A Bavarian Farmhouse

January - The Official Season of petty minded complaints Perhaps it's the lack of certain green vegetables, but January seems to be the period when moaning reaches 747 noise levels here. Having spent the best part of a week preparing the sort of English exam that a five year old child could past, and despite providing them with all of the material prior to the exam and having an open book exam - some of them were still moaning. Of course, no student in my experience in Britain ever complained to me personally that an exam was more difficult than it should have been but that's because students only complain when they believe an injustice has taken place - here students complain when they suspect they have failed - in fact any student who complains probably has failed and they are performing their own version of historical determinism in order to make it clear that it must surely be apparent, only the teachers can be responsible for failure. Someone else always has t

All over Europe, people with difficult parents are confused by the disaster. Well, our neighbours aren't lying dead somewhere on a distant Indonesian beach, they're upstairs back to their normal Christian ways, you know being on a permanent retired holiday, taking advantage of third world economies as tourists and complaining that we haven't cleaned the apartment common stairwell (kaerwoche a subject guaranteed to create mirth in the nearest Bavarian.) So it would seem that they didn't tell one of their children when they would return and it was that poor forgotten sould who kept on ringing and ringing for two weeks. Still, despite their abominable manners and petty-mindedness, as I said to Susi - still very mad at them - the fact that we felt some compassion for them simply demonstrate where our hearts lie. We simply forgot that they were buggers and extended to them the same regard we would have for everyone.

All over Europe telephones are ringing in empty rooms. The phone in my neighbours apartment remains unanswered. Every day it rings in the morning and then in the evening. It rings more in the evening than in the morning and I guess - although I can't be sure - that different relatives are ringing before they go to work and after they return. The ringing continues way past the average eight rings that people normally do and two things are becoming clear: The neighbours should have been home by now and people are expecting to hear from them. Other rather sad deductions can be made, namely anyone alive in Thailand would be in contact with their relatives to let them know they are safe. Anyone who was calling would be bound to call another relative and hear this news. Sadly none of this seems to have happened. I searched the internet hoping to find a list of people, but again like so many other searchers it quickly became clear to me that the one thing that you won't fin

The unanswered phone. I guess I only really noticed the ringing phone about two days ago. It was then I realised that our downstairs neighbours did not have an annoyingly regular unanswered phone call in the morning and in the early evening. I suddenly struck me that it was my upstairs neighbours phone ringing and just to be sure, I went upstairs to listen. Sure enough it was ringing, just like it has been for the past ten days. My neighbours are on holiday in Thailand and I was sure that they were hillwalking types and wouldn't be anywhere near the beaches, but then I remembered something Susi said they had told her. That they hoped to spend their first Christmas on the Beach. With luck they meant German Christmas - which would have been Friday 24th. They were supposed to have gone for six weeks so I'm not sure when they are scheduled to return. The neighbours above them have been leaving the mail on their doormat so I guess and hope they know something we don't.

Oops! I did it again. Today, or rather very late last night I discovered that while I had been sick yesterday I manage to miss one of my classes. Oh, oh!

The January Sales Despite today being a Bank holiday in the UK it isn't a bank holiday here in Germany. Bank holidays which fall on a weekend are still holidays and by some curious process still count as holidays. In the UK, when Christmas falls on a weekend the country usually closes down for three weeks because of the two additional days off the working week. Not so here - if the public holiday falls on a weekend - tough. It just means all the shops are closed and since they are all closed on Sunday anyway there's no loss. Monday the 3rd is not a holiday and the January sales sort of begin. Well not really - they don't need to because the entire nation in the South appears to turn up at either Media Markt or Ikea for the bargain of the year. Now why anyone would consider a little air filter a bargain stumps me. What will they be filtering out of the air - no one smokes in the house here and South Germans certainly despise carpets so there doesn't seem to be a

Follow The Yellow Sack Road Yesterday was the first time that I really spent any amount of time thinking about how much effort goes into recycling here. Well, it's a sort of recycling. I'm sure a great number of people are rather surprised when I tell them that the Gelbe Sack is not systematically sorted by the small hands of indigenous third world children. It's taken to a special Gelbe Sack-burning-electricity-generating unit not far from here. Now don't be surprised but as soon as I mention this to any of our German friends a lengthy discussion entails about how it can't be true, Germany has laws about burning stuff and it must be happening in another country - Poland or even China. No, honest it is just around the corner (figuratively speaking) and they burn the stuff at a very high temparature. In fact when it first opened they had to import rubbish to burn to keep it operating at optimum performance. Unusually - well from a British perspective, there

It is Saturday morning and last night Chris did happen to mention that there had been no blog here since June. Blogging falls into that category of things that seem like a good idea at the time and then you wonder why you don't make it like Sam Pepys. Of course, it has all been done before and making any attempt to digitalise a great diary is bound to fail. It simply lacks narrative structure. Pepys diary has, almost by accident, a structure - well it certainly has the middle part any way, just no real ending nor any real begining. I guess it's obvious that I have been reading Claire Tomlin's excellent biography. Of all the entertaining things that happened yesterday or possibly failed to happen, I guess Susi enthuisatically putting out the Gelbe Sacke along with all our other trash cans. You have to appreciate that here in Germany it looks as if we are recycling everything. We have six different bins - one for paper, one for biological material (er.. food) and one