Busy, busy, busy

It’s the usual end-of-semester stress: too many parties, too many exams. Possibly even in that order.

In the meantime, there’s always Facebook.

Getting Fussy

I’ve taken a few trains recently. There’s a new trend on Deutsche Bahn regional trains for the guards to announce connecting services at major stations, complete with platform numbers and delays. Which is good and usually quite useful.

It’s just a bit ridiculous when they announce a train that’s not supposed to arrive for another half hour as “scheduled departure 11.05, today at 11.06″ or something to that effect. Because that train has no chance of catching up on that minute in the meantime or what? I bet we’ll soon hear of passengers missing trains because the trains made good on the announced delays and left before people had gone to the platform. Maybe they should actually start saying that what they’re announcing are estimated delays. Or stop getting fussy over a minute. This isn’t Switzerland, after all.

Aimlessness

It’s been a bit of an odd week. Not all that much to do for university (apart from procrastinating on my thesis), but it was only the second time this semester that all my classes took place. There’s a grand total of six of them, spread over just three days, but even so there’s always something interfering. Mostly all these bloody public holidays.

Anyway, the upshot of it was that I spent a fair amount of time around university, most of which was of course spent imbibing caffeine with friends. One of my friends had her sister visiting to have a look at what university is like since she’d just finished her A-levels. I thought she got rather good at the whole aimlessness by the end of the week, even if she didn’t quite manage to acquire the vague look of desparation that we proper students all seem to have now that we’re in fourth year.

Hm. Now if the clouds that’ve been hovering above town for the last half hour would finally start to chuck down their rain, the day might actually become bearable after all this stickiness.

The Centre of the World?

While making tea, I switched on the TV in the kitchen and flicked through a few channels and came across some documentary on customs officers stopping vans on some motorway. They were complaining that so few of the people passing through the country on their way from somewhere in further east than Germany to somewhere further west, or the other way round, spoke German.

Well, how about leaning some foreign languages yourselves? Even in English and French, they obviously couldn’t manage more than a few disjointed words.

Student Nights

This is the sort of thing students abroad never quite believe you: Classes today (as on any Tuesday this semester and any Monday last one) didn’t finish until 9pm. Technically 8.45, but we overran by twenty minutes, so it was ten past nine by the time I finally left the building – and ten past ten by the time I was home, having had to go to the supermarket on the way back to actually be in possession of food come breakfast tomorrow.

Do I mind? Not really. It’s just hard to have dinner when you’re stuck in class between six and nine. But apart from that, it’s actually quite normal.

After a year, where do you start?

It’s been almost a year since I last wrote here. I stopped writing because, well, I felt that I didn’t have that much to say. I probably still don’t. The blog started out with a vague idea to keep friends and family updated about what was going on in my life while I was abroad. I’ve long since returned to Germany, but friends and family still don’t know what’s going on in my life and yet it hasn’t kept me writing.

Still, I’m trying to revive it. It’s likely to be as irregular and erratic as ever, but hey, it’s better than nothing and I definitely don’t want to close this blog entirely.

A lot has happened since I last wrote. For a start, my time in Britain came to an end and I moved back to Germany in September to finish my studies at university here. I’m a finalist now, due to graduate this summer if all goes well, and then I’ll have a BA in English Literature and Cultural Studies, which is as good as worthless in this country. I don’t know what I’ll do after graduation, but considering my job prospects here, it isn’t altogether unlikely that I’ll return to the British Isles. I miss living there anyway; Germany does have its perks, but I still miss Britain. That said, life isn’t altogether bad at the moment. There is a certain amount of stress and pressure at university, but that’s only to be expected when you’re in your final semester and supposed to be working on your dissertation.

Other things have changed as well. My camera broke last summer and I haven’t had it repaired. As much as I miss taking photos, I don’t have the time for it and particularly not the time to get better at it; even before I gave up, I felt like I was stalling. If anything, it gives me more time to travel or to see more (and see things differently) while travelling. I’d go insane if I didn’t leave Tübingen from time to time, so that means day trips or weekends away from this small town hell, even if Switzerland doesn’t feature as a destination anymore like it used to. There’s still the odd place around here to see for the first time, and quite a few more places to see again before I leave for good.

So… Hello to all those who are still around there, lurking and having their RSS feeds send them this. I’m back, or at least I think I’ll be.

Don’t Mention the War

Eleni was in town for the last couple of days and dragged me (and another friend of hers) out on Monday night. Things were fine until vodka shots were bought, but sleep until around lunchtime and lots of water managed to cure most of that.

