We've all seen it. That one person/couple/family/group of morons in a public place you just seem to see everywhere you go. The people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the crowds of randomers, the people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the staff who are just there to enforce the rules, the people who complain about their seat on public transport not being the seat they wanted, the people who complain about the fridge being set to 4°C instead of 3°C therefore destroying the optimum integrity of milk... the people who complain about, well, just about anything as though the world should be run according to their own personal standards and not by any pre-devised regulations that have already been constructed for the convenience of the masses of people what make up the general public. Yep, we've all seen them. But at the start of this trip, Manchester Airport played hosted to my parents being the centre of attention, whilst that younger guy in the glasses who's stood with them - yeah, him, the one with his head in his hands - tried my best to remain as normal in keeping with the rest of the public as possible. It's very rare for me to act normal and I refuse to have my chances ruined by the folks when every little thing that could possibly go awry, does.
I would just like to take the opportunity to say that I am not, of course, slandering my own parents here, but merely exaggerating an undesirable situation for pseudo-comic effect. (Just in the event that one of them happens to read this and thinks I'm saying bad things about people I know on the Internet for all the paedophiles and axe-murderers to read, since they are the only people who use the Internet anyway.)
So yeah, I became one of "those people", you know, the group of people who make a scene in public, and you know you shouldn't stare at them, but you so desperately want to. Luckily, two hours sat in the seat at the very back of the aircraft with your face stuck in a random book managed to calm my paranoid mind of 'everyone looking at me'.
T-Mobile were the first to welcome me into the country, notifying me of the extra charges on my phone if I were to ever use it during this week. Surely though, one text message should be enough. When it takes them six texts to tell me (over the course of 40 minutes - by my calculation, one message every 6 minutes and 50ish seconds) of this necessary information, I've never felt more likely to hurl my phone onto the Autobahn, or call up the head at T-Mobile and tell them that I'm aware I'm currently in Germany and quite frankly I don't care about the tiny changes to the cost of my phone calls, although incidentally, such a phone call would've probably cost me dearly. However, for your reading enjoyment/pleasure/frustration, I present to you a typical text message alert from the first night:
T-Mobile welcomes you to Germany. It now costs (ever-so-slightly higher price tariff than normal) per minute to call, (same again but can't be arsed typing it all out and feeling slightly more creative than to simply copy and paste) per text message. To use the Internet on your phone, you will need to purchase Euro-Boosters, which will grant you 20
PAGES
OF
ANNOYING
TEXT
MESSAGE...
And so, onto the first night, and through some 'legally grey-area' complication, we were able to receive British TV over there (which, a little later in the holiday, prompted my mother to be branded a holiday 'spoil-sport' for a whole thirty minutes as we "didn't come all the way to Germany to watch Emmerdale") meaning that an extensive range of English-language films were on offer to us. Unfortunately, since the flight was delayed by about an hour, it ended up being closer to 11pm when we arrived at our lodgings, rather than "just after 9", and by 11 o'clock there's barely a decent film showing on normal telly. Ultimately, we ended up settling on Schindler's List, quite fitting if we visited Germany in the 1940s, but it's been around 70 years since the happenings of the Second World War, Hitler and the Third Reich, and all those Jewish containment camps, and somehow I can't help shake the feeling that time's moved on. Oh well, being one of the only open-minded people in my country (it seems), I'll just have to be lumped into that category of ignorant English pigs who still lord it over the Germans about how we beat them at international war and football tournaments. Thank God the Eurovision Song Contest isn't significantly popular, or else we would've felt their wrath this time last year when Germany romped to victory and the UK finished dead last. However, since Schindler's List goes on for six-and-a-half hours (well it doesn't really but I imagine that's what it feels like) and it already being well after midnight before the little girl in the red coat showed up, majoritatively we resigned to tiredness.
