Christmas Day I got up madly early because I wanted to go to Mass at 8.30AM. My church isn’t terribly big as churches go, and Christmas Day being rather a busy day for religious folk, I figured it would be a good idea to get there early so as to get a seat. I therefore instructed my taxi service… I mean, Tim… to get me there for 8.15. This turned out to have been a bit of a mistake, as surprisingly few people had actually chosen to get out of bed so early on the most relaxed day of the year, and so the church was pretty dark and cold and empty. It soon filled up though, and Tim was nice enough to stay for the service so that I didn’t have to wait outside for him afterwards in the cold

The business of the day out of the way, it was time to head back home for the presents. I got so many lovely things that I don’t even know where to start with describing them. Tim bought be several games for our Wii – Mario Kart (which is my particular favourite at the moment), EA Active (which I discovered this morning is surprisingly tiring), an Agatha Christie game and a new Sonic the Hedgehog game (which I still haven’t tried yet!). I also got loads of books – my sister bought me the new Hitchhiker sequel (which I’ve now read and can thoroughly recommend), as well as the new Winnie-the-Pooh book, which is beautifully illustrated. Babel had set up various relatives to buy me murder mysteries from different series that I’m following, and he himself had bought me Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh in Esperanto translation, which I was particularly excited about I had all kinds of other things too, including a beautiful new overnight bag from my parents, and various additions to our mug collection. Babel’s parents bought me a boxset of Jurassic Park DVDs, which I was particularly keen to watch after my recent visit to the Natural History Museum, and we now have an entire cupboard full of sweets and biscuits, which is somewhat hindering our chances of succeeding with the New Year diet! First prize for the best present has to go to Babel, however, who designed a personalised calendar for me, with a different duck for each month of the year

We were having Christmas Day dinner at home, which was a tiny bit stressful because we’d never cooked anything approximating a roast dinner before. Nevertheless, it went remarkably well – nothing burnt and there was almost more food than we could eat In the afternoon we headed of to Babel’s sister’s house where we had a pleasant evening of Wii games.

Boxing Day was a bit more hectic as we had to pack and get the house in order in preparation for our holiday to Germany. We’d booked to attend the Novjara Internacia Semajno in Saarbruecken, Germany, but in the week leading up to Christmas it seemed an increasingly unlikely prospect on account of the fact that we’d booked to travel by Eurostar, and the Eurostar trains had virtually ground to a halt I was particularly stressed as it was me who had made the bookings and paid the money, and we stood to lose quite a lot if everything went wrong.

Nevertheless, we checked the Eurostar website on the evening of the 26th, and it seemed to imply that they were running a fairly normal service, so we relaxed a little with some wine and some Mario Kart before bed. We opened a bottle of Rose which Tim’s sister had bought me for my birthday, and it was so incredibly nice that I accidentally managed to down a glass of it within 10 minutes or so, with the result that I suddenly felt exceptionally drunk

I felt a little hungover when I woke up on Sunday morning, and not at all like an early start and a brisk walk to the local station with a suitcase in tow, but nevertheless it had to be done, and we arrived at Nuneaton station with plenty of time to spare before our first time of the day. I thought I’d been rather clever by booking our tickets and reserving our tickets on line, but the train had commenced its journey at Liverpool Lime Street, and whilst we had indeed got a reserved seat, that unfortunately didn’t guarrantee us any space in the luggage rack My fairly small suitcase managed to find a home for itself under my seat, but Tim’s had a brand shiny new suitcase which was nearly as big as me, and he didn’t stand a chance! In the end, his suitcase sat next to me and he found a space elsewhere.

I was somewhat apprehensive on the walk between Euston and St Pancras, worrying that at every turn we would come across a queue of 2000 disgruntled French people who had failed to get back home in time for Christmas. Happily, we arrived to find that there were no queues at all We whizzed through security, met up with some fellow Esperantists also travelling from the UK, and before you knew it we were sitting happily on our scheduled train, which departed 100% on time!

I must confess to being slightly scared at the prospect of going through the tunnel, not least because of all the horror stories which had been on the news with people getting stuck the preceeding week, but it was actually perfectly fine and I would definitely do it again. There wasn’t much of a view, not least because it was pouring with rain as we sped through France, but all the same it was pretty impressive to see raindrops running horizontally across the train windows in demonstration of how fast we were travelling

Having arrived safely in Paris, we had about 50 minutes to get from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est and find our connecting train. I was terribly excited to be in the elusive Gare du Nord, having spent most of my French GCSE saying “Ou est la Gare du Nord?” in a seemingly futile attempt to find it. My overriding impression of my ten minutes in Paris, however, is of dog mess, as the streets appeared to be coated in it. Hmmm

We found the second station with little trouble and made our connection with time to spare. The German ICE which was taking us straight to Saarbruecken was without doubt the most sophisticated train of the entire holiday, with more legroom than you get on most planes and plenty of space for luggage to boot. Unfortunately, when at 7pm we finally arrived at our destination the heavens had opened We were lucky in that one of the Esperantists we were travelling with had lived in the town some years back and hence had a good idea of the direction we needed to go in to get to the youth hostel, but it took us the best part of thirty minutes to get there; plenty of time to curse my stupidity for having left my umbrella on the floor of Tim’s car :cry:

It was a group of rather wet and disgruntled Esperantists which finally arrived at the Youth Hostel, only to be greeted by one of the finest examples of Esperantist disorganisation which I have ever had the misfortune to witness. I would like flatter myself that I am quite a placid person, and I am certainly not a person who swears very often at all, but if I remember correctly I nevertheless was provoked into losing my temper and using a couple of F words within the first 15 minutes of being at the event.

For a start, we walked through the door and there was no one there to meet us, no one to tell us what to do, not even any terribly visible instructions. Then, as per usual, there were hordes of other Esperantists randomly blocking all available doors and corridors because they have their heads so much in the clouds that it genuinely doesn’t occur to them that someone with luggage might actually, y’know, need to get past them. Eventually we figured out that there was a notice board, displaying the names and room numbers of all the participants. Great. Except for the fact that there was no further information, such as where your room might be located or how you were supposed to acquire the key. Hmm.

Luckily I speak German, and so I was able to ask the lady on the youth hostel reception desk. She explained to me that my room wasn’t in the youth hostel at all, but in a local hotel a 5 minute walk away. I asked her if she could give me directions and she said she was sorry, but she didn’t know where it was. She told me I would have to ask the main organiser. Fine, except I’d never met the guy before, so had absolutely no idea what he might look like. The lady was nice enough to give me a reasonable description of him, and we bumped into him shortly afterwards anyway, but the point is that I shouldn’t have had to go through that rigmarole, and what the hell was I supposed to do if I hadn’t, like, had the foresight to learn German in advance?!

Deep breaths. We acquired both our room keys and some verbal directions to the hotel, and made our way to the dining room to get some dinner and calm down. Much as I love attending Esperanto events and find it a truly valuable experience, every time Tim and I attend one we both end up so wound up on the first evening that we could easily hit someone. Whether it’s standing for half an hour in a queue of people in Hungary to have a flipping name badge laminated, waiting three hours in a ridiculous ticket system in Liberec, or being addressed by idiots in Bialystok, arrival is never a pleasant experience.

Humph. On entering the dining room, I was delighted to see that the dinner was spaghetti bolognaise, one of my favourites My delight was shortlived, however, when upon having piled a generous helping onto my plate and gobbled the first few eager mouthfuls, I realised that this was in fact not spaghetti bolognaise. Oh no! Spaghetti it most certainly was, BUT THERE WAS NO MEAT IN IT! Now I don’t know how other people feel about this, but I believe quite deeply that you cannot call something spaghetti bolognaise unless there is MEAT in it. You can call it “a vegetarian rip-off of spaghetti bolognaise”, or perhaps “spaghetti veggie-mush-aise”, or something more catchy if you can think of it, but spaghetti bolognaise it is not. As you can see I was quite wound up about this, in particular because when I checked, there was no meat option which I had missed. I decided to give the organisers the benefit of the doubt at this stage, however, on the grounds that it was the last half hour of a two hour dinner-serving, and perhaps all the meat had simply been eaten already? More on that later.

Babel led us to the hotel, which really wasn’t very far away at all. We struggled to find the door initially, the reception of the hotel being completed shut up and locked, and the premises consisting of two buildings on opposite sides of the road. Eventually we found what we figured must be the correct place, and Babel attempted to enter the door code which we had been given by the organiser.

It didn’t work.

He tried entering it again.

It still didn’t work.

We entered it multiple times, to the accompaniment of much cursing and swearing.

The door remained quite firmly closed.

You have to try to picture our frustration at this point. It’s nearly nine o clock at night and we’d been travelling since nine in the morning. We’re standing outside in the freezing cold, soaked from the rain, with a pile of heavy suitcases, and we can’t get into our hotel. Tim looked like he might just kill someone

To cut a long story short, Tim jogged back down to the youth hostel in an attempt to find out the correct code. In the meantime, a Belgian Esperantist who had been given exactly the same code turned up and failed to get the door open either. We shivered and grumbled for 15 minutes or so until Tim reappeared and explained that we were standing in front of the wrong door. The door we were supposed to be entering through was on the opposite side of the road, through an archway and up a flight of stairs, making it invisible to anyone who might be standing outside the hotel reception. Of course, why hadn’t we thought of that! :ninja:

Happily the code worked on this new door, and I have to say that when we got inside we were all pleasantly surprised by the rooms. Considering we’d only paid a couple of hundred euros each for the entire week, it really was accommodation of a very high standard. We ended up with our own little apartment, complete with a private bathroom and a little kitchenette with kettle, sink and fridge This proved to be particularly useful during the week as we were able to stock up on alcohol at the supermarket round the corner and store it in the fridge for several days. There was a slight snag for the first few days as we all struggled to find a bottle opener (note to self, never go on holiday again without a bottle opener), but overall it was excellent We settled down to watch Jurassic Park on Tim’s laptop, not feeling much like any socialising, and when a good friend of ours turned up with a bottle of wine, the evening really couldn’t have got much better.

Monday morning dawned grey and slightly miserable. After breakfast at the youth hostel we met up with some friends and went walking into Saarbruecken to explore our new surroundings. I have to say, I was a little disappointed and of all the towns I have ever visited in Germany (which is really quite a few) this is the closest I have ever come to describing a place as ugly. Saarbruecken really doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it. Admittedly, there are some pretty churches and the town hall is quite impressive, but overall most of it looks like it was built by a 60s town planner who only had his mind half on the job.

That said, there were some compensations A little bit of the Christmas market was still doing business, and so I was able to get a welcome mug of Gluehwein to stave off the cold. Actually I sort of ended up with two glasses of Gluehwein, as I bought one for Tim as well but he didn’t like it The result was that I felt fairly drunk for most of Monday afternoon. There was a nice bookshop which we enjoyed looking around, and we stumbled across a stationers where we purchased two beautiful postcards of ducks. One of them shows two rubber ducks dressed up as wedding costumes – they’re so cute, it would be amazing if we could have something like that on the top of our wedding cake

We found the tourist information office too, and acquired a map and some useful information about what we could do in the wider area. One advantage of Saarbruecken is that it’s very close (about 5km) to the French border, so if you decide you want to get out of it, it’s very easier. By Wednesday, we’d decided that we did want to get out of it, and set off on various adventures.

Unfortunately, the programme at the event left a bit to be desired. That is to say, you may judge that I am not qualifed to comment on the programme on the grounds that (with two exceptions) I failed to find anything in it that I wished to participate in. I don’t wish to sound too harsh, because this is an event which has traditionally been aimed at families, and if you were an eight year old child, the activities on offer may have been excellent. But this year it was being marketed as an event for young adults too, and activities for that age group were severely lacking. Yes, there were some lectures but they were all in the vein of “Why Esperanto hasn’t conquered the world”, “What we need to do so that Esperanto conquers the world”, and that sort of crap. There were some concerts, but Esperanto music isn’t really my thing. If you wanted to get up at 6am in the morning, I think there was some Tai Chi. That was about it.

