A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 5

It has been 17 months since I last posted on this subject, which perhaps gives you a sense of how thoroughly I have been pursuing this particular personal goal.

Well, let me tell you how I have been getting on in the meantime:

1. Since my iPod packed up, I have transferred all my Michel Thomas German CDs onto my iPhone. I haven’t listened to any of them yet. By the way, Amazon are offering me £15.90 to trade the course in – and yet, I have it all in electronic form now! HA HA HA.
2. While we were in Barcelona last weekend, Elvira and I went to see Rammstein...who are German.

One of the problems I always experienced with language learning at school was that learning to read and write something is in no way a guarantee – or even particularly helpful – in learning to understand what someone is saying to you.

That made the marks I achieved in different exams somewhat erratic: explaining the C I got in AS Level French – back when that was a proper exam, not just a certificate for getting through the first half of sixth form - as the outcome of my inability to do French listening with any degree of accuracy.

So I have been honing my German listening skills by playing a lot of Rammstein. This has expanded my vocabulary into many areas left out of the pre-GCSE syllabus, like cannibalism. 

As a parent, one has to be careful about the rock music one exposes one’s kids to. I was horrified to hear Tancred sing back some Turbonegro lyrics to me after I had been carelessly murmuring them to myself.

But Rammstein have the advantage of singing in German – so that with a handful of exceptions, one can relax about the lyrical content: my kids are ENGLISH! They will NEVER speak a foreign language properly! And it is frankly hilarious to hear 2 and 4 year olds impersonating Till Lindemann booming “Amerika ist Wunderbar”.

Anyway, on to the gig review.

• Rammstein live – Awesome. Especially the keyboard player’s treadmill. I was transfixed.
• Rammstein’s audience – Old and very respectable. Lots of neatly tucked in tour t-shirts (which, I might add were priced from a minimum of 25 euros). Somehow, we ended up with tickets in a section that had been sold exclusively to middle aged Germans. The thoroughness of their jaunty familiarity with Rammstein’s more gruesome lyrics was disturbingly at odds with their general appearance.  
• Palau St Jordi – Great concert venue. It’s got balconies you can get outdoors on. Ample toilet facilities (although not as ample as La Sagrada Familia). Weirdly, the seat numbers on our row went 13, 15, 14, 16 – this was a relief as for three months I had been a little anxious about having asked for seats together but in fact getting tickets for seats 13 and 15. In the end though, I was just relieved they were real. 
  
  
  
  
  

Barcelona: It was the first time that we met

Elvira and I have just come back from a long weekend in Barcelona, which has just leapt to the top of my list of favourite cities in the world.

Here are some of my pensées arising.

More whining about airports

As I mentioned last week, coming up with blog material is – for me – dependent on having time and space to mull over an idea continuously, until it has been mulled out of all proportion.

This is why I have written so thoroughly on air travel before. There is always a lot of waiting, and there is always something absurd happening or about to happen to think about.

For example – is the whole “take your shoes off to go through the scanner” now a permanent thing? On the basis that once ever – 12 years ago - some fucknut put a bomb in his shoes, which failed to go off?

I know that real life terrorists tend not to be the brightest, but is anyone really likely to try this again – when everyone’s shoes have to go through the scanner?

As if the superiority of pretty much every other culture to the British was in need of any evidence, Barcelona airport has accommodated this state of affairs by carpeting the walkway through the scanner. That, my friends, is a real sign of civilisation.

La Sagrada Familia

This, for those of you who don’t know, is that funny looking church.

Seriously – I thought it was the most impressive building I have ever seen. It is like nothing else on earth. And it’s not even finished yet.

The exterior is simply astonishing. From a distance it looks organic – like something HR Giger would have drawn or HP Lovecraft would have written about. The towers in particular look unchristian, like something that has risen out of a crack in the ground during an earthquake. I was particularly struck by how they have "Sanctus" written around them in exactly the same font as hotels have "Marriott" written on them. 

Plastic martians come out of it

Close up though, it is as ornate and religious as Notre Dame or Chartres cathedral. Above is a picture from the Nativity facade. This is presumably the first and only turkey featured on a major religious building.

For all its organic, sensuous curves, the Nativity facade is recognisably a more-or-less conventional church door. Contrast that with the modernist Passion facade, which is terrifying in its own way. 

I have to say that, while it was still very impressive, the interior of La Sagrada Familia didn’t move me like the exterior did. My first impression was that is resembled the set of a 1960s sci-fi, particularly when I saw the lifts going up and down the towers.

But what impressed me more than anything was the sheer ambition of it. Gaudi and everyone else who has worked on it knew they would not live to see it completed. Yes – that is true of cathedral builders throughout history, but to think that 20^th century people thought like that as well? The work, I suppose, is itself a collective act of devotion – very difficult for us individualists to comprehend. And yet there it is, being built with the money from the hordes of visitors paying 13 euro 50 a head to go and look.

