurt" is "Super Jurte"
5. If you slice off the end of your thumb, it's probably not bad enough for you to need to go to hospital, just stem the blood flow
6. Lock the door when you're in the bath
7. If you don't know the words, just sing "tractor tractor tractor"
8. Mike the Tiger is the mascot for Louisiana University. He is a real, live tiger
9. Chicken fried chicken exists
10. Tea and sympathy get you a long way
11. If you get bitten by a Catholic, you become a Catholic
12. If you get bitten by the Pope, you become Italian
13. Vegan cheese doesn't melt
14. If you reach the age of 30 in north Germany without getting married, you have to sweep the steps of the Rathaus until a young lady comes along and kisses you [SIDEBAR: This tradition is more common among men, I don't know who kisses women. Maybe Santa]
15. "If it ends in 'e' it's probably 'die'" is a lie.
16. Your housemates will think you're crazy if you try to make the house nicer
17. Your housemates will think you're crazy if you try to use a slow cooker
18. Your housemates will think you're crazy if you try to explain sausage rolls and Christmas Pudding
19. If you lose one of your Beavers, they are probably in the tent
20. You will get on better with your friends during a four day hike than you will ever in your life again. Ever.

Season's Greetings and a happy New Year!

*Some of these "facts" are true and some are utter garbage. I'll leave it to your personal judgement to decide which are which.

In Response To Paris

Hi -di-hi y'all. Bet you didn't expect to hear from me again so quickly.

Like everyone else with access to the free media, I heard about the terrible attacks in Paris, among other places, last week. The media have covered it pretty much non-stop since it happened (at least in Paris, I've not seen a lot about anywhere else). I've been pondering my personal response to these actions for the last few days. I know I'm only one person, but with this blog I know I can reach at least, like, three whole other people. So maybe I can make a small difference.
When I heard about Paris, I was shocked. I wanted to cry, and scream. I wanted to get over to France and do anything and everything I could to help. Sadly, France was in total shutdown, and it wouldn't have been practical to go even if it hadn't been. So I decided to do everything I could from my family home in Hertfordshire.

I checked that my friends in Paris were safe, and then I did nothing.
That's it.

I didn't cancel my plans to travel (using public transport) into central London with my family on Saturday. I didn't stop myself from enjoying a night out in one of the most "at-risk" cities in Europe. (Xanadu at the Southwark Playhouse, if anyone's interested. Amazing. I'd recommend going, but they've sold out until the end of the season!) And I did nothing to lessen my experience of getting on the tube (I hate the tube) any further. I also didn't cancel my flight from London to Berlin (arguably another "high risk" city) on Sunday. I didn't change my travel plans to get to the airport either. And I didn't complain when they wanted to check my bag at security (my bacon showed up as a liquid on the scanner.) When in Berlin, I didn't do anything to alter my arranged journey back to Braunschweig. I didn't worry about anything apart from making sure I got on the right train.

Because that's the best way to fight these morons.

Terrorists are like naughty children. If you react to every little thing they do, they will never learn that that's not the right way to behave. If a child throws a hissy-fit in the middle of the supermarket because you refuse to buy them sweets, you shouldn't give in and buy them sweets. Then the child learns that making a fuss leads to getting what you want. If a terrorist organisation kills innocent people in one of the biggest cities in Europe, you don't creep around in fear for the next few months. And you certainly don't get into a screaming match in the middle of the metaphorical supermarket. You just get on with your day as you would have before. You don't let them learn that they win by making a fuss.

If we live in fear of everything, we provoke the response "Look how weak the West is! They cower at our feet!" If we retaliate and bomb them into oblivion, we provoke the response "Look how dangerous the West is! We must fight back to protect ourselves!" If we band together, recover from the atrocities they've committed and leave them alone, they'll realise that their plan isn't working. They might try again (I really hope not, surely nobody is that heartless), but they'll learn that it isn't going to help.

They'll grow up a bit if we just leave them alone.

America and Europe have sent fighters and bombers and soldiers into more countries than there are scenes starring Daniel Radcliffe in a Harry Potter film. IT DOESN'T WORK. We've never had the result we want, and we never will. What on earth makes people think "This time. This time we're going to come out on top." It just kills more innocent people, a result nobody wants.

Actually, that's a lie. You know who wants that result? Terrorists.

My point is: stop. Stop trying to fight back. Stop giving them reasons to come and do this again. People died. Over one hundred and thirty people died. One hundred and thirty. That's about the same as the number of people in a reasonably large Scout group (Beavers through to Leaders). That's not OK. In no universe is that OK. So don't send troops and planes and bombs. Don't cancel your holiday plans. Mourn the dead, of course, but don't make things worse for the living.

Carry on as before.
Offer support the the refugees trying to escape from these people.
Look after your friends, family, and neighbours. (Especially those who peacefully practice Islam, they need the support right now too.)
Help out if you can.
But apart from that, do nothing.