Tuesday it poured and poured with rain, and we spent the morning confined to our hotel room. I was pretty disappointed because I hate feeling cooped up, but without an umbrella I was too much of a wimp to go through with my original plan of going for a walk in the woods. In the afternoon Tim was chairing a discussion group session on the theme of “fumado” (smoking). Initially it seemed worryingly like no one was going to turn up, but happily people did and we had quite a civilised and intelligent discussion. It could have gone a bit wrong, as Esperantists can be strongly anti-smoking, but actually it went pretty well and it’s a shame there weren’t more things like that in the programme; opportunities to talk *in* Esperanto but not *about* Esperanto. Talking about Esperanto is really rather dull

Tuesday evening we participated in a magnificent session which for me is the thing that redeemed the entire programme: “Kiu estas la murdisto?” (Who is the murderer?). We had signed up for this in advance and been allocated a character by Fabien, who had worked tirelessly to translate all the background and character notes from French to Esperanto. I love detective fiction so had been really looking forward to the evening, until I received my notes and read the first line “Gratulon! Vi estas la murdisto” (Congratulations! You are the murderer!).

I was playing the part of a pregnant woman who shot her husband dead because she was having an affair with his identical twin. This made me very stressed indeed – I don’t like being in the limelight at all, so I hadn’t wanted such a key role, and I was worried that everyone would see straight through me and the evening would be no fun because everyone would know I did it Trying to make myself look pregnant was fun – in the end we rolled up a couple of Tim’s T’Shirts and tied them round my waist. Not a good look!

I needn’t have worried, because the evening actually went really well. I have to admit that chickened out of giving birth to the baby (as I didn’t have a doll or teddy bear to use as a prop). The plot was so well written that there were some major twists and turns, even for me who knew that I’d done it, and it was a really fun group of people who were playing, which made it all the more cool. Tim took us all hostage with a gun which was quite amusing, and when it came to the revelations at the end, no one had guessed that it was me, so I felt quite relieved

By Wednesday we had 100% had enough of the food in the youth hostel. Now I don’t wish to sound rude, because I 100% respect other peoples’ right to be vegetarian, but there is a difference between the right to be vegetarian and the right to prevent other people from eating meat. There was some watery ham for breakfast in the youth hostel, and a token taste of meat at lunch (say, a couple of pieces of hotdog in a stew, or some miniature pepperoni on a slice of pizza) but the evening meal was exclusively vegetarian, which quite frankly I found shocking. Not only were we in Germany, a country which is normally famed for its meat-eating, but we had quite clearly signed up the event as meat-eaters. I completely understand the need for there to be a vegetarian option on every menu, in particular at Esperanto events where perhaps the majority of people are vegetarians, but I 100% expect there to be a valid meat option as well. Why this wasn’t the case, I don’t know. I can only assume it was at the request of the organisers, who felt that the high proportion of vegetarians within the participants negated the need to serve meat every day. Or else there was a vegetarian somewhere on a power trip. God knows, but I wasn’t impressed :cry:

So, on Wednesday we got on a little local train and hopped across the border into France. The nearest town had the very unFrench-sounding name of Forbach, and was a mere 10 minutes journey away. It wasn’t the most beautiful place in the world but it had a pretty old town, complete with a picturesque castle which afforded us a not inconsiderable amount of exercise when we attempted to climb the hill it was situated on. Best of all we found a lovely cafe where we were able to get the first decent meal of the hotel – a beautiful gratin with cheese and onion and bacon

Thursday was another rainy day, but we decided to go further afield and catch a bus to Luxembourg. It was a surprise to me that you could do this, but it was actually only 1 hour 15 minutes away, so it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss Luckily we remembered to pack our passports, as two rather scary German police boarded the bus and demanded to see an Ausweis before we set off. What would have happened if we hadn’t had them I have no idea, but I doubt that it would have been pleasant.

I knew very little about Luxembourg when we arrived there – in fact I still know very little about it now – but I liked it immediately. It must be the most linguistically confusing place in the world, signs being in French, German or the local language Luxembourgish with no particular method to the madness. Still, it was good to have options as to which language to communicate in Before we set off on a sight-seeing stroll, we found a delightful restaurant where we were able to fill up on a much needed steak and chips. Ah, steak, how I love thee! I very rarely eat steak at all, but following the meat-starvation in Saarbruecken it was very welcome indeed.

I have some nice pictures of Luxembourg on Facebook if you want to see them. There were a lot of very posh shops and banks, presumably a lot of accountants too, but there was also an amazingly tall city wall with a beautiful park below it, and despite the somewhat miserable weather we were able to have a lovely walk in the urban greenery.

Thursday was actually New Year’s Eve, so when we got back to the youth hostel we got dressed up in smart clothes and headed off to the buffet. I was expecting great things from the buffet, the one at the IS in Biedenkopf last year having been truly splendid, but this one was a little disappointing. For a start, although we didn’t arrive late, the only seats left when Tim and I arrived were crammed into a little corner, blocked in such a way that we couldn’t stand up without asking other people to move. This is quite a disadvantage in a buffet situation. Secondly, if you get over 150 Esperantists sitting in a room, then place vast quantities of food on relatively few tables and unleash them at it, queuing chaos will clearly ensue. To give the organisers their dues, they did try to suggest that rather than queuing horizantally in a great big line, we should all queue “vertically” in front of the food we actually wanted, but all this achieved was to enable an aggressive old biddy to shout at me when I was standing beside the soup, having let a child push in front of me. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to queue vertically?!”. Hmm. I think perpendicular might have been the word you were looking for

As for the food itself, I didn’t eat very much of it. There was some nice pate for the starter, and for the main course I had a little bit of goulash (made from veal so unethically tasty) and a small amount of chicken curry (I don’t like curry, but I was attracted by the thought of chicken). That was about it. The room was unbearably warm by virtue of the fact that there were twice as many people in it as it was designed to accommodate, and that combined with the claustrophobia of being hemmed in against a random obstacle meant that we soon had to get outside for some fresh air. Upon doing so, I was particularly annoyed to find that our coats, which had been hanging on the back of our chairs, had brushed up against some sort of fake snow made from cotton wool, and were thus absolutely covered by a fine white fluff. I spent the best part of twenty minutes trying to pick the hairs of mine, but the result was so thoroughly unsatisfactory that I have had to come home and purchase a clothes brush on Amazon. I only have one winter coat, and I need it to look smart for work

We were in such bad humour by this stage that we went back to our room and decided to stay there. There had been the promise of icecream after ten but it was too long to wait, and neither of us fancied participating in the ball anyway, dancing not really being our sort of thing. So we read for a bit, and went to bed pretty much on midnight. What an exciting start to the new decade!

At least we weren’t hungover on New Year’s Day We got up relatively early and embarked on an epic walk across the suburbs of Saarbruecken to get to the local swimming pool. Contrary to expectations, this actually proved to be well worth it, having not only a virtually empty sports pool for swimming quiet lengths, but a series of smaller pools linked together by slides and whirlpools and all sorts. I was too scared to go on the slides at first but we had a lot of fun in the whirlpool, a circular channel with a strong current to sweep you along as you swim We were there for about 90 minutes, and by the end I finally worked up enough courage to confront my combined fears of vertigo and drowning, and tackle the slide.

To call it a slide is actually a bit misleading, because it was an adventure in three parts and really only the last bit of it was what I would conventionally describe as a slight. You started by climbing a staircase to a deceptively calm pool of water. At one end of this there was a big bump onto which you had to haul yourself, and when you pushed off you were swept down and along a channel by a strong current of water. I survived this first bit and felt pretty proud. The second bit was more daunting and involved some screaming as I was swept into a pool outside the building, whilst having water poured on my head. I became thoroughly submerged and began to see my life flash before my eyes (chiefly as a series of standing in pointless queues at Esperanto events) but before I had time to speculate as to whether there would be steak in heaven, Tim managed to grab me and I was saved Somewhat traumatised by this experience I nearly didn’t embark on the third slide, but I eventually felt shamed into it when a five year old girl went down in front of me, but in the end I did and it was pretty cool; one of those things you’re glad you’ve done once it’s over.

There was just time for a quick McDonalds (we’re such bad Esperantists, we need to work harder at cultivating a proper hatred of all things American!) before we met up with a friend to go ice-skating in the town centre. This was not such a successful experience. I’ve only been skating twice in my life, both times on a date with a previous boyfriend. The first time was amazing and I really loved it; we were there two hours and after a lot of holding onto the edge and a few falls, I was able to do circuits of the rink no problem. The second time I was just getting into the swing of it again when some kid decided to stab another kid and a van of policemen turned up to raid the rink, just like we were in the Bill. A couple of weeks later, someone burned the rink down, and since then there hasn’t been anywhere in Birmingham to go skating at all

So I was kinda looking forward to this opportunity, it may even have been my idea, but I was absolutely hopeless I even needed Babel’s help to get the shoes on properly, and whilst I managed to walk to the rink without falling over, that was as good as it got! I wanted to do a couple of circuits pretty much holding on to the edge before I felt brave enough to let go, but there were so many people outside the rink leaning against the edge that mostly there wasn’t a lot left to hold onto, and I just got kinda scared. The only highlight of the experience was a lovely German man (also struggling to stay upright) who told me that he was glad there was someone worse than him here, and, upon passing me twenty minutes later seemingly still on my first circuit of the rink, laughed and said “Eine Stunde, eine Runde”

Saturday was our last day and we decided to head to France once more, this time to the beautiful town of Strasbourg. We were fortunate enough to be with a group of very capable Germans, who knew to purchase a group ticket and hence saved us rather a lot of money on the train fare It was a pleasant journey on the train, and when we arrived Strasbourg was beautiful, albeit in an bloody freezing sort of way. Having seen the cathedral, which is possibly the most enormous cathedral I have ever seen in my entire life, we found a restaurant serving Flammkuchen and hence had what was possibly the best meal of the entire holiday After than we wandered aimlessly around the town until the light faded, strolling along by the river and noting to our surprise that the audio on the boat tours has Esperanto as one of the language options. Sadly we weren’t able to test it out, because the water in the river was too high for the boats to be running

When evening fell we met up with everyone once more for an evening meal, and I had the best burger I have ever had in a jacket potato restaurant(!), before catching the train back to Saarbruecken. It was gone nine at night before we got back to the hotel – just time to pack and finish the remaining bottle of wine before bed Packing went surprisingly well – Carolin had very kindly brought no fewer than eight German books along for me, and there was no way they were going to fit in my suitcase, but Tim managed to squeeze them into his with no problems. The journey home on Sunday was uneventful, and we were back safe and sound in Nuneaton by 7pm.

Overall… I’m glad we went; it was nice to be in Germany, and fun to travel to France and Luxembourg. It was a good week in fact, but only because there were a few nice people who we knew and because we organised our own entertainment. Would I go to Saarbruecken again? Probably not, unless there was a very good reason. Would I go to NIS again as an event? No, I think not. Will I go to JES, which is supposed to be taking place in Germany next year? I honestly don’t know – Tim and I are going to give it some serious thought and perhaps opt to spend New Year at home, playing with our Christmas presents

It seemed like less of a good idea at 3.45am on Saturday, when my alarm went off Well, strictly speaking it was Tim’s alarm, because in a moment of madness, Tim had volunteered to get up and drive me to Birmingham airport. I had no idea how long this would take from Nuneaton, and there’s always the potential for us to get lost when I’m in charge of the navigating, so in all honesty we could probably have had an extra half hour in bed and I would still have got to the airport for 5.30 as required.

I feel rather guilty for having abandoned Tim for the entire weekend in order to go on holiday without him… especially because it was the weekend before his birthday… and in particular because today is his birthday and I’m not at home because of work He claimed he didn’t mind though, and he would have been thoroughly miserable if I’d brought him with me, because I was going to visit the Christmas markets in Nuremberg, and Tim is not exactly a big Christmas market fan!

We flew from Birmingham to Munich with Lufthansa, which would have been quite a pleasant experience were it not for the fact that Lufthansa have switched from hard cheese to soft cheese in their regulation cheese sandwich, and soft cheese is a rather revolting thing to try and eat at 7am in the morning. Especially when it’s a Saturday morning, because the best sort of Saturdays are those which don’t start until midday

We landed in Munich around 10am I immediately felt exceptionally happy, because if it doesn’t sound silly, Munich is my favourite airport ever I think it’s because I’ve flown there so very many times that I know exactly where everything is; the location of all the toilets, where the best place to eat a Vanilleschnecke is, and all kinds of other non essential things which make landing there a completely stress-free experience. Unlike landing at Frankfurt, which makes me wish I’d jumped out of the plane while I still had chance.

