A Bavarian Farmhouse

It is Tuesday afternoon and here in Neu Ulm at the Edison it must be almost 26 degrees and set to get hotter still. My class of information managers are all trying to decide which fictional employee to give a job too and hopefully the whole exercise will take up the rest of the afternoon. Having to type on a German keyboard means my educated British fingers keep thinking that z is y or rather y is z the keys are transposed and of course all the punctuation is a mystery so no contractions in this blog. It is so hot that all I am thinking of is getting home sitting on the balcony and watching Voyager now that Sky re runs have reached series four. Cool For tomorrow my British and American TV class at the Uni will be watching The Office, Sex in the City and Queer Eye for the straight gu (UK) so they will be studying the pink pound and surreal docucomedy.

I can't avoid being irritated that we didn't visit this one either. I shall post a blog soon called all the places we didn't visit in Ulm. Gemeinde Steinheim am Albuch

All the time we were in Ulm with the college and we never went here. I mean, for goodness sake, Eugene Shoemaker Platz! Ries Crater Museum Noerdlingen

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. We landed at JFK ahead of schedule and took the shuttle bus to Grand Central Station. That way we could see everything as we travelled into the city. The Ticket guy sold us two $13 dollar tickets and we got on. We were followed by an obnoxious Oxford Don type with his blue checked Land shirt and his comfy corduroys but worse was his Australian girlfriend who spoke with such a high pitched whine it sounded as if she had been gargling on nail varnish remover. They bitched the whole time. They bitched at the driver for not leaving when they were ready and then they bitched at him because the bus was too hot! At each terminal we picked people up and a different ticket dude would come onboard and sell tickets to the new passengers. At terminal one the driver announced that every one had to have their tickets ready, because the guy that collects them would come on. A rather hysterical American woman student announced that the tic

Today I spent the morning, from eight until half past nine teaching Hans on his own at my clients. This was a fairly pleasant affair, Hans is very talkative and interested to a certain extent in both science and etymology so he contributes a great deal to the conversation. He drew my attention to the concept of Hoch Deutsch although I may have spelt that incorrectly. High German is considered the best German to speak although I think almost everyone is automatically excluded from that. The interesting and mistaken comparison is of course Oxford English which never fails to amuse me although I guess the students have never had the good fortune to watch a single round of University Challenge. Five minutes of the rich mosaic of accent present at Oxford these days, should produce near absolute befuddlement in the average German student of English. And Lord alone help them if the ever happen to find themselves shipwrecked on the shores of St Andrews University. Come to think of it

Wednesday is the day I teach my class on British and American TV. There appear to be three sorts of student in my class. Those who are very interested in media and movies, those who think it won’t be too hard a credit for their English module and those who think that a class where you get to watch television for an hour can’t be all bad. I suspect that the last category is the one that won’t quite achieve the standard for a pass, but you never know. Today I went over Michael Hauge’s essentials for a story concept and while some students were very interested and took notes, there is always the class’s answer to Krusty the Klown, yearning for his (and it is always a his) own fifteen minutes in the limelight. There are quite small vestiges of early man who are so out of touch with reality that they don’t want to even imagine that women go to see movies like Troy just to catch a glimpse of Brad Pit’s butt. And it then goes without saying that there are even smaller remnants of early