skits ahoy

just one more reason why i am harbouring a total crush on tina fey

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===> and click here for a 'news worthy' discussion of the tina fey linkage

saturn returning

i am coming home in a few weeks. yes that's right, i am heading back to my beloved melbourne. it's been almost one year since i chucked the city life in and moved to a quieter, and some would say somewhat confusing, little hamlet called heidelberg. don't get too excited mum and dad, i am only coming back for two weeks before heading off once again to my new adopted hometown. in flight terms, that's 14 days i'll be out of germany and three or four of those days will be spent travelling. (i still haven't worked out time zones and flight schedules. there's a reason i studied english lit and publishing and gave my old nemesis math the boot.) so all in all, i guess i'll be home for about ten days. it's good enough for me, for even though i love germany and the whole european thing (my on again/off again love for germans not withstanding) there are a few things from australia, particularly melbourne, that cannot be beat.

1. i love my coffee and german coffee is not that good, or at least no where near as delicious as melbourne coffee.

2. oh how i long for things such as cordial, a sausage roll, a lamb roast and a good ol' fashioned aussie bbq. (i went to a french bbq here one weekend and was disgusted. there was no no meat, just little bits of chicken wings and no real beer. who has a bbq without 2 slabs of beer and half a cow?)

3. family and friends. even though i've made some brilliant friends over here who i love and i will be friends with for a long long time, there is no substitute for those nearest and dearset who you've known for what seems like forever. plus, not having any family here has been hard at times. not too hard, cause they're only a phone call away, but a voice on the other end of a phone is one thing, an actual face is another.

4. my foriegn dvds. i know it's a trite entry, but i have gone a year without being able to watch anything that isn't in english. i can't watch my asian martial arts movies, manga/anime, french and italian horror movies and i can't even watch anything in spanish or portugeuese that alexis wants to show me, cause the germans either dub everything or only have german subtitles. grrrr... of course this would be sort of okay if i actually could speak german, but even then i don't want to have to pause a film to reach for my dictionary. (although i did watch a film that was half english/half german a few months ago and i didn't do too bad. i understood what was going on, not explicitly what was said, but i could follow it.)

5. and of course my dearest love melbourne. god how i miss that city.

but all of this will go away the instant i get up the morning of my flight. as i board the train to frankfurt i know that i'll start missing heidelberg, maybe not as much as melbourne, but there'll definately be a little something in my heart that's left behind here. even if it is for only two weeks. or ten days.

munchen or bust

i'm going to bavaria this weekend (just for saturday and sunday - nothing too special and fancy) so i thought i'd share with you the only bavarian phrase i know apart from random words like 'servus' (which i thought was goodbye, but apparently is also hello and maye thankyou, it's the bavarian aloha). now apparently bavarian is only a spoken language (whatever the hell that means) so i have to write it in proper german.

here goes:

ist meer wurst (pronounced - ismeer vursht)

apparently it means 'it's all sausage', which is easy enough to understand if you know a little german, but as to where this saying came from it's beyond me. it's meant to be similar to english's 'whatever' or 'who cares', but personally i find it giggle inducing. i can just imagine someone going to work on a monday morning, meeting a colleague and saying, 'hallo fritz, how was your weekend?' 'you know what wolfgang, it was all fucken sausage mate.'

horror nerd heaven

i seriously geeked all over myself when i watched this.

28 outta 100! who says i'm illiterate and shit?

so i stole this meme from a friend's blog who got it from another blog and thought it would be interesting to put it on here. what is basically going on is that the big read has stated that the average adult has only read 6 out of the top 100 books. let's check out how i go.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and since i don't know how to underline i'm going to make those books red.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (started but i got bored and gave up)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

i guess that makes 28. suck it big read. although there are a few books on there which i can't tell why they are there, why hamlet and the lion, the witch and the wardrobe get excluded from their families, and why there are some glaring exclusions. and why would dickens be on there, what, like four times? he only needs one book to be on there and then put something else. he's not going to be offended, he's dead. that goes for austen too. but i fail to see why bridget jones' diary is on there as well as the da vinci code. but i guess everyone's taste is different. i would have added frankenstein and american psycho to that list, and maybe even put the monk in there too. but it's not my list. maybe one day i'll make a 'tim's books to read list that isn't quite as smarmy as those other books to read lists'. til that day... do the test and let me know how you go.