All my love goes out to those affected by the attacks France, Lebanon, Chad, Cameroon, and Nigeria, to name some of the most recent ones. I hope life can resume for normal for you all as soon as possible.

Arrival in the Land of the Free and the Home Of The Daft.

That title refers to two separate places, by the way.

As you may know, folks, I have recently "upped sticks" and wandered my way over to Germany. It was a good decision. I'm glad I made this decision. Even though the weather is too hot to function.

After a week and a half of living in a Youth Hostel, I finally moved into my actual flat last Thursday. It's great. I get my own bedroom, and food, and a bathroom... And I'm living with a dude*, which is new and weird. You don't think it's going to be a big deal until you realise there are certain things you can't do any more. Don't get me wrong; I shared a house last year and I know how to be a vaguely tolerable housemate. I don't walk around naked or anything, and nobody has ever walked in on me in the bath. But there really are things you take for granted when you live with four other girls that you can't do if you're sharing with a guy.

Anyway, that's not what I was pondering. I was actually pondering the small differences that exist between life in Germany and life in the UK. They're silly things really, stuff you'd never even think of. But they exist nonetheless, and they make everything seem that little bit more alien. Here is my rundown:

They say you never forget your first -
Braunschweig's Amplemann.

Crossing the Road
This might seem like a weird one, but it's a serious consideration here. Jaywalking is illegal, with an on-the-spot fine of up to 25€ (as far as I remember), which is particularly enforced if you're caught doing it in front of children. Some days, this can add five to ten minutes onto my walk into work. You don't realise how often you cross a road before the lights go green in the UK. And it's a pain in the tush if there's no traffic coming and you still can't go. (Equally, traffic turning right onto the road you're crossing can still turn right. It just has to not hit you in the process, even if the little green man is showing.)
Also, I've found my first real life Ampelmännchen. :D EXCITING!

People
This is the bit where I talk about the dude I'm living with. He is the MOST GERMAN man I have ever met. Seriously. How is anyone even that German? His surname takes up two lines of space on the letterbox. He wears almost entirely black and listens to scary metal music. He does one of the most efficient sounding jobs I have ever heard of. He drives a van (I don't know why I find this particularly German, I just do) and last week he literally ate a singular sausage with mustard for dinner. He even suffers from what my father affectionately calls "The German Affliction" (smoking).
And the lady dudes at work aren't much less stereotypical. They've all got incredibly German names, like Annika and Britta, and they do that German lady thing of always wearing scarves and vests and getting into work really early to make sure they reserve their desks with towels...
Plus, most conversations I have with them are about food. Or alcohol.**
Stereotypes. They really do exist for a reason.

Breakfast
What sort of self-respecting country eats breakfast off a board? Germany, that's who.

Pasta
Apparently, pasta sauce made of beetroot, hotdog and whatever other vegetables and spices you have in the sparsely-stocked kitchen is a typical DDR meal. Apparently.
I'm not sure I believe that but, unlike some people around here, I wasn't actually born in the DDR. Something something communist rant.

(It was actually really tasty, I just wasn't expecting it.)

Mealtime Manners
You don't eat until everyone has their food. Obviously this is the same in the UK, but you always get the sort of "please start, don't all wait on ceremony" fandango going on. In Germany, you wait until everyone is seated and ready to actually begin the eating process, then you say "Guten Appetit" and then you eat. It's nice really, then everyone feels like they're included. (NB. My main experience of this is in a cafeteria, where you have to wait for everyone to sit down with their food.)

Flexitime
Awesome. This is a great idea. I know it exists in the UK, but it seems to be more common/widespread here. There are certain "core times" that you have to work (where I am it's between 10:00 and 15:00), but otherwise you can do whatever, as long as you average your total number of hours per week.
The only problem I have with flexitime is that I don't always have enough to do at the moment. Because we're not in our peak season, there isn't always enough work for me to be getting on with. This means that there is a lot of time where I have to make my own work to ensure I'm filling the minimum requirement for the week and not slacking off at 4:30 every day. Regardless of what my workload is, my hours are still the same.

Supermarket checkouts
Anyone who's used Lidl or Aldi in the UK will have a vague idea of how this works. German supermarkets don't usually have that nice long space at the end of the checkout that means you can take a bit of time packing your bags. Everything is thrown at you and pay is demanded as soon as the cashier is done. If you're not packed by then, you're in the way of the next person.
However, unlike in the UK, the person behind you is probably not going to be sympathetic of the fact that you're only twenty and haven't had to do your own shopping for much longer than a year.
You're a strong German woman, mein Gott, can't you go any faster?
I'm not German, I'm a Brit. I get sunburn and I apologise for literally everything.
Literally.
Sorry.

