Chapter 18 - First week back!

Sunday 3rd January - Sunday 10th January 2010

Back in Saarbruecken; a new week, a new month, a new term, a new year, and a new decade...quite a new theme going on then! So, what was it like being back in this little Ecke (corner) of Germany? Well, not a lot's changed - somewhat unsurprisingly as I was only back for two weeks. Did it take a lot of time to get back into the swing of things? Err....no...because I didn't have any lessons to plan, nor anything to get up for on Sunday, so I was able to get up at a leisurely 10am!

So, let me just run over what I've been up to this week. On Sunday, as I just mentioned, I got up suitably late and did very little - including actually getting out of bed and getting dressed about 10 minutes before getting some lunch! The day was pretty much spent unpacking all the stuff I didn't specifically need for the Saturday night, which didn't take too long, and the rest of the afternoon was spent catching up on all the BBC Iplayer programmes I'd missed during the last week and knew I'd be able to watch back over here! So, as you can see I was a pure hive of activity on Sunday!

Monday saw my return to Ludwigsgymnasium, which was ably aided by the fact that our buses seem to run despite wintery weather (more about that later!). The first thing I discovered about returning to work after the new year is that the first week back is made up, primarily, of shaking your colleagues' hands and wishing them a Frohes Neues Jahr (happy new year)! This, whilst being a very friendly and polite way to implicitly congratulate everyone on surviving Christmas, is also a very time-consuming exercise. If you naively (I know it should have the umlaut on the i, but I'm on a laptop and too lazy to put it in myself!) chose to go into the main staffroom it must have taken bllody ages just to take your coat off. I would like to say that I chose to go to the quiet Staffroom (logically called Lehrerzimmer 2 (Staffroom 2) through sheer intelligence and forethought, but that would be a lie - I went there because that's where I always go, primarily because that's where my mentor teachers usually are, and I have a seat in there, instead of having to "borrow" someone elses in the main staffroom. This meant that it only took me about 5 minutes to sit down, and start reading my book, and talking to my colleagues (although not simultaneously - I'm a bloke!). This was going well until someone else walked in the door; then it became that unfortunate soul's turn to shake everyone's hand and swelter in their winter coat for a few more minutes. So, after all the hand-shaking and frohes-neues-Jahr-ing it was almost time to go home again! The four lessons I attended were painless enough, and required little in the way of effort from me - which was nice!

Tuesday was completely free for me, although I did have to pop into the Ludwigsgymnasium to do a bit of lesson planning; which I did for a couple of hours. However, on Tuesday, the buses had seemed to have taken a dislike to me - I managed to miss the bus to the school, from the station home again, and then from home to Harriet's in the evening. This meant that I did a fair amount of exercise today! I also managed to walk home from Harriet's in the time it would have taken me to wait at her bus stop and then sit on the bus to my bus stop, which saved sitting out in the sub-zero temperatures.

Wednesday was an early start for me, which wasn't much fun at all - it required me to leave the house at 6.50 (so as not to have a repeat of Tuesday and miss the bus). On the plus side I was finished at work by 9.55, so I went to the train station and bought some tickets for an adventure in March (more about that then!). Then I had the day pretty much free, so I went home and pottered around. NB: Pottering around is a euphamism for doing nothing of any real importance! Thursday was a pretty similar story to be honest, back at the comprehensive until about 12.30 when I came home via town as I had a few odds and sods to sort out there!

Friday, as you all know, is my day off during the week - hence a three day weekend, which isn't to be sniffed at (unless you are suffering from a cold, or the flu, in which case it's fully acceptable to sniff at whichever part of the blog you want/need to!). The day was to be spent going shopping - but this, bizarrely, wasn't as bad as it could have been - we were successful in finding a new supermarket. The supermarket, however, is on the other side of the city, and would require at least two bus journeys to get there, so, as such, isn't one I shall be frequenting apart from the odd occasion when I find myself on that side of Saarbruecken. The afternoon was spent at Harriet's again, where me and Claire joined Harriet in watching Slumdog Millionaire, which was particularly hyped when it came out. It was a good film, but at times the speed the lines were spoken made it difficult to understand (a lesson for anyone teaching a foreign language can be found there!). I had previously heard a Radio 4 dramatisation of the story long before it was made into a film, so knew roughly what was going to happen - still a very nice afternoon!

Saturday was a trip to Strasbourg to meet up with my fellow Bathonians (Not sure how it works - but bathmates seemed a little too intimate!) before they all head off to diverse corners of Europe. When I say diverse, I mean two different places - one is heading off to be an assistant in a small Austrian town in Lower Austria, and the other two are headed off to Konstanz (Constance in English) on the German border with Switzerland, near the the originally named Lake Constance (or Bodensee in German - I'm not entirely sure either!). So, I caught a train down to Strasbourg from Saarbruecken despite the fact that it was snowing - and what's more is that it departed and arrived punctually! We had a wander around for a bit, had a bit of lunch then decided we'd head over to one of their flats to watch a film - after the obligatory snowball fight on the way. For the record, I should not join a cricket, baseball, or rounders team ever - it was proven by my near complete inability to land one snowball on the intended target. I am quite good at catching them though - which being as they're made of snow and thus crumbled in my hands and splattered over me anyway - is possibly not the best technique to bring to the battle!

Sunday was washing day, and cleaning day here - I was hoping to make it last until next Wednesday without needing to be done, but I was beginning to run short of clothes, so spent the day around the house pottering again (see above for clarification!) while I was waiting for the washing to be done!

Now that I've finished describing how my week has been I feel that this blog entry has been a little too rant-free...so allow me to put and end to that state of affairs now!

SNOW...we've got snow in Germany, and have had for weeks and weeks of varying depths - does anything stop? Is there a shortage of salt for gritting? Do the schools (amongst other establishments) close? The answer to all of these is....NOPE! There's still snow outside as I write this entry - the buses still ran, so I still had to go to work...you don't see people panic buying, or fearing that the gas/oil/heating may break down, instead...being used to the weather, they look at the calendar and without even needing to switch on the radio/TV/PC or look out the window, they see it's Winter, and as such it might well be cold - so how do they cope? They put on extra layers, and then depending on the level of cold - they may wear a scarf (quite common), gloves (not uncommon, but not universal either), or hats (quite rare really!). In other words; they cope! The British Government need to look at this and see that when it's winter - it stands a good chance of being cold, and icy, and possibly snowing and instead of waiting until it has happened and going "oh, sugar!" they need to get the infrastructure prepared for winter...it's the only European country which really almost breaks down completely at the first sign of snow. (Except France maybe - but to be fair, they had the resources ready and would have been able to cope if the council employees hadn't been on strike!) If it had fallen in April, then I could go some way to understanding the unpreparedness - the Government and Councils need to remember the motto of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting Movement "Be Prepared" - which I shall now paraphrase for them - it's winter, it's going to be cold, it may well be icy, and it mght even snow - so stop leaving it until March before reacting, and try and deal with the weather pro-actively for once!

So, that's my rant over, let's see how I manage in the second week back in Saarbruecken.