45 minutes on an S-Bahn later we arrived in Munich proper, where we had precisely 90 minutes before we had to catch our connecting train to Nuremberg. 90 minutes is a very insufficient amount of time to spend in Munich, but it was just enough time to rush to the edge of the Christmas market at Stachus, gobble down 3 Nuernberger sausages and a delicious Nutella crepe, then rush all the way back again

We actually rushed a bit too much, arriving at the station by 12.30 when we didn’t need to be there until 13.00. We speculatively approached the platform we were expecting our train to come in on, in case it happened to be there early, and to my not inconsiderable surprise, we found that there was indeed a train sitting there. Now I have travelled enough by train over the past four years to know that it is not necessarily to jump on trains indiscriminately if there is any doubt in your mind as to whether they are The Right Train, but I was with my family, and jump on it they did…

Five minutes later, it unexpectedly started moving. As you can imagine, there was not inconsiderable shock in our carriage Happily, the conductor made a timely announcement to the effect that the train was indeed going to Nuremberg, but even so it seemed a little odd, especially when this train didn’t feature on the Munich-Nuremberg timetable which we’d printed off the internet for reference.

Oh well, we sat back and began to enjoy the journey. The scenery was rather spectacular because it had been snowing on Friday night, and there was a light dusting of snow across all the fields. I flinched slightly when we stopped at Dachau, mainly because my geography of Bavaria isn’t terribly good and I didn’t realise it was on our route. My mother said she’d seen a TV programme about Dachau recently and how the residents were trying to rebrand it, but I imagine that must be rather a difficult task

We were expecting the journey to take somewhere in the region on 90 minutes, but by 2pm we’d made it as far as Ingolstadt, which I estimated to be about halfway. Another lady in our carriage was obviously concerned and she stopped the conductor as he walked through to ask him what our expected arrival time in Nuremberg would be. Imagine our surprise when he said 15.30!! It turned out that we’d accidentally boarded a very slow regional train, which called at every barn between Munich and Nuremberg and hence took the best part of 3 hours to reach its destination. Oh dear

By the time we finally reached Nuremberg we were all rather exhausted from sitting on trains, and had to pop into a cafe for a reviving Latte Macchiato… or possibly we just all have a dangerous addiction to Latte Macchiato, which causes us to book expensive flights to Germany several times a year Revitalised by caffeine, we squeezed our way along the packed streets of Nuremberg to our hotel.

The hotel was a little odd. I suppose there was nothing seriously wrong with it, but there were several things which were a bit unusual. There was only one lift, for example, and whilst the sign inside claimed that it was suitable for five people, it was rather a struggle to cram three in. My sister and I decided to use the stairs instead and managed to locate them by consulting the fire escape map, but imagine our surprise when we discovered that the staircase was furnished with windows that opened directly onto outside (that is to say, they had no glass in them!) and that when we got to the bottom, we opened the door and found ourselves outside in the street, as opposed to in the reception as we imagined!

I took the opportunity of being in the hotel to change into my thermal underwear, which I know is not a terribly glamorous thing to do, but I was so exceptionally cold when I went to the markets in Munich last year that I thought I was going to collapse and die, and I didn’t want the same premonitions to ruin this weekend for me

Suitably clothed, we headed out to find somewhere to eat. It so happened that we stumbled across a branch of Vapiano where I seem to end up eating every time I’m in Germany, despite the fact that I can never decide whether it is the most wonderful or the most disturbing dining experience I have ever had. If you’ve never been to a Vapiano, you need to organise a short break to a city which has one Basically you choose what you want to eat off the menu, and then stand in front of the chef while he cooks it. This is kind of amazing if you’re a fussy eater like me and want to tell him to leave the green things out, but also kind of stressful when you’re abroad and trying to make polite small talk in a foreign language.

Fed and watered, we set off to explore the famous Nuremberg markets. I’d always wanted to visit the famous markets in Nuremberg and I wasn’t disappointed Don’t get me wrong – it was horrendously busy, and especially on Saturday night, it was a real crush to get round the stalls, but the atmosphere was really, really good and despite the crowds, there was no aggressive pushing. People were content just to go with the flow and have a good time… or else they’d all drunk too much Gluehwein to care where they were going The market itself was the most tasteful I’d ever seen – no tacky Christmas displays or naff music And the quality of things for sale far surpassed a lot of the tat which the Germans try to sell in the markets they bring to the UK.

A lot of people have asked me why I bothered going to Germany when we have a German market in Birmingham every year, but it really is completely different. Things are cheaper for a start But apart from that, it’s so much more fun. In Germany you don’t get just one market, the whole city centre can be taken over by a series of markets with different themes. I went to the Cologne one year and experienced a Christmas market on a boat on the Rhine. In Munich last year, we found a medieval market with a hog roast and fire eating. This year in Nuremberg there was a special children’s market (complete with the most wonderful model train display you ever did say) and also a special market dedicated to stalls from the towns with which Nuremberg is twinned. We tracked down a stall from Glasgow, where a couple of Scots were bravely trying to sell “hot toddy” to some rather unenthusiastic Germans.

I have to confess that after our hideously early start, none of us were up for a late night and I was safely tucked up in bed by 9.30 Nevertheless, Sunday was another day and we didn’t have to leave Nuremberg until 5pm. After a rather sparse breakfast at the hotel, we headed out to see the sights of the town with less people around. We saw the house of Albrecht Duerer, although I have to confess that being as ignorant as I am of art, I didn’t recognise any of his works except for the praying hands, which I think I have seen on Christmas cards in the past

As we climbed up the slope to the castle it began to snow, and by the time we had reached the top and were looking out towards the town, there was a veritable blizzard. I took lots of lovely photos involving snowflakes which are on Facebook if you want to see them. I may not have the energy to resize them and upload them here

The disadvantage of snow is, of course, that it makes you rather cold, which was our cue to find another cafe for another Latte Macchiato After that, we commenced Mission “Eat as much German food as possible, before it’s time to go home again”. We found a lovely stall in the main market selling the famous Nuremberg sausages, so each had three of those in a roll but whilst delicious, it didn’t quite hit the spot. We were too embarrassed to go back to the same stall for a second helping, so we had to hunt out another stall selling the same sort of sausages for the following three. A spot of pudding was in order after that, so we polished off our second Nutella crepe of the weekend and washed it down with the best Gluehwein I have ever had in my entire life After that, there really wasn’t space for any Nuremberg Lebkuchen but, well, it had to be done

We did a bit more sightseeing in the afternoon in an attempt to walk off some of the food, and the most impressive thing which we came across was the church of St Sebaldus, an obscure German saint from the middle ages, who I have to confess I had never heard of before in my life. There’s been a church there since the 13th century though, which is pretty impressive, and it was very beautiful inside. The building certainly gave the impression of being very old, and so it was with great surprise that I noticed a display of photos from the church’s past. It turned out that the building had been completely destroyed by Allied bombing towards the end of the war, along with most of the centre of Nuremberg. Sad, but not entire surprising when you contemplate the city’s infamous history. What was surprising, was the fact that immediately after the cessation of war, reconstruction of the church had begun, with the result than in 1957 it was essentially looking as good as new You can see some of the photos of the destruction of Nuremberg here.

On a lighter note, we used our last hour in Nuremberg to do a bit of Christmas shopping and I finally succeeded in buying a nativity scene for our new house – yay!! It’s a really tasteful wooden one, with sheep and a palm tree, and it wasn’t as expensive as you’d expect a carved wooden nativity scene to be. We also managed to pick up some elusive Ritter Sport to feed our addictions

All too soon it was time to catch the train back to Munich This time we succeeded in catching the correct train though, which was an improvement, and the journey passed off without event. Babel met me at the airport, and I was safely home by 11pm. It was a very exciting weekend, but I certainly paid for it with extreme exhaustion at work on Monday. Oh well, by this time next year I don’t doubt that I will have forgotten the pain of getting up at 3.45 on a Saturday and have planned another trip ;)

The beginning is actually that I was very scared about going and not looking forward to it as much as one might reasonablely expect a person to be looking forward to their holiday. I had admittedly survived the IJK during the summer in an ultimately rather positive manner, but I for reasons which I would struggle to explain, I felt significantly less confident going into this event than I had during the summer. I don’t know, I guess I was reasonably happy over the summer, whereas the past month or so at work had been rather horrible, and I felt generally rather upset and miserable. The more depressed I feel, the less confidence I have and the more I just want to hide under my bed and not come out. I think it’s harder to be cheerful anyway at this time of year when the nights are so dark, as opposed to in the summer when life seems sunny and full of possibilities. So there was a part of me which didn’t actually want to go to the IS at all, which felt like it could no longer remember how to speak Esperanto, and which felt utterly incapable of the mental exertion required to walk into rooms full of new people and speak to them. Plus I knew from the start that realistically I wasn’t going to be able to spend very much time with Babel, him having a lot of other commitments to fulfil….

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t want to go abroad for a week and leave behind my favourite thing in the whole world; my new, shiny laptop! :cry:

Nevertheless, the tickets were booked and whether I felt mentally prepared for the adventure or not was irrelevant. Babel did an outstanding job of waking up on time and arrived at my house by 4.30 to collect me. I had been a little apprehensive about whether we would find our way to the airport carpark without getting lost, but with the aid of some helpful directions we were soon there and dropping off the Moosemobile. The carpark was admittedly rather a long way away from the airport – or at least, the bus journey seemed to take quite a long time – but it was well worth it for the excellent value of less than £25 for an entire week

Having arrived at the airport, my forward planning in checking in online the night before proved to have been an excellent idea, as we were able to circumvent the queue of several hundred people who were waiting outside the Lufthansa check-in desk and drop our bags off in a matter of minutes, before breezing through security with enough time to spare for breakfast. There’s a very nice cafe in terminal one of Birmingham airport which offers a breakfast much more reasonably priced than the Wetherspoons in terminal two, and in no length of time we were tucking into a hearty feed of bacon and eggs. I even got some free hash browns because I said I didn’t want any baked beans

The flight to Germany was rather uneventful. The weather wasn’t good enough to have much of a view, even though I’d managed to nab the window seat. By 10am we had landed in Frankfurt and the journey ahead of us was so simple, especially in comparison to our journey to the IJK during the summer, that we had chance to do a bit of sight-seeing in the city. I was especially excited about this, having visited Frankfurt once several years ago but only having had chance to get a very brief overview of the place. Stashing our suitcases in the baggage lockers, we set off to see what we could see!

I don’t think Frankfurt is ever going to win an award for being the most attractive city in Germany, although arguably it’s more attractive than Birmingham, but I think it’s quite an exciting place. By pure coincidence we headed out down the main road from the station and came across one of the sights I was most interested in seeing; the headquarters of the European Central Bank. I had a vague recollection of having seen this from the distance last time I was in Frankfurt, and having got close enough to establish there was an absolutely enormous Euro symbol erected outside it, before being dragged away by uninterested relatives. This time I was determined to get a proper look at it, and having the good fortune not to be on my own, I was even able to get a photo of myself taken in front of it. I appreciate it might not be to everybody’s taste, but I think it’s really beautiful

We wandered along the main shopping street, stopping off for a nostalgic look in Woolworth, and I thought that my day couldn’t get any more exciting, until I turned a corner and all of a sudden saw the most amazing thing you can imagine. I would upload a photo for you but I’m worried that I might die in the attempt, so instead I’ll just link you here
so you can see for yourselves…

It may seem that your eyes are deceiving you, but I am in a position to inform you that no, it is not a mirage; there really is a pub in Frankfurt which is named after Birmingham Having seen it, we felt morally obliged to go in and take a look, and seeing as it was nearly lunchtime for anyone who’d been up since 4am, we soon ended up eating rather delicious Bratwurst in the peculiar surroundings of random British memorabilia. After that we managed to find the river, which was another item on my “things to see in Frankfurt” list, and then wandered around aimlessly in the hope of finding a bookstore. Frankfurt seemed shockingly devoid of bookshops at first, but eventually we stumbled across a branch of Hugendubel and it was worth the wait I walked away not only with a German translation of a Sharpe novel, but also as the proud owner of a globe. And not just any old globe, oh no! This one is a tasteful shade of brown and has all the names of the countries written on it in German!!!