Achso ja, that's it really. They're the ones that immediately spring to mind. I'm sure there are others, like not walking in the cycle lanes, but you'll probably hear about those over time. My plan isn't to turn this blog into a year abroad blog, but I am now living in Germany, so you'll have to get used to the fact that I'm going to talk about German things a lot. ("What's new?" I hear you say. Yes, I can hear you through the internet.)


*I often use "dude" as an agender epithet, but for the purposes of this blog post, "dude" is male and "Lady dude" is female. I don't have to refer to anyone of any other gender in this post. When I do, I'll think of something.

** I'm fully aware that these aren't all standard German stereotypes, but they exist a lot throughout Germany, so I'm using them.




EDIT: Daniel gave up Smoking about two months ago, and he's doing really well. He's not killed anyone yet or anything.

Fame At Last?

Hello dear reader(s), and welcome back! I just have one thing for you today, although I'm hoping to have several posts out in the near future. Today I am pondering the idea that I am now famous :)

Well, sort of.

Earlier this academic year, i.e. before Christmas, I enrolled on a module called "Fremdsprachen; Lernen und Lehren" (Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages for those who don't speak German). The aims of this module were to teach us about theories of language acquisition, to explore second language development at various ages, and to essentially teach us how to teach. It was a great module, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who gets the chance to do it (so, German Studies students at Nottingham Uni.) Despite initial worries that it was just a module aimed at German learners to remind us that our only job prospect was teaching (yeah, right), it was actually very informative and interesting in itself.

The assessment for this class was an essay, but the formative assessment, carried out halfway through the module to ascertain how well we were coping with the content, was to create teaching materials for a Beginners' German first year class. We had the option, in groups, of either preparing a lecture and presenting it, or making a video. I worked with Jordan, and we made a video exploring the difficult pronunciations found in German, which just don't exist in English. Our video was, somehow, a resounding success. Sascha, who ran the module, absolutely loved it (far more than we did!) and this made us all very happy.

A few weeks ago Jordan and I received an email from Sascha, asking if he could use our video as part of a report on the module's success, with a link being put on the University's website. We of course said yes. You know, whatever makes you happy, Sascha.

From Helen

Oddly, this has ended with two people, so far, sending me links to my own video, telling me I'm famous. Well, two is hardly thousands, and I don't really need a link to the video - I'm in it! But it's nice to be recognised. By my housemates.

Anyway, here's the link to the original blog, if you fancy a read. The video link is on there:
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/clas/2015/05/21/flipped-roles-german-students-as-teachers/

Much love xx

House Hunting

It's now come to that time in my life where I've had to start (and indeed conclude) a hunt for my first privately-rented property (how scary!) So, this led to me pondering the housing market and, well, just everything really.

For anyone who's interested, I am sharing as part of a group of five girls who will all be living in a two-storey house in Beeston; near the university. The property has five bedrooms, three bathroom-esque rooms (only one actually has a bath in it, the others have showers), one lounge, one dining room, one kitchen, a scrubby garden with a "bald patch" (Helen) and a "Bedroom", in which the bedroom furniture doesn't even fit. Needless to say, this will be used as an occasional overnight room for people staying (willingly or because they're unable to use their own legs...) over and (probably) a storage room.

Basically, this whole process has made me feel very grown up; primarily because I have been doing most of the dealings with the estate agents (as the one who was willing to make the phone calls on Monday) and this gives me a terrifying level of responsibility, but also because I now realise that next year I will be responsible for myself; all the payments of bills and rent will be down to me (probably not financially, but I will be in charge of organising it) and if I mess up, it will be my own fault, with no way to blame anyone else.

That's scary.

In addition, I have decided I would be a terrible estate agent. I would feel incredibly guilty for the amount of... not quite lying, but... 'smoothing over' I would need to do to sell certain properties. Did you know there's no patron saint of estate agents*? Somehow it doesn't really surprise me. (At a stretch you could say it was St Lucy, patron saint of salespeople, but I'm not sure that's the entire of the estate agent's job.)

To be honest, my main concern for next year is getting on with my housemates, who are all lovely girls. This may seem a silly thing to say, if they're all lovely girls, why would that be a concern?
Basically, because they're so lovely I'm worried that I will be the one who will annoy everyone to the point where we have an argument and they are no longer friends with me. Apparently there's meant to be someone like that in every house. I really hope we're the exception...

If it doesn't work out, I could always live in a yurt.

Emmatt update: I realised I didn't do one of these last time, so in case anyone's interested, I thought I'd let you know. Matt and I sent a lot of time together over the Christmas holidays, even though we both had a lot to do. We're both very happy that we've now (more or less) reached five months together and are making plans to see each other in a few weeks, just after my Birthday. I also hope during this time to introduce him to some of my other friends (the girls I'm living with, plus other people in my course), although he doesn't know this yet. Sorry Matt.

*P.S. Father mine, the patron saint of Bankers is St Matthew