it's been awhile

so people have been asking why i haven't written here for ages (by people i mean about 5 or 6, and by that i mean friends at home) and there is no real reason apart from laziness. now don't act like you didn't know i was slack at things that i'm not paid to do. well, that and the fact that the berlin story ends in some odd, totally berlin decadence that i was a little unsure about putting down here for fututre prosperity and for my mother to read. think random public sex (not with me, but strangers sitting beside me), sharing toilets with coke-heads, being served by transvestites/transexuals and various other things that may or may not include me being drunk off my arse in an unfamiliar city at 10am in a train station coffee and sandwich cafe. aaahhh... the hazy memories of bygone months. so anyway, i've decided to scrap the idea of finishing it off. sorry if you were waiting for me to do it, but i just can't bring myself to do it. but as most of you know me in real life ask me about it next time we chat and i'd be happy to tell you about it - unedited and unbridled.

what i feel like talking about now is just exactly what i've been up to for the past few months. don't get too excited as it isn't very much. all i've been doing is working, meeting new people and drinking myself into a sort of alcoholic state. work is going well, i've got the hang of waiting tables, which is a little different to back home. apart from the fact that over here you have to work for tips, which for those aussies reading, yes people tip here and so should you when you travel. cheap motherfuckers. and i like to think i've got the hang of the bar as well. the bar was kinda easy, it was more the fact that i had to get used to the different names of things, the amount and types of shots are different and i had to get a little quicker at it. i like working the bar a little more than the floor, but i enjoy waiting tables as there is more tips involved and i feel a certain amount of accomplishment when someone tips well. it's an acknowledgement thing of a job well done. the one thing i don't like about the bar, however, is the friday and saturday night karaoke. now you all know that i enjoy a bit of drunken singstar on the playstation and i do enjoy proper asian style karaoke and what have you. but working during a karaoke night is a completely different story. i don't mind it, it's kinda funny, but the problem is when you have the same people come in every wekend and sing the same goddamned song. like there's this one guy who comes in every week and sings the bad touch by the bloodhound gang. sure it's amusing the first time, but by week 8 you're like, 'do something else you useless twat!?!' what bothers me even more is the fact he's been doing it for ages and still doesn't know the bloody words. ugh... i do enjoy this one guy who used to come in and sing holiday by greenday. not because he was particularly good at it, in fact he was terrible, but i enjoyed the irony of an american soldier singing a sarcastic anti-war song with what i thought was no amount of irony at all. you could almost feel the euros narrow their eyes and look at him with hatred when the line, 'bomb the eiffel tower' comes up. very team america.

apart from working i've also gotten to know the basics of german pretty well. i try and use it whenever i can, even though alot of people will speak english or switch to it when they realise i'm not very good at it. but i can order food, buy my train tickets, ask people about their day and even help people find their way around heidelberg. i'm still a very long way away from being fluent or even knowing the language enough to say i can speak it. although i can understand a hell of alot more than i can speak. my spanish however is another story. it's woeful, plain and simple. you'd think after living with a cuban for 6 months and having a few latino friends i'd pick some up, but nope. my brain refuses to think about another language other than german. all in good time i suppose.

summer is here in germany at the moment and it's killing me. yes i know, i come from australia. land of zinc, beaches, bronzed aussies and skin cancer, but i just spent the last 12 months in winter. i came over here at the end of winter in my beloved melbourne, to arrive at the start of the german winter (which admittedly is alot colder than the melbourne one - you don't see people in melbourne walking around in jackets made for the snow season). so i've become aclimatised to cold, only to realise that i can't handle the heat anymore. and to think i grew up in queensland where the temperature was at least in the mid-forties for almost half of the year. i currently have no summer clothes, sweat all the time (charming i know) and feel like i need a slurpee constanly, of which they don't have here cause 7/11s are non-existant. i suppose if you had a 7/11 then you'd have a shop open on a sunday and that just seems silly. (re:sarcasm. whoever the bastard was that said sunday is a non-anything day needs to be killed. it's like they want you to drink, cause there's fuck all else to do but go to church and hang with your family. let me remind you that heidelberg is a university town. so i ask, 'what family would people have here and why would students go to church?')

anyway, that's the end of the catch up blog. now that i've absolved myself of finishing the berlin story i'll probably blog a little more often. so til next time...

ps sorry if there's spelling mistakes, it's been months and the damn spell check still wont work. fucking stupid blogger bugs... fix it you bastards!?!

new year's eve in berlin - part three

so here we are at part three of this saga. i am secretly hoping that this is the last one, cause after a brief departure of a short blog entry letting people know i'm fine and am now gainfully employed and another very short entry (posted while slightly intoxicated on german beer - mmm... german beer...) showcasing one of the coolest and most useless websites i've stumbled upon to date, i'm back to my story of new year's. to tell you the truth i'm over talking about it. i've told a few people in real life what happened, few people even got the uncensored director's cut version, and it seems like so long ago now that i want to talk about other things, but they'll have to wait til after this story is done with. (NB what i will type here is the slightly censored version, not totally censored, but ever so lightly edited. afterall my family reads this and i would like to keep some of this story for myself and a few trusted close friends. otherwise, as previously stated somewhere on this collection of ramblings, if you bump into me, buy me a beer and i'll be sure to tell you the full story. i'm hopeless when it comes to keeping in stories about myself after a drink or two.) but anyway, on with our story...

