Having found a home with Gulla, we now made attempts to settle into life in Germany.
There were some good things:
I loved my new classes. I had chosen to study absurdist drama, and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Kate agreed to study whatever I was doing, given that there were no courses available on Latin in literature. The work was interesting and we learned a lot. All the classes were in English, as everyone could speak perfect English which put my non existent German to shame.
The university library was amazing, and also held massive amounts of books in English, which we were free to take out. That was the summer I worked my way through all of P.G. Wodehouse and all of Sylvia Plath simultaneously. No wonder I’m a bit messed up.
We had an awesome teacher who was an American professor called Rick. He was a lovely man and a brilliant teacher and I developed a massive crush on him, as I tend to do when I come into contact with anyone who has a brain the size of a planet. I think I loved him even more because he wasn’t Call me Klaus. He invited us round to his house once and I fell in love with him all over again on the strength of the contents of his bookshelves.
It turned out that the Germans were obsessed by ice cream. There were two, huge ice cream parlours in town where you could sample an array of flavours that would put Baskin Robbins to shame. We made it our mission to eat our way through the entire menu. There was also a fantastic stand that sold Mr. Whippy style ice cream but that you could have dipped into either chocolate or strawberry sauce that then hardened into a thin layer on top of your soft ice cream. It was ice cream heaven.
We got some cash through and the strike finished. We could now afford to eat in places that weren’t McDonalds. We found some places that didn’t just serve dead pig or American burgers, and life became a lot more tolerable.
Now that we were not having to be in for ten o’clock every night we could start having a social life. We found a place where the university held discos, and me and our friends Bev and Martin, who were studying German would go to these while Kate did more cultured stuff or came along and looked after us. We would dance like freaks while the Germans plodded about exhibiting a worrying lack of rhythm and occasionally taking their Birkenstock off to clap over their heads in a rock ‘n’ roll style. I do not recall a single German I met who did not own and wear Birkenstock at every occasion.
We could also start travelling further afield and planning weekend trips etc. We went to Prague for four days, and apart from nearly being murdered by a gangster we had a great time. We went to Berlin, which I found cold and boring, until we discovered East Berlin on our last day and then I wished we had had days more time there. We also did day trips with our fellow students who were being catered for way better in the German department than we were in the English department. We went to Leipzig, and everyone but me went to Nuremburg. That was the day I had such a terrible hangover from attending a ball that Kate abandoned me in disgust and went without me. She was already furious with me because I had gotten lost and she’d had to call the fire brigade to try and track me down (it’s what they do in Germany. Don’t ask me. I didn’t call them). While they were hunting for me I had gone home to die on my air mattress. I was not popular at all.
We went to lots of interesting local places with Gulla, who had taken us under her wing. It was through her that we got to see the hidden beauties of Bavaria, gorgeous little towns and villages, lakes for swimming in, fantastic restaurants tucked away in the middle of nowhere. We were very lucky to have found her in the end, for so many reasons.
Gulla, despite the scary start, turned out to be extremely good company in the end, and remained our friend for years afterwards until we finally lost touch with her. I think that the turning point in our relationship came when we found Gulla watching Monty Python one night, laughing her head off. Our shared love of absurd humour helped bridge a lot of the cultural gaps that loomed between us. That and our shared love of a good feed.
The weather was amazing. It was so hot the roads were melting, and we spent a great deal of time at the local lido, eating ice cream and sunning ourselves. One time there was an amazing summer storm, where we had sheet lightning, bolt lightning and a real ball of lightning. That was the night the lounge window nearly fell in and we spent the whole time mopping up the floods of water pouring in through the knackered window seals. Happy days.
There were a lot of municipal fountains in Germany. Bayreuth had hundreds of them. In the boiling weather they were very tempting and in the end we gave in to temptation. Many is the night we plotted our way home to the flat via a route of fountains we would take a dip in. It became a bit of a mania, and nobody ever caught us and/or told us off. Nor did we pick up any hideous, water borne diseases.
All this was good.