It wouldn’t have been Eleni if ten minutes into being in some bar she hadn’t socialised with a stag party and insisted on us joining the fun drunken commotion. Husband-to-be was so pissed he told me every other minute that I was a nice guy (or something to that effect) and once he found out I was German insisted on introducing me to everyone at least once, always mentioning my German-ness. Every last one of them told me how England was going to beat Germany in the world cup, but that was pretty much all they came up with.

After going through it (and the required response, i.e. we’ll see about England beating Germany, it’s going to be penalties again and Beckham will ruin it for England) more than half a dozen times, I think I would’ve almost preferred if someone had mentioned the war like they usually do.

Tales of Cities

Although I’m not sure whether anyone still reads this, here’s a bit of an update. I haven’t been up to much, having had to write a number of essays and exams over the last weeks. Currently, there’s one exam to go in a few days’ time, before I’m free until the autumn. If all goes well, I’ll have a job here in Leeds for the next while, so that I’ll be hanging round for a bit longer. I did get out of Leeds on two days last week, though, visiting Sheffield and Nottingham.

I’ve always had a bit of a fondness for Sheffield, so I used a sunny day to pay the city another visit and take a few photos. It’s not exactly the most beautiful place either, but somehow they seem to have managed much better over the last deacde or two. The tram system seems to help a lot in making the place more likeable (and less traffic-choked), but the city centre not being entirely dedicated to shopping is another good thing. I certainly wouldn’t mind living there for a while one day.

I had a look at the university as well – I’m fairly sure I would’ve gone there if we’d had Erasmus places there – and what struck me most was that how the university (along with the rest of the city) seemed to have much more of a sense of identity than Leeds. It’s all the little things like the student newspaper being called Sheffield Steel or the café or the students’ union café being called Coffee Revolution. The rest of South Yorkshire may have gone relatively apolitical, but socialism seems to live on at the university. Oh, and the Arts Tower is beautiful in its own way, no matter what anyone says.

Nottingham was a bit different. I didn’t have quite that much of a look at the town, but it seemed reasonably nice as well, if in parts as badly congested by buses as Leeds is. Also paid the university a visit as I was curious to see what the campus was like, Nottingham having been my third preference for my exchange year (Newcastle had been second). Well, it’s large, very green, even has a lake – and I didn’t like it much. Apparently it has won awards for the fact that it is nicely landscaped, with buildings set apart by lawn and trees, but personally, I don’t like a university campus where you can never really see the next building. Give me a 1970s concrete hell any day, but not something as genuinely nice as Nottingham’s campus.

They do have a good student radio, though, as I was reminded when I sneaked into the students’ union shop to buy something to drink. They were playing the station there and I recognised the jingle from when I listened online to their 40-hour broadcast in aid of Comic Relief, which was a wonderful piece of radio broadcasting.

Leeds, where I’ve been stuck rather disappointedly since, could do with a bit of all that – good student radio would be nice, but better still would be a sense of identity and history. As it is, this place (and this university) is an overly commercialised whiteboard ready to wiped clean whenever money is to be made with something else.

Extracurriculars

Two very different things out of the usual in the last two days: Firstly, I attended a “focus group” (yes, it really was called that) on Wednesday, when the Study Abroad Office wanted to get some feedback on its website. We were lured at lunchtime with free sandwiches and greeted by someone from some administrative department, probably Student Promotions or something equally un-academic-sounding. Apart from me, there were three Americans, one Canadian and a Turkish girl. I thought feedback on the website wasn’t very hard – after all, and in line with the rest of the university’s many websites, it’s one big usability mess -, but they actually wanted to hear about the content. It got a bit frustrating for everyone when it turned out they weren’t really interested in usability issues, while all we could talk about was that because we never actually found the relevant content they wanted to get feedback on. Ho hum. Still, the free sandwich was worth it.

Yesterday, after not having left the flat all day because I overslept right into my 10am lecture, I headed over to the School of English in the evening for a poetry reading by Grevel Lindop. I’d never heard of him before, but as it was I liked his poetry a lot. I will not pretend I’m much of a literary scholar and try to impress with big words here, but I found his poems were surprisingly gentle (for lack of a better word). Maybe it was just having studied Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Seamus Heany this semester in some depth, but I was glad I went and ended up getting a copy of his latest collection (signed by him on account of the occasion, of course).

Death by Essay

These essays are going to kill me. The first one is due tomorrow and it’s not even finished yet. That leaves less than two weeks for the other two (at least that’s what I think; I really need to check the deadlines to make sure they’re not due in sooner) and I haven’t even been able to start on them yet.

And on top of everything, I’ve caught a nasty cold. Just what I need now.