so there we were, myself, alexis and paul. we had just gotten off the train and met our friends reinaldo and ricardo outside the station. at this point the alcohol had sort of worn off, but i know that for me the adrenalione of being somewhere in berlin on a night like this, and the added excitement of all that alcohol and firwork fueled mayhem of potsdammerplatz had kicked in to overdrive. add to that the fact that i was en route to one of europe's most talked about, feared and insane alternative dance clubs, well you could only imagine the rate of my heartbeat. before we left our posting at the train station ricardo went to a bank and i took the opportunity to grab some smokes from a little alcohol shop that faced the station. i walked in there to find a massive group of toursts trying to buy alcohol. i know they were tourists because they all spoke english and they all seemed really drunk, loud and slightly obnoxious. i, however, being slightly sober was able to ask for my smokes in german and made no fuss or noise that wasn't needed. to tell you the truth, this is one of those times i was glad that i can pull off being german. having just expeienced the most crowded train ride ever where i was forced to talk to some english college boys i didn't want to have the same conversation again with people who were infinately more drunk than anyone else i had noticed so far that night. my german may not be good enough to fool a german, i have no idea what's feminine, male or nuetral, but i can fool a tourist. and that's all anyone can ask for really. so after a quick, 'drei davidoff classic, bitte? danke.' i left the store, rejoined my friends and we started to make our way to berghain.

berghain is in the midst of a rundown area of town and all that seems to surround it is an empty dirt field with some 3 metre high chain link fence and a few scattered industrial buildings, which look either abbandonned or waiting for hostel 3 to start shooting. it's kind of creepy to walk through this area (although to tell you the truth, alot of berlin looks creepy and dangerous to walk through). but once you get inside berghain and passed the huge number of poeple lined up to get inside, it seems like a whole other place. although it still has an industrial feel and look to it. as a friend of mine said, it reminded him of blade. he was waiting for the sprinklers to start showering people with blood and for the vampires to all come out of the woodwork. i thought that sounds silly, but once you've been in there it's a pretty spot on comparison. i prefer to think of it as if blade and batman had a baby and filled it with industrial house music and never came back to clean or check up on it. but again i'm getting ahead of myself. we arrived outside and as soon as we saw the line we were so thankful that we bought tickets for this place the week prior. the regular line was huge. by huge i mean massive. it was at least 100 metres long, at the very least and about 6 people wide. alexis, reinaldo and myself had tickets, so we left paul and ricardo in line together and headed towards our line, which by comparison was like measuring the distance between the couch to the tv, and between siberia and brazil. okay, that might be a slight exagerration, but you get my point. reinaldo was in the line a little bit ahead of us, cause alexis wanted to talk to ricardo for a little before leaving him behind (they hadn't seen each other in years, and he was only here with us because of a chance meeting two days earlier) so by the time we got inside reinaldo was already in line at the coat check. which was handy cause we got to push in. and germans being all correct and german, will never tell you off for something like that and cause a scene. it's only when it can be done annonymously or privately will they ever tell you off. i can't even begin to tell you how many red lights i've crossed at an intersection and having seen many a german look at me disapprovingly and yet not say anything because someone else is there. hehehe... that's the trick if you ever want to have a perfect existence in germany, don't let people be with you alone if you're gonna do something that's not koscher. also don't let them know where you live or you'll get a letter in the mailbox telling you not to do something. for example, the recycling here is waaaaay outta control. there's four different bins, one for waste, one for compost waste, another for paper and yet another for plastic and/or packaging. there's yet even another three for your different kinds of glass, white, brown and green. alexis tells me that if you don't put the rubbish in the right one, instead of someone telling you off and fining you, cause that would be a public thing, they put a picture of the offending rubbish up annonymously at your front door, like anyone could have put it there. i laughed my arse off and keep bugging him to put the wrong thing in the wrong bin so i can have a picture to bring home, or at least post on here. i, however, am of the belief that the german's way of recycling is just a front. when they collect the glass from the bins it all goes into the same truck together, so the seperating is a waste of time. i am highly suspicious of the rest of their recycling as well. but that's for another post.

(i'm going to have to stop this post here for now, as i have to start getting ready for work. i will probably get into it again either tomorrow afternoon or more likely the next day, as i have to work again tomorrow...)