On Saturday evening Babel and I finally arrived home after a week of Esperanto-craziness at the IS. It was an unusual week, albeit in an enjoyable sort of way, and I hardly know where to start with describing it. I actually suspect I won’t get very far with describing it at all, because I’m off to the land of no internet in Oswestry for the rest of the week, but if I shall begin at the beginning and see how far we get (more…)

Sunday morning we got up bright and early because we had decided to head to the beautiful city of Regensburg in Eastern Bavaria. I don’t have any photos of it so you should definitely click on that wiki link to see some, because I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s beautiful. A UNESCO world heritage site, the town is situated on the river Danube and largely escaped bombing during the second world war, so has a virtually intact medieval centre which is well worth a visit. It’s quite a surreal place; almost every building in the town centre would warrant being a museum piece in another location, yet people do actually have to live normal lives here and so you have medieval churches with a discreet sign outside indicating that they now serve a wide range of spaghetti (more…)

Despite the fact that we successfully checked in online for our flight to Munich, we still had to get up at 4am 4am on a Saturday morning in December is not a pleasant sort of time, all the more so because it was literally tipping it down with rain. The world’s most talkative taxi driver refused to drop us right outside the terminal building, so we had to walk quite a distance in it and ended up very wet indeed Feeling rather tired after a week at work I was desperate for a coffee, and as soon as we got through security, the plan was to head to Costas. Security was unfortunately rather a nightmare on account of it being a Saturday, and by the time we made it to the departure lounge there were only twenty minutes until boarding. That ought to have been long enough to get a drink, but sadly the queue in Costa was so long and the staff so inefficient that my sister and I were literally just in the process of paying for our lattes when my mother arrived to tell us the flight had been called As you can imagine, I wasn’t a happy bunny and it’s made me question the whole value of ever checking in online. (more…)

I would write this post in German, except that I feel a little bit rusty at the moment. I have admittedly been getting a bit of practice in this week, but I still find it shocking how much of a language it is possible to forget once you don’t use it for a period of months. I know that all my German knowledge has not seeped out of my brain, that it is in fact just resting in a dark recess somewhere, but it is requiring conscious effort to pull it back out to the front again. So many words are getting stuck on the tip of my tongue

Munich is probably the most expensive city in Germany but also the most beautiful and exciting, and I am determined to drag Babel there one day soon, although preferably in the summer. I am going there with my family tomorrow for a mad Christmas market visit, and am very excited A full blog report on exactly how much delicious German food I managed to cram into one weekend will follow at some point next week, but not Monday because I’m seeing Babel for his birthday. (more…)

My week down south was about as enjoyable as I had been expecting. By the end of Friday, my colleague and I agreed that if we had a choice between voluntary euthanasia and life in Wantage, we would choose euthanasia. And I don’t even agree with voluntary euthanasia. Well, not really.

To be fair, the hotel was alright this time. I could pick fault with it, on the grounds that the milk in my room had gone off, the water came out of the cold tap warm, and it wasn’t obvious how to get water into the bath, but such sins can be forgiven when a place has free wireless The attached restaurant was Italian, which should have been really good, but unfortunately it was too posh to serve pizza, and when I ordered lasagne it came complete with peas (more…)

This was a book which Babel lent me, and it took me an incredibly long time to read. I’m not sure why, because I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was bad. Perhaps after how good he had told me it was, I just found it somewhat of an anti-climax. The premise of the book, which is that Hitler won the Second World War and is still in power in the 1960s, is an amazing, mind-blowing idea; the amount of thought which has got into recreating this version of the 1960s which never existed is deeply impressive; but somehow, the actual characters and plot failed to grab me and by the time I got to the end I was left with the feeling that I’d just read a rather mediocre thriller. (more…)

There are lots of reasons why German is a really cool language - far too many to list in their entireity - but here are just a few

1. Being phonetic, it’s so straightforward to pronounce. You get some amazing consonant clusters like “Dschungel” (jungle) and “Tschechien” (Czech Republic).

2. If you’re prone to catarrh, trying to pronounce a word like “Chuchichaeschtli” (Swiss German for kitchen cupboard) is a really great way of clearing your throat.

3. It’s full of genuinely enormous compound words like “Rolltreppenbenutzungshinweise” (tips for using an escalator) and ” Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsg esetz ” (the law which regulates the supervision of beef) (more…)

Bored in Stuttgart airport a couple of weeks ago, I decided to have a mooch around one of the duty-free shops, and was pleased to discover it had a small selection of books. My pleasure was actually short lived, as I soon discovered that virtually the entire stand consisted of trashy American novels in translation Just when I was about to give up and find myself a copy of Der Spiegel to read on the flight home instead, I came across a paperback novel by Bernhard Schlink. Having seen it, I had no choice but to buy it (more…)

With the cancellation of my flight, my weekend got off to a bit of a rocky start. I’d had to get up at four in order to get to the airport on time, and was a little annoyed that my taxi had set me back a whopping twenty five quid Admittedly my mother had warned me about this, explaining that a new change in legislation meant taxis were charging substantially more for fares at antisocial hours, but even so I felt faintly outraged. Nowhere near as outraged, of course, as I felt when I got to check in and became aware of the debacle with my flight. Despite the fact that it wasn’t quite six am, I was so frustrated that I had to go to Costa’s for an iced latte (any excuse), and spent the rest of the time wandering around the poor selection of shops in Birmingham airport’s grubby little terminal two. I was tempted to buy my boyfriend a handheld fan which squirts water on the grounds that he constantly experiences menopausal hot flushes, but in the end I didn’t because I figured he was probably too macho to want to use it in public (more…)

This weekend I am travelling to Tuebingen to visit my sister who is staying there. This involves flying from Birmingham to Stuttgart, the nearest airport, and the only carrier to offer this service is the airline regular travellers affectionately refer to as Fly-may-be. This is an airline which has an appallingly bad track record of cancelling flights simply because it can’t be arsed to run them. My parents were travelling to Stuttgart with them a couple of weeks ago, and they arrived at Birmingham airport to find that their flight had been “delayed”. It was delayed for a couple of hours until it became clear that Fly-may-be weren’t even trying to find a replacement aircraft. Instead they decided to transfer everyone to their Frankfurt flight and treat the Stuttgart passengers to a two hour trip down the Autobahn. (more…)