All too soon it was time to leave and head off towards the IS. We caught a train first to Marburg, before changing onto a small regional line towards Biedenkopf. It was a very short journey, in total only 1 hour 45 minutes, but there was nevertheless no small amount of confusion when we reached Biedenkopf due to the fact that we hadn’t realised it was a town with 2 stations! Initially having disembarked at the wrong one, we eventually found our way to the right one, and from there to the youth hostel where we would be staying for the week.

I was interested to see what the quality of accommodation in the youth hostel would be like, and am pleased to be able to report that it was very high indeed. Our room was bigger than I expected, having a single bed as well as two bunks, and there was even space for a little table and two chairs in addition to a wardrobe each. What surprised me most, however, was the fact that we had our own ensuite bathroom! Very nice indeed

The rest of the first evening is a little indistinct for me. I assume we must have eaten at some point, but I don’t recall it. There was some sort of interkona vespero in the evening but I didn’t participate in it. Babel and I went downstairs and milled about for a while, but I felt exceptionally nervous and utterly incapable of socialising. A glass of wine might have helped, but the trinkejo was only able to serve beer and before many minutes had passed I had decided I couldn’t cope with the situation and run away upstairs. There I proceeded to attempt to cry myself to sleep, although didn’t entirely succeed because I was still awake when Babel reappeared some time later. I dunno, I just really didn’t want to be there and the whole week was looming in front of me like a great big black scary thing that was going to overwhelm me. Plus it was pretty late at night and I hadn’t had much sleep and I’m prone to get tearful when I’m tired Somewhere in the middle of this I succeeded in banging my head on the bunk bed, which only added insult to injury But eventually I was all cried out, and ready to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning it was with the resolution that I was going to keep as busy as possible, so as not to give myself time to get so scared and unhappy again…

I have been to Regensburg many times before, but never fail to be impressed by it. On Sunday I was obviously very tired, and I was in a not inconsiderable amount of pain which the two paracetamol I had remembered to pack with me didn’t do a whole lot to shift, even when I had the happy thought of combining them with Gluehwein. Still, it was one day only and I made the best of it. Things got off to an excellent start when, upon checking out of the hotel in the morning, I was handed…. wait for it…. a rubber duck!!!!!!! Which is why the Hotel Mark in Munich must surely rank as the best hotel of all time; as a Christmas present, they were presenting every guest who checked out with their own duck My sister got one too, though I’m not sure she appreciated it as much as I did

The train journey to Regensburg takes about an hour and a half and is fairly pleasant, especially when remnants of Friday’s snow were still covering the countryside. Once in the town, we wandered around for a bit to soak up the atmosphere, before consuming some more sausages at the main Christmas market in the town centre. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I really wished I had a memory card in my camera as we went for a stroll across the famous stone bridge over the Danube. The bridge once made Regensburg an important trading centre, and knights pupportedly used it as their route to cross the river on their way to the Crusades. It is almost overwhelming to have so much history in one place. Regensburg was also the home of the famous Johannes Kepler, something which as a mathematician I find rather exciting, and the current Pope has links with the university there. Not all history is positive, however. Every so often the cobbled streets are broken up by golden stars, which give the names of the Jews who lived in these streets and the camps they were deported to

As the afternoon drew on, we sought on a private Christmas market which was taking place in the grounds of Schloss Thurn und Taxis, a large palace belonging to a famous German dynasty, which is situated between the town centre and the train station. You had to pay to get in, which personally I found a bit off-putting, but in the end it was well worth it because it was a totally unique experience. If anything, it was more medieval than the so-called medieval market we’d visited the previous day in Munich Walkways were illuminated with burning torches, and at random intervals there were open log fires burning for guests to warm themselves around. It was a total disregard for European laws on health and safety which would never be allowed in this country, but nevertheless it was all rather lovely. We ended up eating a massive portion of Kaiserschmarrn, a traditional Austrian/Bavarian pudding which consists of broken up pieces of pancake served with sauce. Delicious I also managed to fit in another latte macchiato before it was time to catch the train back to Munich.

The journey home passed mostly without incident, although there was a lot of turbulence on the flight which made it difficult to drink my coffee. All in all it was a lovely weekend, and something which I would definitely choose to repeat

The flight across was pleasant enough, although cloudy so there wasn’t much of a view. Lufthansa provided the obligatory cheese sandwich, although it was far too early for it to seem an appetizing prospect. By ten we were hovering above Munich, and it was with extreme astonishment that I noticed as we came in to land that the ground beneath us was covered in a beautiful blanket of white Snow was indeed what was needed to make it a perfect wintry weekend, but I don’t think any of us had reasonably expected it, especially as it hasn’t been particularly cold in England of late.

The journey from the airport into Munich proper takes about fifty minutes on the S-bahn. The journey is normally a bit dull, the surrounding countryside being utterly flat, but the snow made the fields quite delightful and it passed in no time at all The airport itself was very Christmassy, having it’s own little market, but we were there so early in the morning that it hadn’t actually opened for business yet. It struck me at this point that I had managed to get all the way to Munich in the time it would normally take me just to get out of bed and have a bath on a Saturday morning

There was something comfortingly familiar about arriving into Munich Hauptbahnhof, despite the fact that it’s been the scene of many of our past railway-travelling disasters. At least we know where the baggage lockers are, although the very existence of baggage lockers in a station which is far, far bigger than even London Euston never ceases to be a source of amazement to me. We were starving hungry by this stage, and struck out into Munich to see what sort of exciting food the markets had to offer.

It was absolutely delightful to see Munich, a city which I have only ever visited on bright sunny days, covered in Christmas decorations. Everything was so much more tasteful and discreet than in Britain, the decorations plainer and less colourful but still attractive. The Christmas markets started at Stachus, where an enormous ice rink had been built on the site of what is in summer a striking fountain, and stretched all the way down the main street, into the famous Marienplatz and beyond. It was interesting to look at the stalls and assess how different they are to those which come to the UK purporting to be authentic German markets. There was far less food than there typically is in the UK, and more craftwork. I was also surprised by the number of stalls which were simply selling fruit

Anyways, we found a man who was selling delicious little Nürnberger sausages in rolls and treated ourselves to a few before heading down to the Schrannenhalle. If you’ve never been to the Schrannenhalle, I’m not really sure how to describe it. I believe that in a former life, the building used to be an undercover grain market. It’s certainly a big hall which had some sort of industrial usage in days gone by, and has recently been converted into an attraction for the people of Munich. There are a few shops of a crafty sort of nature inside it, but the main draw is the food. There are countless numbers of little restaurant outlets dotted around the edges of the building, with large open seating areas in between. It’s a good place to go on a date with someone whose taste in food is totally dissimilar to your own, because you can sit at any of the tables and order off any of the menus. So if you want to eat Italian whilst the person next to you wants to eat Chinese, it’s perfectly possible. Actually I ought to take Babel there!

This time we weren’t going for a full meal, of course, but rather just for coffee and I was very excited to be served my first latte macchiatto of the weekend. It may be that no one who reads this is entirely sure what a latte macchiatto is, because England seems to be peculiarly devoid of them. It’s not the same thing as a normal latte… I think the difference is something to do with the fact that the milk is steamed and then a small shot of espresso added to the top, and less espresso is used than in a typical latte so it would probably be good for strange people like Babel who don’t actually like coffee. The key feature for me is that you get it served in a beaker type glass without a handle and drink it out of a black straw. Some people are not a fan of drinking hot, vaguely coffee-like milk via a straw, but I find it quite addictive and sincerely lament the fact that it is not possible to such a think in Costas, or even my adored Caffe Nero Happily, latte macchiato is commonplace all over Germany, and so I have to make the most of my weekends abroad to drink as much as I can

Suitably fortified with caffeine, we walked back up to the vicinity of the Hauptbahnhof in order to find our hotel. I hadn’t been involved at all in the choosing of this, but I know my family had put a lot of thought into it because whilst the area around the station is certainly home to the cheaper hotels, there are a few dodgy streets and we once stayed in a hotel which contained artwork that would have been better suited to a brothel. Not that it bothered me, but some people have standards The Hotel Mark turned out to be the best hotel I have ever stayed in. The rooms were an adequate size, the bathrooms were clean, and the breakfast the next morning was plentiful. I have, however, stayed in many hotels with an adequately sized bedroom, a clean bathroom and plentiful breakfast, and that is not the reason this turned out to be my dream hotel. Oh no! You will have to wait to find out the reason later when I have got round to taking a photo of it

Having dumped our stuff at the hotel, we headed out once more to make the most of the rapidly diminishing daylight hours. Munich is fortunate enough to have an enormous public park called the Englischer Garten within easy walking distance of the city centre, and we were keen to see it in the snow. To call the Englischer Garten a park actually seems a travesty if you consider the scrubby bits of grass which go by the same name in this country. It’s a huge landscape garden, bigger than Central Park in New York, which has a river, waterfalls, areas for nude sunbathing and all kinds of weird and wonderful monuments including a Chinese Tower which in summer is home to a public beer garden. The most striking thing about the place in summer is the atmosphere; that is to say, it’s generally full of hundreds of very drunk Germans sitting in close proximity… and not glassing each other.

In winter it was something else entirely. The Germans don’t seem to share our paranoia about gritting pavements, so the walkways were all rather slippery, but it was worth the little frissons of tension when you thought you were going to fall flat on your face in a patch of ice for the excitement of seeing the garden covered in snow. Once we finally got to the centre we found a delighted Christmas market, very family orientated and nowhere near as hectic as the main market in the city centre. We managed to buy some authentic Lebkuchen which were thoroughly delicious and not at all like the things they flog in Aldi

By now darkness was falling. My mother was loathe to walk the whole way we had come back across the park, so my sister devised a clever route out the other side and round the outskirts. It was somewhat longer than the direct route though, and by this time I was really starting to feel the cold. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold in my life as I was this weekend, and that includes time I’ve spent in Switzerland walking in the snow! It was mostly definitely subzero, by virtue of the fact that the snow wasn’t melting, and despite the fact that I was not only wearing a jumper and two coats, but also a hat and gloves, I spent most of the weekend shaking in a somewhat uncontrollable manner. So it was that we decided we needed to go inside somewhere to get a proper meal and a blast of central heating

Fortunately we remembered an Italian restaurant which we’d eaten in during a prior visit to Munich and which does very good pizza. The waitress there was very friendly and complimented us all on our German We lingered as long as we could in the warmth before setting out once more; this time our mission was to visit a Mediaeval market which my mother had read about on the internet. It took a bit of finding but we got there in the end and it was worth it because it was so totally different to any of the other markets we had seen. I wasn’t so interested in the various crafty things which were on display, but there was a really cool atmosphere; in one corner there was a hog roast, in another there was a gluehwein tent selling the drink in mugs which wouldn’t have looked amiss during a banquet at the Round Table, and right at the end were a couple who put on a spectacular display of dancing with and eating fire

We took the opportunity to drink some gluehwein while we were there, and that definitely helped to warm me up. The markets actually don’t stay open too late, so we were back in the hotel and thinking about going to bed by ten. It wasn’t the best night’s sleep we’d ever had because there seemed to be a coach party of tourists making a lot of noise in the hotel bar until the early hours, but I was so tired after the early start that I was able to doze through most of it and felt almost refreshed when the alarm started going off at 7 am the next morning…

When we boarded the flight, there were a few minutes of utter chaos. The reality of the situation was that the Stuttgart passengers were gatecrashing the Hamburg flight, but no one had taken this into consideration when allocating the seat numbers. Consequently, my seat was double booked and I had to wander aimlessly down the plane until I found another one which looked randomly free. It was one of those tiny little Embraer aircraft which only have one seat on the left hand side of the aisle, and so I was able to sit in antisocial peace on my own

The captain was a very nice man, and apologired profusely for the confusion. Methinks he was pretty hacked off himself as nobody had properly explained to him or the air crew what was going on. I later found out from the air hostess that the first she’d heard of it was when she got on the plane. To be honest, they all sounded as fed up with their employer as I was.

