MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! Hope everyone’s having a good one, stuff your faces and have a good time!
Oh, and I did get home eventually 
Archive for December 2009
MERRY CHRISTMAS
An unhappy bunny
(at least there’s a cute bunny picture)
So really, I should be posting this from the comfort of my home, cuppa in one hand, Cadbury’s in the other…
But nope, afraid not. London Gatwick cancelled a hell of a lot of flights today, mine being one of them. Cue frenzied passengers attempting to find their luggage, queues for the only internet cafe in the airport and crazy crazy plans. A few of us sorta stuck together trying to find a solution, from getting the train to London to hiring a car and driving. None of them worked out, but I think everyone managed to find a way back in the end. Luckily I got to an internet cafe just in time (in a really seedy smoky gambling place in Cologne whose owner had a barely intelligible accent) and managed to get myself on a flight for tomorrow. Only just though, as when someone tried to do the same five minutes after me, it kept timing out and showing an error message. Still a little worried that I’ll get there and something won’t be right.
I’m thoroughly disappointed not to be at home to be honest. It’s not that I hate it in Germany, I love it, but I’ve been looking forward to these two weeks for so long that it was a real kick in the teeth when we heard that the flight had been cancelled. It’s hard not to chalk it up to the U.K’s general reaction to snow – remember earlier in the year when everything shut down due to snowfall, while the rest of Europe were baffled at the whole commotion? Wile I understand shitty weather conditions are not something you want to be flying in, with that sort of track record, can you blame people for being angry?
The worst part is that I’m missing the grading back home. A lot of people are going for important grades, and I wanted to be there to support everyone, especially the boy. It’s hard not to feel like a bit of a let down, even though it’s not my fault. I really did try everything I could think of to get back home today.
I’m going to get a pizza now to cheer myself up 
here’s hoping tomorrow goes a little better
BORN TO PEDAL
My my, do I have an awful lot to update on… And with only four days before I’m flying back home!! I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am for Christmas!
But in this post we’re going back to late November ‘09… If asked to name two of the most popular things in Germany, beer and bikes would probably be among some of them, along with bread, staring and waiting at lights (heeheehee). So what do you get when you combine the two?
YOU GET A BIERBIKE THAT’S WHAT!! A bar on wheels! What an EPIC idea! It only needs 6 people to pedal, but you can have up to 16 on one Bierbike. If you check out Bierbike.de then you can see which cities it’s available in (Dortmund in March!!). We did ours in Muenster, capital city of the world if you were to believe Beef, definitely a good choice! We had the bike for two fun-filled hours, in which we (kind of) saw Muenster, albeit through beer goggles, shouted PEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL a lo, particularly when the lights turned green so as to not get caught by another red, and pestered whoever was on bar duty at that point!
I got to play barkeep! I wasn’t very good at it though. Someone asked if I’d done barwork before and I pulled a half pint of froth as an answer. Also did the whole ‘barkeep tells a story about the area’ game, in which I told too many people about the cages at St. Lamberts (see the first Muenster post!), which, as you’ll know from that post, creep me out to no end!
Other fun things that happened on Bierbike:
We got serenaded! TWICE.
Once by some angels and devils who assumed we’d want an English song, being English speakers, until I DEMANDED a German one…
And once by some dude who sang Country Roads and didn’t understand why no one knew every damn word to the song like he did.
We also picked up some hitchhikers on the way :
Lazy bastards! Let this be their wall of shame…
So all in all Bierbike = SPASS
BEAT THE SEAMS OF IRON
I love Google Translate.
A while back, another sewing blogger linked to Manequim’s collection of free patterns – really chic, really cute… one problem? They’re all in Portuguese! So I downloaded the pattern for this beauty :
Now, for good old Google translate. I loved how back in Year 9, kids used to try and fool the foreign language teachers into thinking that they’d done awesome German/French/whathaveyou homework by writing it in English and then using google translate – except not only would Google translate use forms that they hadn’t even learn yet, it would use them incorrectly! Fun times to be had when marking that piece of work! I half want to give out homework just to see if anyone does it at my school, but it’s a Gymnasium, and they’re all clever enough and hard working enough to do it themselves! There goes my fun
But anyway, here’s what google translate makes of the instructions:
MOUNT
• Close the sides of the external and internal parts separately.
• Add the external and internal parts, right on right, with a seam by
edges of the armholes. Beat the seams of iron, turning the gaps on the inside parts
internal and secure with stitching different. Revire parts, inside on inside.
• Close the collar with a seam, holding the edges under, right on
right. Next, crease the collar along the length, leaving the
edges higher, right on right.
• Sew the edges of the larger collar, without closing the edges of the neckline assembly
front and back. Revire, inside on inside.
• Sew the right edge of the inside of the collar at the neckline of the right front
and back, matching the numbers mount.
• Put up the outside edge of the right of the neckline and secure with
different stitching.
• Put up the bottom edges (0.3 cm, approximately) for the reverse. Tap
iron. Put up the borders again and again secure with stitching.
Go on then! Get to it! BEAT THOSE SEAMS OF IRON DAMN YOU!
Frankfurt!
Long time, no travel update!
So a few weeks ago we were in Frankfurt for the weekend. Found a brilliantly cheap way to get there by using the “Quer-durchs-Land” ticket that you can get from Deutsche Bahn. It basically means you can travel through all of Germany for about 50 euros for 5 people, but only on the regional trains. We paid 44 euros for 3 people, so effectively we paid 14 euros for a ticket that would normally cost 60 – 70 euros. Bargain! The only snag is that it takes ages to get there – 5 hours and a half to be precise – but you can’t exactly be picky when you can’t afford an ICE.
Plus who needs an ICE when you have 5 and a half hours of the Dictionary Game (consisting of choosing random words from the dictionary and saying them in a funny voice) and endless fun bothering Beef? Beef and Graves contented themselves with taking the piss out of how my head sorta falls forward when I’m asleep on trains – it’s never boring when members of Team Fabelhaft are around!
As luck would have it, some Swansea ladies were in Frankfurt that weekend too – in the same hostel no less! It was great to see some faces from home and catch up on how everyone’s been doing in their respective places in Germany. Reunions = viel Spass!
Frankfurt itself was awesome. Very much what you’d expect from a big city; towering skyscrapers, a busy shopping centre and lots of people! Fun fact : while our hostel was brilliant (except for when there were Spanish people shouting at 5 am outside the hotel ‘PAPIIIII PAPIIIIIII’, so annoying!!), it was in the middle of the red light district! Didn’t bother us, it was fairly amusing to have random guys try to proposition us through the window when we were sat in the Hostel’s bar, and it made for a funny night visiting the sex shops and the strip clubs (well, a strip club in my case, those places are expensive even if you don’t pay the strippers!!)