They have Ikeas in Germany. Bit of a redundant statement; they have Ikeas everywhere, just like they have McDonald's, petrol stations and grass. But I was somewhat surprised considering I've never been to any Ikea in the UK before so the whole thing was just as special as I imagined. Mainland Europe's most cutting-edge furniture designs all housed in a gigantic building with foreign language descriptions of each product, store section and emergency exit sign. My mother, in a bout of forgetting which country she was even in, did that thing what propa inglish peepul doo, engaging staff and customers alike in super fast paced English conversation only to be met with blank looks from the German population. Luckily, she never resorted to the football-hooligan's guide to speaking foreign languages, wherein every word is spoken in PLAIN... ENGLISH... ONLY... LOUDER... AND... SLOWER... thus forcing the recipient into understanding you or running to the nearest telephone to alert the authorities that people are shouting gibberish at them and they don't know how to contain the situation. The best part was when my Deutschland-dwelling sister, who needed to kit out her living room with flat-pack furniture, bought too much that it all had to be done in two trips, thus leaving myself and mother with a mini-mountain of dismantled coffee tables and such. Asking Customer Services to keep an eye on the purchases while we waited for our second-journey to pick us up wasn't such a bad idea. However, a bad idea was approaching them with a "'scuse me love, spoken English, complex query, blah blah blah", which left the poor old woman behind the counter making muted excuses for going in the back room and subsequently returning with another employee who tentatively asked in her best English if we were the arrogant bastards who needed assistance. Naturally, she didn't know the English words for "arrogant bastards" but proceeded to help us anyway, leaving me to ponder if the whole spectacle could've been avoided if only my mother had opened with some variant of "Entschuldigung, können Sie Englisch sprechen, bitte?", or a simple "Sprechen Sie Englisch?", or even a semi-distressed, panic ridden "ENGLISCH SPEAK-IDY? NEIN?" whilst containing the urge to smear excrement all over the walls.
Already I feel like I've said far too much on Ikea, but the ride home is where all of this has been leading too. See, the second-journey ended up overloading the back seat of the car with boxed goods so much that, legally, at least one of us should've stayed behind at Ikea for another hour or so. Being English, none of us could be bothered with such a situation and thus a novel seating arrangement was improvised on the spot. This largely consisted of three adults and one infant sitting in the car as normal, but with the other "adult" half-crouched in the backseat cavity where the legs go, half sat on the window-winder-downer spike thingy. I tell you what, on the big list of life experiences, I never thought I'd be able to check off "contort self into cramped backseat of car, somehow, with arse almost pressed against window whilst doing 80 kilometers-an-hour auf der Autobahn". Apparently we would've also been driving on the right-hand side, which would've been even more disorienting but luckily I was staring at the floor for most of that half-hour. The whole thing also led to another life experience being ticked off, "exit a car by backwards roll".
More stuff happened during the week but I apparently didn't care enough to write them down; it seems nothing could top the Ikea day, but judging by how long it's gone on for, it's just as well I have not much to write about. That is, except for what I would like to Christen the new and improved German National Anthem: 'The Quarter-to-Eight Song'. Except it's apparently not specific to quarter-to-eight, but specific to quarter-to-any hour. Typically, we're used to clocks chiming every fifteen minutes but with a special chime on the hour, every hour. It's the same in Germany, except the tower clock in the town chimes on the hour, at quarter-past and at half-past. But every forty-five minutes past, the chimes and bells break out in song. Apparently quarter-to-twelve is the new midday in Germany. I haven't had the chance to research this because it's the 13th of June, and I only got back into the country last night, remember.
Anyway, that's it, that's the highlights apart from the gift-set bottles of Jägermeister and complimentary Jägermeister-y shot glasses I got for a decent price in Hannover's Duty Free stop, as you're on your way out of the country. I can predict lots of good times drinking all this Jägermeister and I'll never get sick of it. I'll never become ill from drinking too much of it, and I'll not post anything on the 30th of June saying otherwise.
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