It's been months since I left my home in Dublin, bade farewell to Maynooth 'til February and headed off to the EberhardKarls University at Tubingen, in BadenWurtemberg, Germany, with its 28,000 students, 43,000 bad hair-cuts and 68,000 different types of sausage.
Our apartment block was the most modern building of its kind in Tubingen - in 1965. This, however, was 1998 and communal bathrooms were out of fashion. My "apartment" is a one-roomed box. I live happily in it, sometimes pretending I am a horse being transported. I open my blinds. What a view! The Swabian Alps as a backdrop for the little medieval city of Tubingen, with its thousand pairs of bright-pink jeans, containing people.
Our next task was to register with the university itself. We queued for more than an hour, only to be told to go upstairs to the office for foreign students, where we were promptly told to go back downstairs, where we were sent back upstairs again, where we were told to come back tomorrow. I hid inside a doorway as the offices were closing, and sneaked my girlfriend in a back door. We were registered there and then. The best weapon against German bureaucracy is simply keep repeating "Ich verstehe nicht" and keep opening your passport in answer to every question they ask you.
With the bureaucratic dragon slain, it was time to walk blindfolded across the tightrope of language. Our first encounter came at the airport, when I managed to mix up the words for elevator and wheelchair. Next came my girlfriend, who mixed up the sentence "Why is the cauliflower rotten?" with "What god betrayed this cauliflower?" Then came me trying to buy a plug and instead ordering eight screwdrivers for next Wednesday.
Food is one of the biggest cultural difference between Germany and Ireland - especially the local Swabian culinary tastes! In the university canteen we ate Linseln und Spatzle. On other days, we were served sausages - but not just any type of sausages. No! We were served cheap sausages! Most German food actually isn't that bad. Schnitzel is quite nice, and their pastries are delicious. A vast amount of pork is eaten here, and in the few non-Italian restaurants it is difficult to get anything else. I, however, have started eating proper student food. Today, for example, I ate tempting sausage meat curry, followed by mouth-watering fried mustard cakes - my own recipe, of course.
German alcohol is different, but not very. The fact that they drink different beer doesn't alter the fact that they still drink beer. There is a very nice German type of sparkling white, called Sekt, and a bizarre vodka drink, called Boris Yeltsin (no kidding).
German music, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Think back to the Eurosong this year and Guildo, the German singer. Yesterday, a couple in front of me in the supermarket queue actually had a Guildo CD in their trolly. At a disco last night, I heard Tainted Love and a whole host of other totally outdated songs that have become fashionable here with the recent advent of stone-washed jeans.
The German people are very pleasant to live with. Those that I know have been very helpful to me in practising my German - correcting me when I'm wrong etc. The typical German stereotype of people dancing around in green shorts, slapping their thighs and finding nothing funny is not true. I am told by those I live with, however, that this type of person does exist in Bavaria. Perhaps this is another factor in the unspoken war between Bavaria and the rest of Germany, whereby they earbash each other. In any case, forget the stereotype - the only stereo type here has Tainted Love coming from it.