Anyway, the plan was to head to Hamburg first and then sit and wait on the tarmac for a bit before flying on to Stuttgart. The pilot seemed a bit worried about this as it would normally be illegal for him to fly internally between German airports; the company only has a licence for certain routes. The air hostesses were also a bit worried about the legality of it, something to do with the number of hours they were supposed to stay in the air…

In a bizarre twist of fate, I suddenly realised that I knew one of the air hostesses! That is to say, I didn’t recognise her in the slightest, and was beginning to get annoyed when she came round with the drinks trolley and was doggedly pushing me to have a cup of coffee, despite my protestations that I didn’t want one. It’s a good job I don’t have a temper, otherwise I might have told her where to stick her overpriced filth. As it is, I’m a timid weak-willed sort of person and I eventually agreed to buy one on the grounds that refusal was becoming embarrassing. It was only when I reached for my purse and she whispered that no, it was on the house, that I saw her name badge and realised I went to school with her. Actually, I sat next to her in A Level Geography for two years and used to lend her my notes But to be fair, that does make it six years since I last saw her and in the intervening period she had grown a fringe.

At any rate, I had a free cup of coffee and later got passed a free bottle of water prominently labelled “crew only” which was very kind of her and caused the couple on the other side of the aisle to glare at me viciously I take back some of what I said about Flybe, because she and the rest of the crew were all very nice, and whoever’s fault it was, it wasn’t theirs.

It being a bright sunny day, the flight was pretty nice. As we took off I had a great view of Birmingham city centre and could even make out the tower of Old Joe, the university clock in the distance. The approach to Hamburg was also very enjoyable as we came in low over a massive river which I assume was the Elbe. We sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes while the baggage of the Hamburg passengers was unloaded, and we also acquired a new load of passengers whom the aircraft was supposed to be taking back to Birmingham but who were due the surprise of a little detour via Stuttgart. Meanwhile I was feeling awake enough to read, and skimmed through one of the pile of Esperanto magazines which flood through my door ever since I joined TEJO. This one was a little surprising. An article about a group of Japanese people who find cleaning toilets a semi-religious experience, and another about a town in Poland where some school children had beaten up their English teacher. I was surprised to find a very nice gentleman whom I had met in Southport not falling far short of praising this as a victory over linguistic imperialism. After that I decided a bit more normality was in order and went back to Engleby, which is good but potentially very dark.

Anyhow eventually we took off, eventually we got to Stuttgart where it was a horrible cloudy day, and here there was a further commotion because the German authorities boarded the plane and requested everyone get off, even those who were intending to stay on for Birmingham. Everyone was most put out by this, including the cabin crew. Stuttgart is only a small airport though and by the time all this had been resolved and I had got through passport control, I was pretty chuffed to find my bag had already been offloaded and was sitting all on its own on the baggage carousel

Sadly I’d just missed the hourly bus to Tuebingen but there was the advantage that this gave me time to search out something to eat. I ended up with a Pizzabroetchen and a Vanilleschnecke from the airport bakery, and headed outside to get some much needed air whilst I waited for the bus. There is an excellent bus service which ferries people between Tuebingen and the airport in less than an hour, which is quicker than the same journey by train. The road journey is significantly prettier and more exciting too, although I was worried that even armed with a timetable and an email of instructions, I might fail to stand up on time to get off at the correct stop for my sister’s suburb. I sat right by the door just in case.

I needn’t have worried though because everything went according to plan, and having got up at the hideous hour at 4am I finally arrived at my sister’s flat at half past one. By this time I was in a tired sort of daze and had I not been so pleased to see her, I would certainly have fallen asleep. As it was we had some bread and cheese with coffee, and I started to feel a bit better I was disconcerted when sitting in her kitchen to look out the window and see a cow walking past But there is a sort of farm behind the accommodation block and now the warm weather is here they have released the cattle to graze

We headed into town on the bus in order to do some shopping. It’s Fathers’ Day next weekend and so I thought maybe we should take the opportunity of being together in the same country to get a joint present. This was a bit of a race against time, because no shops open at all on Sundays and they mostly close at five on Saturdays. Also, there aren’t really many shops in Tuebingen at all. In the end we went to the famous Gummi Bear shop, which sells gummi sweets in every shape and colour you could possibly imagine. I wanted to buy myself a bag of gummi cocks but in the presence of my sister didn’t dare In the end we settled for a box of sweets for my dad in the shape of a car, which looks quite cute That mission accomplished, our next task was to buy some peppermint flavoured Rittersport for my mom.

Rittersport is the only famous brand of German chocolate of which I am aware, and they make it in a factory about twenty miles from where my sister lives. Its uniqueness consists of the fact that the bars are always completely square, which is apparently because they were initially designed as bars which would fit into a sportsman’s pocket (hence the name). It now comes in a variety of different flavours, all with a different colour packaging, and is quite delicious. I wouldn’t choose it over Cadbury, but as far as I am concerned Cadbury is sacred, and I would choose it over Lindt, which I really don’t think is that nice despite how much people always go on about it and how much it costs. The nicest flavour of Rittersport is the mint, and until very recently it used to be obtainable from the foreign section of the posh food hall of Rackham’s in Birmingham. Recently, however, they appear to have run out, hence my mother’s request that we bring her some back. This should have been a simple request to fulfil, but was complicated by the fact that because there are so many different flavours of the chocolate, the first three shops we went to didn’t have the mint We obtained it in the end though in a little chemist where there was a big poster over the display saying, “Ich treibe Rittersport”. I thought that was quite witty

By this point the shops were closed anyway, so we decided to go for a bit of a walk. We climbed a hill which lies just behind the city centre and on which the poshest and most expensive houses are built. The majority of the most imposing houses belong to the Burschenschaft but please don’t ask me to explain who they are, because I scarcely understand it myself. They are slightly frightening anyway, and there was one particularly intimidating house we went past which had a red carpet leading up the steps to the door whilst either side of the path was lit with flaming torches Trying not to catch anybody’s attention, we progressed up the hill and after climbing through a small wood we emerged into a large clearing with a tower. The tower looked rather like it might once have been used as a prison, on account of the narrow barred windows. My sister said she thought it had been built by Kaiser Wilhelm, but when she said that I don’t think she meant one of the German rulers but rather one of the local kings who continued in existence here long after the country was allegedly united.

The tower was locked up and so we couldn’t climb it for a better view. Instead, we headed back down the other side of the hill, through some fields of peculiar German sheep and alongside a little river into the town centre. I had already arranged with my sister in advance that for dinner we were going to go to Neckarmueller, an historic brewery on the banks of the Neckar and my favourite restaurant in Tuebingen.

The Schnitzel there is really very good, and they serve Apfelschorle in big tall glasses as if it were beer One of my sister’s flatmates has just started working there and I feel sorry for her because she’s allowed to carry people’s food but not to bring them their bills, and so she misses out on all the tips Anyhow, after that we felt like pudding so wandered round Tuebingen in the twilight for a bit until we found a place that was selling the most delicious icecream I’ve had in ages. That was followed by a Latte Machiatto in a nearby bar. I don’t know why none of the coffee houses in England serve Latte Machiatto, but in Germany it appears to be everywhere. It’s a strange sort of concept, being essentially indistinguishable from a normal latte but served in a glass beaker with no handle and a straw to drink it with. It takes a bit of getting used to, drinking hot coffee with a straw, but it’s actually rather fun

I was fairly exhausted after all my travelling, and retired to my hotel before eleven. The hotel, being honest, leaves a lot to be desired. I had a bad impression of it the first time I ever saw it with the word “Fremdenzimmer” stencilled on the side in huge letters. Fremdenzimmer, it just sounds a trifle unwelcoming The girl who checked me in was unwelcoming to say the least and refused to accept that I was correctly pronouncing my own name. One of life’s phenomena which I have never understood is the peculiar perception the Germans have of English vowels. It matters not which part of Germany you visit: uniformly across the whole country, Germans are convinced that the English pronounce u as a and a as e. Hence the German word Handy, their mistaken impression of what the English call mobile phones, is actually pronounced Hendy, which they fondly imagine is excellent British pronunciation. Similarly when speaking English they talk about “a cap of tea”. What you and I might imagine was a cap, that is to say something you might wear on your head, they would call a “kep”. The Queen is not affluent, but effluent, and so on.

That aside, the main objection I have to the hotel is how incredibly dark it is. The corridors have no windows and are lit by the sort of lights which only come on when you are standing underneath them, with the result that you have to walk through a darkened passage which becomes illuminated just five seconds too late. The rooms themselves are also incredibly dark, being lit by one solitary sixty watt bulb on the far wall. I was enjoying reading Engleby so much that I wanted to get through another chapter before I went to bed, but the light was so poor that I event admitted defeat and went to sleep.

The breakfast buffet in this establishment is also not going to win any prizes. The orange juice is watered down so much that it more accurately resembles squash and there is no cereal, the choice being between muesli and muesl. I am also slightly disconcerted by the fact that I have never stayed there and not been the only person eating breakfast. It was, however, only forty euros a night, and so it’s not fair to complain

Having packed my walking boots, for Sunday we had planned a more ambitious walk. My sister had obtained some walk leaflets from the local tourist information office and we decided to combine two of their suggestions to make a longer walk of just over fifteen miles. Having finally succeeded in convincing my sister it didn’t make sense to attend Mass, we made an early start, and after the thirty minute walk from where my sister lives to the town centre, began to walk through the western outskirts of Tuebingen and ascend a hill known as the Kreuzberg. It was a baking hot day, but the walk was very pleasant and the exertion of walking uphill was relieved by the frequent patches of wooded shade. When we temporarily emerged from the trees there were some beautiful views back towards Tuebingen and the Wurmingen Kapelle, and thanks to the excellent written directions we soon arrived at a picturesque little village called Hageloch

Hageloch appears to boast only one eating establishment, which was nevertheless absolutely lovely and the woman there presented me with the biggest and most refreshing Apfelschorle which I have ever drunk in my life. We were tempted to stay and eat there, but eventually decided that we didn’t have time and needed to press on if we were going to stand any chance of making the necessary bus back into town.

Now, the second walk we were trying to complete started at one end of Hageloch, and we were quite definitely at the other, so my sister had a clever brainwave that we could climb up a hill through some apple orchards and eventually intercept the woodland path we were aiming for. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and we quickly climbed up through the beautiful orchards and reached the woods. The problem was that once in the woods there weren’t any helpful footpath signs, and we weren’t entirely sure where we had come in. We had a look at the map over lunch and were confident we had it sorted, so strode out at a brisk pace for half an hour or so, making the features on the ground fit with those on our walk instructions. After a while, however, we were faced with incontrovertable evidence that we weren’t actually where we thought we were, and were faced to retrace our steps in the hope of finding some sort of landmark which might correspond with the map.

Things were rather fraught for a while. I was rather panicked that we would be stuck in a wood forever and I would miss my flight back home. We walked for twenty minutes down one path only to find it come to an abrupt end at a precipice, and we had to walk all the way back again. At one point I caught a glimpse of a huge brown beast running through the forest towards us and screamed rather loudly on the grounds that it looked suspiciously like a wolf. Closer inspection, however, revealed that it was just a deer

My sister has her gold Duke of Edinburgh Award and is actually pretty good at map reading, so before long she managed to get us back on track, and we eventually arrived at a pretty place called Schloss Hohenentringen. The castle was very attractive indeed and probably worth seeing, but it was so incredibly busy on a sunny Sunday afternoon that I just wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible. We proceeded to climb down a narrow valley and into the village of Entringen proper. As we walked down the main road towards it we began to hear ominous rumbling noises behind us, and it soon became apparent that a particularly vicious thunderstorm was hot on our heels. We just made the village as the first drops started to fall and sought refuge under the porch of the Rathaus until it calmed down enough for us to find the busstop. There was rather a long weight for the bus, with the result that we didn’t get into town until half four, barely giving me time to get back to my sister’s, grab my stuff and make my connection to the airport.

I managed it somehow though and the goodbye was mercifully short, although I did as ever end up crying slightly. The journey back to the airport gave me time to reflect. Sometimes I wonder what we’re doing, tying ourselves down to a long term residence in England by talking about grown up things like buying a house. The quality of life seems so much better on the continent in so many ways that it is difficult to come up with justifications for wanting to live in Britain. Life in Britain always seems rather like a grey existence, making the most of the moments which fall between the general unpleasantness. I think I might rather live abroad and have a dead end job and struggle for cash than stay in England with a career and a mortgage. But I am probably romanticising it out of proportion, and of course life can be crap everywhere. I just know that if I ever end up single, I won’t be hanging around.