If you go to Barcelona, you MUST go and see La Sagrada Familia.

Barcelona itself

It’s never a fair comparison to put somewhere you go on holiday alongside somewhere you live and/or work.

But let’s do it anyway.

Barcelona has a warm welcome for sailors

The weather was beautiful. Everyone we spoke to was friendly and helpful – despite my having gone there with the belief that it was simply a matter of time until we were pickpocketed. Everything was clean. Families were doing things together. Generations and nationalities were getting along just fine together. The food was good. Nothing was overcrowded. Even the many dogs seemed polite and relaxed.

I saw none of the waddling, tracksuited urban peasants one sees everywhere in the UK. Maybe they were all at home watching “Javier Kyle” instead of wandering about public spaces like grotesque overweight zombies.

LOL: "Quim"

OK, we did see a fair sample of that uniquely Iberian phenomenon - the man with long hair up in a bun - but then even the beggars were picturesque... ;)

No-one seemed to be doing anything purely for the sake of pissing everyone else off – apart from the (mostly, but thankfully not exclusively, British) stag and hen parties.

It almost made me think that living in a city need not be a hell on earth. And the scooters!

OK, on the last night on the way home we saw (i) needles, (ii) vomit on the Metro and (iii) a broken bottle on the station steps – but the fact that this was remarkable rather than entirely commonplace seems important.

Like I say, it’s probably not a fair comparison. Tourists who jet in and do the sights for a few days only see the theme park Barcelona. I’m sure it has its problems. But my god, its best side is so much better than the best side of any city I’ve ever seen in the UK.

So THAT is where I am retiring to.

¡Visca Catalunya!

A Block of Ice

Most of my ideas for blogs come to me while I am riding my scooter. My commute gives me a good 25 minutes or so of chewing a thought up, swallowing it, digesting it through my many stomachs before finally regurgitating it to chew a bit more.

And so I feel I must blame the recent sparsity of my posting on the dismal weather we have had for WEEKS ON END NOW.

Following the ghastly experience related in The White Caterpillar trilogy earlier this year, I have become rather more wary of taking my bike out in snow and ice. And being older now than I ever have been in the past, I am finding myself less and less willing to get cold or wet unnecessarily.

So I have been taking the train a lot more recently. And I can’t just sit and think on trains. So I read.

Reading is all very well and good, but it hasn’t furnished me with that many ideas for blogs. Not ones I can pass off as my own, at any rate.

I’m on a train home from London as I write this, and I am experiencing what I suppose proper writers would call writer’s block – insofar as, in spite of having a few basic ideas for posts, I haven’t had the opportunity to masticate them properly; to grind them up between the molars of my mind into the pulpy, glutinous paste I need in order to make the ODHSNM magic happen.

I’ve started writing a couple of things, and then deleted it after a hundred words or so.

As long-time readers will attest, considerations of quality have never stopped me writing before. And so I am writing this instead to tell you all about it.

Perhaps the weather has turned and we are finally going to get some kind of spring, which will in turn see the green shoots of things to write about begin to poke their heads out of my frozen brain-soil. Or maybe I’ve just run out of decent ideas. Or maybe I’ve lost the ability to express them. Or maybe I just don’t want to do this any more.

I need to get back on my bike and find out. 

Mystery Pants

As a dog-walker, I spend a lot of time looking at the ground. On the one hand, I am trying to avoid stepping in anything unpleasant. On the other, I am trying to avoid tripping over a deranged, half-blind, half-deaf whippet who is unable (or unwilling) to walk in a straight line.

This means that I see a lot of litter. And dog shit.

Better to see it than not to see it.

But I never cease to be surprised at how many discarded items of clothing I see.

Right now, from my office, I can see a lost glove on the street. Yawn. Everybody loses gloves. That’s just carelessness or bad luck.

For someone to lose a pair of underpants (pictured) there must be a real story.

Whose pants were they?
How did they come off?
Why did they get left behind?

Here’s another pair I found on the same road.

These are not worn grey emergency pants. These are prestigious, name-brand pants (the ones at the top are Calvin Kleins, in case the waistband is unreadable). What fall from grace led to their being cast adrift?

Abandoned single shoes are commonplace in city centres. Staggering screechy lady-drunks lose them falling off kerbs. Bellowing violent man-drunks lose them misplacing a wild kick at a prone rival’s head.

But here is a woman’s leopard print top – the pattern is still just about discernible. Actually I think that's what it is. It could be another pair of pants. Possibly belonging to Tarzan. 

Whatever it is, this has been sat in the gutter at the top of a residential street I often pass along for months. 

What is the history of this lonely garment? How did it end up cast out on the street, never to be returned for? Is that the face of Jesus at the bottom right?

Oh, but that these pants could talk - the stories they would tell us.