Hallo London!

I suppose this is my last post. Unless of course I end up doing something very German-orientated within the next week, which is highly unlikely. I am back home in London, as you can probably tell by the title. London is as overwhelmingly London as ever. It’s grey, menacing and outrageously expensive. It’s also home and I love it. I met up with some friends the night before last, and was suprised to find someone charging me £3.60 for a pint of urine. Someone had even gone to the trouble of putting it in barrels and naming it “Stella Artois” (presumably it’s a question of marketing and it wouldn’t sell if they simpy admitted it was piss). The music was too loud in the pub. On the way there there was a heavy police presence outside the tube station. Across the road there was an equally heavy presence of black teenagers hanging around outside a newsagent staring them down. I moved on fast before things turned ugly.

Why do I love London? – in fact why do I even like it? I’m not sure; maybe it’s just because it’s addictive. Certainly because my friends are here and I missed them all back in Germany. My big theory though is that I suffer from a curiously British love of crapness. Most American readers will not understand this. They don’t see why you shouldn’t simply go through life aiming to be as beautiful and happy and make as much money as possible. “The persuit of happiness” is a constitutional right. My feeling though is that going through life expecting everything to be great may give you fantastic drive, but it must leave you curiously empty inside because you can only ever be disappointed when circumstances are any less than just right.

The British attitude seems far healthier. If you go through life expecting everything to be rather bad then you are completely unfussed by disappointments while silly little things like nice views and cups of tea make you happy. That’s why, although there’s so much wrong with London I still love it; it’s the myriad of little cool things every day, but also I love it because of the crapness rather than in spite of it! In the same way I loved Russia the only time I went. It was cold and dark, the tap water was poisonous, I was constantly hung-over, most of the people I talked to simply assumed I was mentally subnormal because I couldn’t speak Russian and replied “Nyet!” to any of my questions, but somehow it worked. Beers followed by quadruple vodkas, the fact that Russians can pickle anything, trenchworks dug into the streets making the place look like Stalingrad, 50p packs of cigarettes, the whole thing was amazing!

On the other hand Germany was amazing because it actually was amazing. Maybe I’m simply not used to that. Germany does so many things better. Beer, sausages, kebabs, cars, driving, public transport, Pfands, tapwater, prices, those cool windows that open both ways, cheap cigarettes and bars where you can smoke, friendliness, families, being students, alternativeness. I could very happily live in a German city, but I’d have to know I could come back to London occasionally. I don’t know why, but it’s home and I can’t cut it off.

What about the summer overall? I suppose in the narrowest possible sense I didn’t do that well for Rise. I failed to carry out any particularly ground-breaking research. I’ve already got my Masters sorted out back here in England. I have no intention of doing a PhD. I’m an EU citizen, so I wouldn’t be paying juicy North American fees even if I did do one. As far as I’m concerned though it was terrific. The only downsides that I can think of was the fact that the pay covered accomodation and food, but didn’t stretch far enough for travelling and nights out, so I ended up cleaning out my own bank account, and also the fact that Carrie disappeared back to the States way too early! – I blame that on San Diego State University and their outrageously long semesters though! Other than that everything was great. Lots of sunshine and beer and wonderfully cheap prices. The structure and the money of a job, but one without too much in the way of pressure and restrictions. A rail pass and the whole of Germany to explore every weekend. I’ve made new friends, really improved my German and although work was not always quite as involved as it could have been it was a bit of CV gold nevertheless! I’d really recommend this to anyone applying and I’d be interested to see if other European countries run similar schemes; now I’ve done Germany I’d be well up for finding the same thing in France or Spain or Italy next summer!

One piece of advice though, do try to learn some German before you come out. Your German doesn’t have to be good, but if you have a half-decent framework and just go out of your way to speak to people all the time you can really build on it in a couple of months, while if you arrive with just a phrasebook you will have to be very self-disciplined if you want to leave with anything more than phrase-book German. Try to get adopted by Germans as well. I only managed this in the last two or three weeks but it was really worth it. Preferably find Germans who don’t speak English as well. Working out how to say what you want to say fast with limited vocabulary is how you really learn a language. Of course you need the language lessons, but they are just the foundations which get you up to speed. They’re much the same as driving lessons, you need them, but they really don’t compare to the actual buzz of driving fast and fluently by yourself. Of course you can survive in Germany with little or no German; a lot of my fellow students in Dresden did, but the whole experience seems depressingly two dimensional. So in short, get to work, learn German, come to Germany. I haven’t worked out when I’m coming back yet, but I am.

Auf Wiedersehen!