The journey home was totally uneventful, despite the fact that I was put sitting in row 13 I arrived home after 11, utterly exhausted, and not looking forward to my six am start for Bolton

I wasn’t disappointed The book is set in the 1960s and tells the story of a young German reporter who by a series of coincidences comes across the diary of a Jewish man who has just committed suicide. The diary tells the story of everything that happened to the man during the war, which he spent in a ghetto at Riga. The camp was run by a very sadistic man called Eduard Roschmann who inflicted all sorts of cruelties on the inmates, including forcing this particular Jew to put his wife into a van which was taking people to be gassed. The man, inexplicably I thought, didn’t go to the gas chamber with his wife but instead vowed to survive the war and live to see Roschmann brought to justice.

Survive the war he did, against all odds and by the skin of his teeth, and yet he never managed to achieve his aim. After the war, Roschmann mysteriously disappeared until one day, the old Jewish man saw him as a free man in West Germany, going to the opera. It was at this point that he decided that his life was no longer worth living

When he reads the diary, the young reporter is totally outraged and vows to track down this murderer who is still at large. His newspaper refuses to commission him, so he takes all of his savings out of the bank and sets off on his own personal quest. As the book progresses, his adventure becomes increasingly dangerous as his path crosses that of an organisation called Odessa, which exists to rehabilitate former SS men with new lives and new passports. At one point he goes undercover and tries to infiltrate the SS but his love of his rather distinctive looking jaguar is nearly the undoing of him and he soon has to contend with bullets and bombs.

Throughout the book there is always the hint that this is about more than the reporter’s desire to avenge a dead Jew, and when the twist comes at the end it is superb. I certainly didn’t see it coming, and I had spent half the book wondering what it was going to be It’s not a book which has a happy Disney-style ending, but nevertheless I didn’t find it depressing to read. I mean, in theory I love books full of spies and plotting and intrigue, but the two John le Carre books I have read (A Small Town in Germany and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), both set in Germany around the same period, have made me feel that life was so utterly pointless it was hardly worth living! It’s a shame, because my father thinks John le Carre is a fantastic author, and he certainly has a lot of books to his name, but I can’t get on with him at all. Anyway, in my opinion this book is infinitely superior and well worth a read.

There are only two small criticisms that I can make. The first being that I am dubious with regards to the extent that Frederick Forsyth can speak German, because towards the start of the book he describes a random character, supposedly a native of Hamburg, saying Grüß Gott. Nobody from Hamburg would say that any more than a native of Belfast would start talking in Cockney Rhyming Slang! The second thing which stood out to me was that this book would never have been written by a woman. For while this reporter is off gallivanting for months at a time, his poor girlfriend is completely abandoned at home without having the least idea where he is or even if he was dead or alive. No consideration is given to her feelings and he doesn’t contact her until right at the end when he decides she can be useful to him by bringing him a gun. She dutifully does so, more fool her, and in a scene which could only have been written by a man she willingly shags him upon arrival without demanding an apology for the appalling way he has been treating her. She does mildly lose her temper later, at which point the reporter proposes to her as a sort of afterthought, and in a bizarrely unrealistic manner this apparently makes everything okay and she accepts. Hmmm, indeed.

Anyhow, those are but small criticisms which do nothing to marr the overall quality of the book, which is exceptionally well written and constructed. When I got to the end I was highly curious as to how much of the content was based on fact; I started by assuming that all the Odessa stuff was made up, but when references were made to Roschmann being the so called Butcher of Riga, I began to be unsure because I had read about such a man in a completely unrelated book many years previously. A bit of googling revealed that whilst obviously the ins and outs of the plot are an embellishment, the basic facts regarding Roschmann are true and at the point at which Forsyth wrote the book, he was still alive, living a secret life in Argentina. Apparently one of the hopes of the book, which was written with the cooperation of Simon Wiesental, was that it would lead to new information about his whereabouts and perhaps secure his arrest. West Germany did indeed finally request his extradition from Argentina in the late 1970s, causing Roschmann to flee once more. Regrettably, he died a natural death as a free man in Paraguay in 1978.

The first thing we did upon arriving was very naturally to text my sister, who explained that she was in the middle of typing up an essay which she would then need to take into university to print and hand in. After that she was planning to do some shopping, have lunch and meet up with some friends at three for a birthday coffee and cake affair, but that she should be able to find time to meet up with us for a couple of hours once that was over, about half four. My mother wasn’t best pleased by this announcement, but she did have to bear the responsibility for it, having previously told my sister not to let us disrupt her normal routine. My sister had evidently taken this recommendation to heart.

It was cold and damp in Tuebingen, and we were all very cold and hungry. We went for a half-hearted walk along the Platanenallee before having a large pizza in what is apparently my parents’ favourite café. By this point it was gone two; that is to say, past the time at which we were allowed to check into the hotel, so we decided to do just that. It had been raining whilst we were eating and so my mother suggested we take a taxi from the railway station, where we had left our bags in lockers, to the Hotel am Schloss where we were staying. I was of the belief that this was somewhat unnecessary as it was at worst a ten minute walk but likely to run to a comparatively expensive taxi fare due to the one way and pedestrianisation schemes in place around Tuebingen. My mother explained that she didn’t want the suitcases dragged through puddles, so I offered to carry the heavy one (hers) and give Dad the light one (mine), but my attempts at thrift fell on deaf ears, and so it was that we arrived at the hotel in a taxi.

The journey was actually a bit hair-raising, because the drive up to the Hotel am Schloss commences via a very sharp turn up a steep and narrow cobbled street. The taxi driver was a woman, and I suspect formed the opinion that we were slightly mad; firstly for taking a taxi such a short distance with such a small amount of luggage, and secondly because my mother, in an attempt to convey how strange it was to be sitting in the front seat of a car which was travelling on the wrong side of the road, randomly announced “Ich denke, dass ich Taxifahrer bin”.

The Hotel am Schloss is a rather grand affair, one of the most expensive hotels in Tuebingen. It is situated at the top of a hill, adjacent to the very impressive Tuebingen castle. The rooms have views over the mediaeval old town or the Schwabian Alps, depending on which way you are facing. The restaurant is locally famous for being the best place to eat an authentic variety of the local speciality, Maultaschen, which I will describe later, and is correspondingly pricey.

We had two rooms booked, and the plan was for my sister to abandon her normal abode and come to stay in one of the rooms with me. Checking in without her, however, I was forced to make the all important decision as to which room out of the two we had booked she would prefer to stay in. The rooms were… erm… weird. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels and I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

Starting with the positives, they were both large and airy. one was bigger than the other, but they both had ample space for a sofa and arm chair. The smaller room had windows down the entire length of two walls of it, which were adorned with a peculiar set of beige and crimson drapes which later proved to be impossible to rearrange correctly. In the evening I spent a good twenty minutes attempting to manipulate them so that every bit of window was appropriately covered, and we still ended up with strange chinks of light coming into the room in the middle of the night. That aside, its main distinguishing feature was an enormous wood carving of the face of Eberhard (who founded Germany’s second oldest university in Tuebingen during the Middle Ages) which was hanging above the bed in a somewhat disturbing manner.

The second room was substantially larger and colder, and decorated in a bizarre pseudo-mediaeval way which I can only assume must have been chosen in a desperate bid to attract American tourists. The curtains and bedspread looked like they had come straight out of a re-enactment of King Arthur, but the most striking feature was the wardrobe. How to describe the wardrobe?! It was a flat-pack construction which looked suspiciously liked it might have come from the local branch of IKEA, and contained far more MDF than it did wood. This in itself would not have been remarkable, had the proprietors not employed someone to give it a mediaeval makeover. An artist of dubious credentials had covered it with a life-size portrayal of a couple with strangely distorted features, in a style that was so appallingly bad and un-lifelike that you were supposed to think it actually was mediaeval. It totally freaked me out, and for once I made a forceful decision that I was going to be staying in the other room!

The weather continued to be poor, so we sat in our respective rooms and used the opportunity to wrap all the presents for my sister which we had carried with us from the UK. The huge iPod speakers which my great aunt and uncle had bought for her had caused some confusion among the airport security staff earlier in the day. I only had a small necklace to wrap, so I sat in a corner and finished Der Teufel von Mailand, the truly excellent book which my sister had bought me for my birthday a week previously.

When my sister finally arrived it was nearer half five than half five. The reunion could have been strained, but the atmosphere was helped by the presence of 6 enormous 21 balloons which my Dad had blown up and I had gone round affixing to the curtain rails. There was a lot of catching up to be done, but my sister had arranged a get together of her friends for Friday night and needed to go to her place to get changed. My mother slightly bullied her into letting me come too, which was slightly embarrassing but ultimately very fun as her friends were all very nice people and because they were mainly international students, their German was in some cases not very much better than my own.

It wasn’t a late night but once we got back to the hotel my sister and I stayed up talking until gone one am, which led to me being rather tired for the rest of the trip, having got up at four on Friday morning.

It was slightly surreal celebrating my sister’s birthday abroad, but I think that she had a good time. My parents had bought her an iPod and various other people had given her money, which had been mercifully easy to pack and was much needed as her Erasmus grant has still not come through. She decided she wanted to spend the day taking us for a walk, and so we all wrapped up in the warmest clothes we could muster and set out. Behind the hall of residence where she lives there is a nature park called Schoenberg, an area of wooded hills which are protected under local law, and it was through this we walked towards a little village called Bebenhausen.

Bebenhausen, when we finally arrived at it, was quite a remarkable little place. The small village is the site of an ancient monastery which spreads over a considerable area and is still preserved in tact, having been captured during the Reformation and appropriated by the local kings for use as a hunting lodge. We spent over an hour wandering around it, looking at the different buildings and gardens, but being chilled to the bone, we soon retired to the one guesthouse establishment in the vicinity for a warming cup of coffee.

In the evening we had booked a table to eat Maultaschen in the famous hotel restaurant. It was a very small little place, with the tables so close together you could accidentally elbow the person sitting at the table next to you, and I quickly began to wish we had asked for a menu in English, being as the standard menu was written not in High German but in Schwabisch, the local dialect. Sometimes I think German dialects could really qualify as languages in their own right. One of my sister’s flatmates considers Schwabisch to be her mother tongue and dislikes being at university, where she is subject to the strain of trying to express herself in Hochdeutsch.

The Maultaschen, when they arrived, were quite strange. The only thing I can think of to sensibly compare them to is ravioli, but I feel this is somewhat of a disservice to them, as ravioli conjures up for me at least, horrible memories of school dinners, and these were actually rather nice. What you have to try to imagine is the filling from a sausage roll, wrapped in the pasta from ravioli, and being the size and shape of a small Cornish pasty. Imagine three of these on your plate, coated in a sauce of cheese, ham and tomato, and you should have a rough sort of idea. They were highly tasty, if somewhat filling, and certainly not likely to be a hit for anyone without a strong love of sausage meat.

In the evening we went out to explore the Tuebingen market. Tuebingen doesn’t actually appear to have a traditional German Christmas market of the type you might expect, but this weekend was a special chocolate festival and so a chocolate market had sprung up down the streets of the Altstadt, full of stalls selling different types of chocolate treats. There was delicious hot chocolate, which tasted rather like the chocolate river which Roald Dahl’s unlovable creation Augustus Gloop tried to drink from must have tasted, and stalls selling all manner of flavoured chocolates, with a strange preoccupation with chilli flavour. There were stalls were you could make you own chocolate, eat pancakes covered in chocolate, or buy large quantities of slabs of the stuff at knock down prices. And, of course, there was the obligatory smell of Gluehwein which seems to permeate every inch of Germany throughout December.

Sunday was kind of strained, because we all knew we were going home but were trying very hard to not let that thought affect our spirits. We had prearranged to spend the day in Stuttgart visiting the famous Christmas market there, but the itinerary was complicated by the fact that certain members of the family refused to entertain the idea of missing Mass on the Second Sunday of Advent. The Mass times in Tuebingen itself meant that if we waited to attend Mass there, it would hardly be worth going into Stuttgart at all. I thus spent half an hour on my sister’s internet, and managed to located a Catholic church in the middle of Stuttgart, no mean feat considering what a highly Protestant area it is. Mass was at twelve, which meant we had to leave Tuebingen at half ten at the latest. This wouldn’t have been a problem in any way, shape or form, except for the not so small matter of all my sister’s presents, which needed to be transported four miles across Tuebingen to my her flat. Breakfast wasn’t served in the hotel until eight, so it was nine before I was safely checked out and ready to assist her. The irregularity of bus times on a Sunday morning meant we were going to have to walk there and catch the bus back which was fine, except for the balloons. You can probably not imagine the embarrassment of walking four miles across an awakening city, carrying a bunch of enormous balloons! To say we attracted considerable attention would be an understatement.

Anyway somehow we made it there and back with no worse mishaps than me losing my pedometer down my sister’s toilet, and before long we were arriving in Stuttgart. The church I had chosen was mercifully close to the station, and the service was much more pleasant and easier to understand than the one I had attended in Tuebingen two weeks previously.

After an hour of strenuous praying, we felt in need of sustenance and set off for the Stuttgart branch of Vapiano. Vapiano is a chain of pasta restaurants which is represented across all the major cities in Germany, and is hopefully going to open in London very shortly if it hasn’t already. When it does, you have to go there! It’s trendy and pricey, but it’s such a strange experience you have to try it once. The premise behind the chain is that you get to watch your meal cooked right in front of you. When you go in they issue you with a swipe card, and then you take it to different counters depending on what you want. You can choose pretty much any type of pasta you can think of and combine it with a wide selection of sauces, then there are counters for starters, pizzas and desserts as well. You queue with your tray in front of a chef, tell him what you want and then he cooks it according to your specification, asking you how much onion you’d like and how much garlic he should put in and so forth. For fussy eaters like me it really is quite a exciting prospect to be able to tell the chef exactly which bits you want left out, and it’s also rather fun to see how quickly they can put the meal together. It’s true that you can end up standing in the queue for a while if the person in front of you has ordered something complicated, but on the whole I think the service is faster than you’d get in a more conventional restaurant and the food is really fantastic. One word of warning if you try it; on no account lose the swipe card that they’ve given you. You pay off your balance on the way out, and even if there are two of you and you’ve put all the food on one card, they need to be able to confirm the other card is unused, otherwise there’s a flat rate charge of fifty euros.

I had never been to Stuttgart before so I was greatly looking forward to it, but in matter of fact it was actually very difficult to get any sort of a feel for the place when it was literally suffocated by the Christmas market. Hordes of people thronged the streets, pushing and jostling in an excessively aggressive manner, and despite not being normally claustrophobic I began to feel quite uncomfortable with it. The streets seemed rather too narrow for the volume of people trying to pass down them, and it required real dedication to actually make a purchase from a stall. Added to that, I don’t think it was the best Christmas market I have ever seen. In previous years I have been to both Frankfurt and Cologne, and I think either of those wipe the floor with Stuttgart, if not in size at least in atmosphere and variety.

And then we had come unto the end again and there was one of those painfully sad goodbye scenes before we all bundled into the S-Bahn and away, leaving my sister standing forlorn on the platform. The journey back was unpleasant and I wouldn’t recommend that anybody ever fly with Flybe; I’ve used them three times and both times their level of customer service has been unacceptable. The first time I flew with them was to Edinburgh, and they informed us that my father had changed his ticket to fly to Malaga and that if he wanted to come to Edinburgh he would have to pay a fifty pound admin fee to change it back again. My father had not, of course, done anything of the sort, despite the fact they claimed they could prove it had been done on his card. The second time I flew with them was to Düsseldorf, and upon arrival back in Birmingham they randomly locked the entire cohort of passengers into a holding room for an hour with no explanation. On this third occasion, the plane turned out to be an hour late taking off, but there was no announcement or explanation for this at the airport, and no apology for it when we finally boarded the aircraft. Anyone who wants to fly anywhere should use Lufthansa; Flybe is not good value for what it is.

It was horribly lonely arriving home without my sister, but thankfully it’s nearly the Christmas holidays, and come next Thursday we will have her home and to ourselves for a whole two weeks

I arrived at the airport far too early and was surprised to find it empty. On reflection I suppose it isn’t wholly shocking that multitudes of people do not choose to fly at 7am on Saturday mornings in November, but it was a refreshing change not to have to queue for check-in and to walk straight through security. There were no queues for the internet terminals either, and a great deal of my time and small change suddenly seemed to disappear down a black hole, so that I scarcely had time to swallow a cup of coffee and a chocolate cake which I didn’t actually want before my flight was ready for boarding.

The aircraft was also peculiarly empty, with the result that I had an entire three seats to myself and avoided the necessity to make small talk with a random businessman. The flight passed relatively quickly whilst I tried to avoid choking on the Lufthansa regulation cheese sandwich and attempted to telepathically absorb as much of my German grammar book as possible without actually opening it. I did genuinely mean to read through it and refresh my memory because I feel like my German has been somewhat neglected of late, but there is something mesmeric about travelling which means I just want to sit and stare blankly out of the window.

I guess the great thing about being on a plane is that you’re not supposed to be doing anything else. I mean, there is very little you can actually usefully do in that sort of environment. And thus you have no qualms about giving yourself that rare permission to do nothing except be, and that can be rather enjoyable. It always interests me to discover what sort of thoughts come unbidden into my mind when I relinquish control of it. Today I ended up contemplating those dreadful three weeks over the summer when my boyfriend split up with me. I think that I came to it via the thought that the last time I was on a plane was one of the happiest days of my life to date; coming back from a holiday in France with him, which had initially been a little awkward due to our not-exactly-a-couple status, but which was perfected on the final drunken evening when he told me that he wasn’t going to leave me and start a new life in Korea. Now life is on an even keel again and August is at a safe distance to be contemplated without tears. And yet at a distance, as I discovered somewhere above Belgium this morning, it is even more frightening that it was at the time. As I ran over each encounter, each conversation, each argument, I was struck anew by how tenuous the happy ending actually was, and left almost breathless by how the pain of what might have been almost was.

I wasn’t particularly daunted arriving at Frankfurt airport by myself, having been there several times before and thus feeling fairly confident that I could navigate my way through it successfully on my own. This confidence proved to be misguided. I believe there is a gap in the market for someone to start selling guide books to Frankfurt, preferably complete with several maps. My first aim was to find baggage reclaim, which seemed a modest sort of goal for someone who has just arrived at an airport. I found myself directed down a maze of corridors and escalators, which culminated in an enormous and disorderly queue for passport control. German officials are very hot on the control aspect of passport control, and on a prior journey I have actually been reprimanded with “Nicht laecheln!” (“Don’t smile!”) for daring look cheerful during such a solemn ritual.

Eventually passing through this, I narrowly avoided being shepherding onto a connecting flight to New Delhi and proceeded to walk what felt like several miles down a rather chilly tunnel. I find long hikes in airports rather tiresome, but the admitted advantage is that if you do finally have to good fortune to arrive at a baggage carousel, your bag has not only long since been unloaded from the plane, but has already done several laps on the conveyor belt and is started to get out of breath.

Baggage safely reclaimed, my next goal was to make my way to the station, and so I was cheered to see a sign with a train and an arrow on it. Following this hopefully down a very steep staircase, I found myself in an unpleasant-looking underground subway. It felt like the sort of place where something dire was always on the verge of happening, but never actually did, probably as a result of the surfeit of policemen who seemed to be frequenting it. Walking past an Irish pub which looked like if you entered it you might never be seen again, I followed a series of further train pictures and was conducted round in a large subterranean circle before proceeding back up another escalator which returned me to the level where I had started. Resisting the temptation to reclaim another piece of baggage, I became entangled in a queue of people waiting to fly to Tel Aviv and in an attempt to at least not end up there, I started walking in a direction in which train arrows were not pointing. Curiously, I promptly found myself in the airy and spacious glass-roofed station building which I had been expecting to see all along.

Fortunately I had had the sense to buy my ticket online, and so was spared at least one further trauma. All that remained was to sit and wait for my train, a wait which was much shorter than I had anticipated after so much unexpected and time consuming exercise. The journey from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was very pleasant, on a big intercity express. I was surprised how quickly we got out of Frankfurt and into the surrounding countryside. It was a shame that I didn’t have time to stop off in the city itself, which from my limited acquaintance with it seems like a fascinating place, but time was so short that it was imperative to press on to Tuebingen.

Sadly there was a fifteen minute delay in Mannheim whilst we waited for a late incoming train from elsewhere, and so I arrived in Stuttgart two minutes too late for my onward connection. Looking at the departures board I realised that there was another local train leaving in five minutes and a rather undignified sprint enabled be to reach it seconds before it pulled away. Collapsing in a hyperventilating heap in the bicycle compartment, I was immediately interrogated by the inspector, who was upset by the fact that my ticket was specifically valid on the preceding train only, and therefore not on this one. There followed an interesting discussion as to whether or not the fact that I had missed the preceding train was the fault of Die Deutsche Bahn and whether I therefore had the right to expect to be compensated for my delay by being allowed to use the next available train without paying a fine. The inspector didn’t appear wholly convinced by my rather incoherent and breathless arguments, but in an uncharacteristic display of German flexibility, he agreed not to arrest me on the understanding that I stayed in the bicycle compartment and didn’t cause an obstruction. Bicycle compartments are not very comfortable places to sit but I was anxious not to be delayed by the hours of German form-filling bureaucracy which would ensue if I was done for Schwarzfahren (travelling without a valid ticket) and so I readily agreed. I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard to look like a bicycle. The journey was mercifully short and so by half past one I was standing on the platform at Tuebingen and wondering if that rather grown-up looking young lady who was standing a hundred metres away staring expectantly at the swirling mass of passengers, could actually be my little sister.

It was, of course. She looked different though to how I remember her looking when she left home to go and study in Germany three months ago. She seemed taller and thinner somehow, her hair was surprisingly long and she was wearing more make-up than usual. When she caught sight of me she ran towards me and hugged me, which was somewhat of a shock since we never traditionally go in for that sort of thing in my family. A pleasant shock, though…

And so began a weekend which, if truth be told, consisted largely of eating and drinking. First stop was my sister’s flat, which I have to say is both the largest and the cleanest student apartment which I have ever seen in my life. To be fair she has moved into a block which has just been extensively refurbished, and so it stands to reason that the kitchen is clean and bright and shiny, but I was impressed that the inhabitants had kept it that way and that there wasn’t as much as one piece of unwashed up washing up on the draining board. That’s Germany for you I guess! One of the conditions of the tenancy is that you make a cleaning rota and the caretaker can apparently request to see it at any time if he requires proof that your cleaning is not sufficiently organised.

From there we caught a bus into the town proper and headed to a little bakery where I had the first of the ten Latte Macchiatos which I managed to consume within two days (there’s just something so exciting about drinking hot coffee out of a glass with a straw) and something called Flammkuchen which I believe technically are from Alsace and consist of a pancakey sort of mixture with pizza toppings. It sounds a bit unusual, but is really really nice

That fortified me for a strenuous afternoon’s sightseeing in Tuebingen. My sister gave me the guided tour, which actually didn’t last that long because the place is much smaller than I expected.

That is to say, the actual town is a fair size in terms of outlying suburbs but the actual centre, the Altstadt, is rather compact and doesn’t have a terribly wide range of shops. In terms of the chain stores which you might expect to see in any European town these days, I saw H&M, The Body Shop and Benetton; that was it. I assume there must be a MacDonalds somewhere, because I can’t bear to believe that there still exists a spot on the planet which true civilization has not yet reached, but I regret to say that I didn’t actually see it with my own eyes.

Tuebingen is also rather hilly, far more so than I expected, and so I found myself getting somewhat out of breath from time to time as my sister, now accustomed to it, charged off up the hill to the Schloss ahead of me. When or why the castle was built I really can’t tell you without consulting Wikipedia, but it was suitably picturesque and the view from the ramparts was very pleasant even on the dull, grey sort of day that we had. I was a bit surprised to discover that in the area where the moat must once have been, a large group of people were practicing archery at very high speeds. Being somewhat unnerved that one of them might inadvertently hit us in the eye, we made a hasty retreat and went for a walk down by the river.

The river Neckar flows through Tuebingen and is very wide, although it doesn’t appear to be terribly deep. In the summer people punt up and down it in strange little boats not quite like the ones which they have at Oxford, but by November all these had been safely stowed away somewhere and I didn’t get to see them. It was quite a strange feeling for me to stand on a bridge and look at the Neckar. For a start I confess to being a bit of a geek about rivers; I get awfully excited every time I go to a new city which has a river, even if the river is fairly minor, and if a place I go to should have a famous river running through it then my excitement is very intense indeed. The first days on which I saw the Inn, the Rhine and the Danube stand out for me as important events in my life. No really, they do As for the Neckar… not the world’s most prestigious river and one that perhaps few people in England have ever heard of. I know I had never heard of it, aged seventeen, when a certain someone described it to me for the first time. It is a long story, which is not ever going to be told on this blog, but I once had an emotional attachment to the town of Heidelberg, through which the Neckar also flowed, and so I spent many years dreaming on a day when I would finally stand on a bridge and look at it.

It is strange how we finally get the things we wish for. I have now fulfilled my dream to see the Neckar, even if I have never been, and probably never will go, to Heidelberg. And actually, I must say I have seen better rivers!

That said, it is hard to get the full impact of the thing because someone, at some unspecified point in history (this being the narrative of my sister, of whom history is not her strongest point) collected a big pile of rubble from somewhere (no idea where) and dumped it in the middle of the Neckar. Well, not just dumped, but sort of flattened out and put earth on top of and made into a big long promenade, a quasi-island in the middle of the river, with tree planted on it, and benches, and statues. Die Platanenallee, they call it, and it would be a rather pleasant place to walk a dog, if you happened to have one, which I never would, being scared of dogs.

Down by the riverside there is a sort of tower, in which died a famous German playwright called Hoelderlin. My sister informed me of this in a solemn sort of way and did my best to look suitably impressed and not like a very ignorant person who had no idea who an evidently highly important German literary figure actually was.

“What was it Hoelderlin actually wrote, again?” I tentatively asked her after ten minutes or so of fruitlessly mulling it over in my mind.

“I have no idea,” she confessed, “but I’m sure he was someone important”.

Far more exciting than the demise of poor Hoelderlin then, is Currywurst. Now I confess that I have never eaten Currywurst, nor seem likely to, seeing as I have a strong aversion to curry. But I mention it here because Currywurst has recently taken on a strange sort of significance in the Tuebingen psyche.

For the past few months, an anonymous graffiti artist has been walking round the town in the dead of night and using stencils to spray peculiar slogans about Currywurst on any available space. This being Germany, I think people paint over or wash off the slogans as quickly as possible, but I still saw quite a selection of random phrases, Currywurst wider Krieg (Currywurst against war) being the most frequent. According to my sister, only a few weeks ago a rival artist has started spraying similar messages about Falafel. Falafel aendert sich nie (Falafel never changes) could even be seen painted on the side of poor Hoelderlin’s tower. I confess to not understanding this craze in the slightest, but my sister claims Falafel is Turkish and thus thinks the messages may have some sort of racial undertones.

Before night fell I went to check into the hotel where I had reserved a room for the night. The staff were Eastern European and had not very talkative, but the room was adequate considering that it was setting me back less than thirty quid including breakfast. The only annoyance was the lack of sufficient light to read, but seeing as I wasn’t going to be there long enough to actually want to read I can’t really complain

We soon headed out to sample the delights of the Tuebingen nightlife. There is a rather nice pub-like establishment down by the river called Neckarmuller, which specialises in different sort of beer, served in big tall glasses which look like vases for roses with exceptionally long stems. I had one of the nicest Schnitzels I’ve had in a long time, despite the fact that it was served in a beer gravy and I don’t like beer in the slightest. There was a variation on Spatzle as an accompaniment but it was completely different to the sort of Spatzle which I’ve had before; far more pasta like. My sister and I both fancied a pudding but unfortunately all Neckar Muller had on offer was ice-cream and it felt a bit too cold to experiment with it. We resolved to leave and go elsewhere on a quest for cake.

This Quest for Cake turned out to be resemble the Quest for the Holy Grail in far too many respects. As the knights of the Round Table had no idea where they might find the Grail, so were condemned to wander aimlessly through the dark forests in search of adventures, so we had no idea where in a small German town one could reasonably expect to find light refreshments of the cake variety being served after seven pm in the evening, and thus condemned to wander aimlessly up and down the hilly side streets. Mirages of cake appeared in front of us, always visible but never quite attainable due to bakeries being shut and what not. We contemplated going into a restaurant and asking if we could skip the starter and main course and just take dessert, but in the end we chickened out and had a coffee, before heading to a bar to drown our sorrows in Gluehwein.

The Gluehwein had cherry juice in it and was rather delicious. Sadly it also had cloves floating in it, and cloves being something I would rather not have to swallow whole, no other course of action was available than to try fishing them out. This proved to be difficult enough sober, never mind an hour or so later, and it’s probably a good job most of the people in the bar were German and hopefully too rusty on their English to understand our paranoid exclamations of “There’s something hiding in my drink! I know it’s there, I just cant find it!”

Breakfast at the hotel came too soon and proved to be rather an embarrassing affair as I was the only guest partaking in it. Having got up and checked out early enough to attend half nine Mass down the road, it transpired that half nine Mass had actually been cancelled, so we had a long and rather chilly walk into town on time for eleven.

My sister sort of insisted on going to Mass, but to my mind it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Unfortunately it was a special youth Mass which meant the prayer books had inexplicably been removed. Without the words, the only responses to the German Mass which I was able to muster were Amen and “und mit deinem Geiste”. The elderly lady sitting next to me evidently thought I was a heathen and halfway through asked if she could have my hymn book seeing as I didn’t seem to be making much use of it. The normal course of the Mass was interspersed with random interludes of children singing American gospel songs. It was difficult not to crack up when they burst into a rousing rendition of “Swing low, Sweet Chariot” just before the sermon; that strange way Germans refuse to believe that English people do not render the letter a meant that they kept singing about a “cheriot”; and the whole spectacle just seemed completely incongruous with the very Germanic surroundings.

The ordeal over, I expressed the desire for more cake which led to a minor dispute with my sister over how cake is defined. When I said I wanted cake I meant something along the lines of a pastry; something light, without vast quantities of cream, which I could eat without spoiling the dinner I had spent most of Mass fantasizing about. My sister, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a more continental attitude of defining cake as a sickly gateau-like substance, and this led to disharmony over the sort of cake-establishment we wished to grace with our custom. In the end we both ended up with doughnuts we didn’t want, and moved straight on from the cafe to the pizzeria where we had already agreed to eat.

We must have sat there for two hours or more, talking about this and that. It was so nice to get the chance to talk to her properly again, and it brought home to me how much I miss her. It had got to that awkward time where we were both silently counting down how many hours we had left. We had a desultory walk round the town once more to point out a few lesser sights I might have been forgiven for missing first time round, then found another cafe in which to sit and try and pretend I wouldn’t be getting on a train in ninety minutes. And in the end I was glad when it was time to catch the eye of the waitress and leave, because there is only so long I can keep up bright conversation for whilst trying very hard not to try.

It was very strained on the platform, we both focussed on talking about something totally and utterly pointless (my boyfriend, in fact ) and then the bright red train became visible at the end of the platform and we both burst into tears and hugged each other.

The journey back, which I had almost been looking forward to, being quite a fan of travelling, turned into a bit of a nightmare. The train to Stuttgart was fine. It arrived on time and I managed to run across Stuttgart station once more and make my connection with about sixty seconds to spare. The ICE to Frankfurt, however, left something to be desired. For a start, the entire train appeared to have booked their tickets online. Now this is in principle A Good Thing. I had booked my ticket online too, and received an email telling me that I would be sitting in carriage 23 and giving me a seat number. The problem arose from the fact that a hundred other people had also received emails allocating them seats in carriage 23, they all seemed to be boarding at Stuttgart, and train carriages are too narrow to allow two people to pass in the aisle way. It seemed that everyone with seats at the top of the carriage had got on and the bottom and vice versa, with the result that there was a very ugly and ill natured traffic jam in the middle and I’m not exaggerating if I say the train was twenty minutes into its journey before all were comfortably seated.

There followed ten minutes of peace and quiet, then an announcement that we were on the outskirts of Mannheim. The train stopped, and vast quantities of people who had only just found their seats jumped up assuming we were at the station. A few minutes later there was a further announcement asking everyone to sit down and not to leave the train. Confusion reigned before clarification came in the form of another message on the tannoy. The train had broken down, something wrong with the brakes, and we were going to sit here until someone could come to look at them.

I started to sweat. I was still half an hour’s journey away from the airport and I had been allowing myself exactly two hours to check in and navigate my way back across that maze. A slight delay was not a disaster, but every minute it went by took away a minute I could afford to spend wandering round in a lost bewilderment in an attempt to find a check in desk in Frankfurt airport.

The minutes ticked by. Announcements came thick and fast. No one could be found to mend our train. Someone had now been found. The problem was not very serious, the train could be repaired on the track. The repair would take five minutes. Just another five minutes ladies and gentlemen and then we’ll be moving. We thank you for your patience. And so on and so on. Meanwhile the conductor sprinted up and down the carriage like a frightened rabbit, trying to field questions about what would happen if people missed their connections to Amsterdam. Further polite announcements were made via loudspeaker, which basically amounted to the fact that anyone who had been trying to get to Amsterdam was screwed.

As for me, I was still in with a fighting chance of making my flight, so long as everything went smoothly. Quite clearly when faced with such a circumstance, things elected to go anything but smoothly. Exiting the train, I was quite pleased to see a sign pointing to check in after only two minutes walk. Less pleasing was the fact that only two check in staff appeared to be on duty. I felt myself lucky that I was somewhere near the front of the queue but it turned out to be fairly irrelevant, as the queue declined to move an anything beyond snail’s pace. The passengers from hell appeared to be checking in at one kiosk and were having a lengthy fight with the check in girl about whether they should or should not have printed off their own e ticket prior to arriving at the airport. Check in girl number two noted this and evidently decided it was time to call it a day, closing up her desk. A small riot nearly ensued when the passengers from hell were finally processed, and a pilot then jumped the now half a kilometre long queue and checked in before us. So many irate Germans waving passports is quite a frightening sight, and it soon inspired Lufthansa to locate the extra staff which ten minutes previous it had sincerely assured us it did not have.

having checked in literally the minimum hour before my flight, I had thirty minutes to find my gate. Sound doable? I promptly abandoned all hopes of finding a toilet or a place to buy a drink, and devoted all my energies to navigating. Things seemed to be progressing well, I got through passport control with less of a wait than one normal is subjected to at Frankfurt, and arrived at security check number one. For reasons I don’t quite understand, anyone flying to Britain has to undergo two identical security checks before they are allowed to get on a German plane.

Concentrating intensely on not smiling, I managed to bundle my coat, scarf, belt, phone, passport, pedometer and small change into a tray at an acceptable speed and felt rather proud, until I got reprimanded for putting my bag directly onto the conveyor belt and not in a tray on the conveyor belt. Naughty me! I avoided being taken into a little booth to be searched by a very unattractive armed policewoman, and began to redress myself whilst waiting for my bag.

My bag didn’t come. It took a few minutes for this to register, and then I became rather anxious. I noticed that it had been isolated over to one side, and that a number of people were alternating between staring at it and pointing at me. What on earth could be wrong? I was hit by the sinking realisation that I had left an empty bottle of apple juice in the side compartment. Could this be what was causing such a stir?

Eventually I was approached by a rather daunting official and asked to confirm that this was my bag. Having done so, he asked me to unzip the side. I did so, already forming the necessary German apologies for having forgotten the empty bottle, when I discovered to my surprise that this was actually the side with my purse in.

“Open your purse!” the German commanded, and I duly did so. He peered at it crossly, and informed me that I was carrying a suspicious number of Euro coins.

???!!!

Okay, so I did have quite a bit of small change, because I still haven’t quite got my head round euros and so prefer to also pay with notes for the sake of speed and convenience. But I didn’t have an excessive amount, it being only an average sized purse, and so I was rather nonplussed. I started to regret having admitted to speaking German, because I think sometimes they let you get away with more if you put on an act of being English and stupid. All in all I was detained for fifteen minutes while I struggled to convince the Germany security team that there was no sinister motive in me attempting to carry a moderate quantity of 5 cent pieces out of the country, but in the end I succeeded and started to move towards my gate with a slow jog. I had around ten minutes until boarding!

By virtue of my extraordinary sense of direction (?) I ended up at security check two just as my flight was called for boarding. I was somewhat apprehensive that I would have to justify my coins all over again, but luckily there was only one man on duty and he seemed far too preoccupied with the Polish passport of the lady in front of me to care about my collection of coppers. Phew! I literally ran onto the bus to my plane with thirty seconds to spare and that was it, one adventure successfully concluded

Now I can’t wait until next weekend, when I can do it all over again!