Der Himmel über Berlin

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?

On October 15th, 2007, we can find out if blogging can make a difference to the world. The idea, to which some of the world's biggest blogs have already signed up (including my very own Himmel über Berlin), is to post about the environment, in their own particular way that is relevant to their own topics, in an effort to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Check out the Blog Action Day promotional video, which I think is super cool:

It's easy to take part: Just go the the Blog Action Day homepage and register your blog. You can also check out Blog Action Day's list of resources, to help you think about how you can make environmental issues relevant to your blog topic. As a clean freak, I especially like the section How to Green Your Cleaning. Maybe my post will be a Green Cleaning one...how exciting!

There are also lots of cool banners available for your blog, such as the one at the top right of this page.

Do it! Sign up now and make a difference! Do it, do it, do it!

So on Saturday morning I'm off back to Ireland for a week's holiday. Nothing to panic about, you'd imagine. Nothing I haven't done a hundred times already. Some time with the parents, couple of Guinnesses down the local with the old friends. Easy. No stress.

You'd imagine.

But, for the first time in my twenty-three and a half years, I'm bringing my ladyfriend home to meet my mother. Now my mother is not a particularly formidable women. She's tiny. She's also a wonderfully charitable, outgoing and friendly person, someone I truly believe to be one of the most fundamentlly good people I've ever met in my life. But she still looks on me as her little boy.

I know that all of my fears are utterly unfounded, and I know that the two leading ladies in my life will get on wonderfully. Probably through poking incessant fun at me. I have already coached the missus that this is one good way to integrate yourself with Irish people - poke fun at a common acquaintance, who, of course, must be present for the fun-poking.

So here's hoping I have a miserable weekend of everyone laughing at me. And everyone getting on famously as a result.

Did I really forget to gloat at last Wednesday's football result?

Yes, I think so. So here goes:

England 1-2 Germany

Hurrah!

I'm undergoing a bit of a relapse to my teenage years at the moment. I'm buying a load of football jerseys off ebay, my main criteria for purchase being whether it looks cool. So far I've got my hands on jerseys of my beloved Sampdoria (two), Galatasaray, Ferencvaros, FAK Vienna and also Turkey, Albania, Scotland and Germany national team jerseys.

I have quite a strict pricing scheme - maximum €15 for used jerseys, €20 for new ones. My Germany one, which I secured with a thrilling 23 seconds left, sneaked over the limit at €20.50, but as this was including postage, I decided to allow it.

I was proudly wearing it today as I strolled happily into my bank to confirm that my account is nicely swollen after my weeks on English camp. What a shock it was then, to find that some utter cretin had deducted not €20.50 from my account, but €620.50. And what about that bastard who received the extra €600, said nothing, packed up the world's most expensive football jersey and zapped it off to me?

And I spilled bloody curry on the fecking thing today as well. Maybe I should put it back on ebay, saying that it is a dribble of Jurgen Klinsmann's curry. Might recoup some of my losses.

As you might be aware, I'm a big zombie movie fan. When I started, most of them scared me, at least a little bit. But now I just find them pretty funny; I thought the days of me being scared by brainless mumbling and aggressive behaviour were over.

But then, last night, I watched Jesus Camp.

And it scared me much more than I ever thought a film could.

It features the scariest movie bad guy ever in the shape of a nutty middle-aged lady who runs a kid's camp and uses it to enourage America's youth to take arms in the name of some sort of über-zombie, whose name she and the kids regularly chant.

They believe that Gerge W Bush was sent from above, and worship him accordingly.

They reject science and genuinely believe in creationism.

I'm too frightened to continue.

*curls up in a corner and rocks back and forth*

We had a little day trip with the kiddies last week, to a big park with enclosures for exciting animals such as wolves, deer, goats and other things. After a long walk around the park, some time in the playground was called for. There was a zip wire thingy that looked irresistibly fun - the seat zoomed down the wire to the other end of the playground, bouncing off a tyre at the bottom and sending it zipping back in the other direction. The kids loved it, flying back and forth for hours on end.

Of course I had to give it a try. Of course I'm much heavier than a kid. Of course I was going much faster when I hit the tyre at the bottom. Of course I fell off, nay launched off, falling very heavily on my back. Of course, as I lay there in quite a lot of pain, the kids ran up and started jumping on me, thinking all of their Christmases had come at once with the sight of their English teacher wiping out in such a spectacular fashion.

So the next day my boss insisted on bringing me to the doctor, despite there being no bruising of any sort. Pretty disappointing, I really wanted some physical manifestation of my discomfort. Still, my lack of ability to dress myself was reason enough to go, I suppose.

I always feel that doctors must be relieved when a (relatively) healthy young man such as myself comes in for a visit. Must make a change from old ladies with all their old lady problems. This doctor was no different, and, on finding out that I'm Irish, insisted on treating me for free. Lumbago was the diagnosis, should be back up and about in a couple of days. But in the meantime, I'll be capitalising on the fact that I can get people to tie my shoelaces for me.

So, I was on English camp all of last week. A week of howling, yowling, yelling and felling kids. Despite my well-publicised dislike of kids, I really actually enjoy it, on the condition that I only have to teach teenagers and have minimal direct contact with any beings under 10 years old. I just can't relate to them, you see.

Logic and independence are pretty much the two most important things to me, and these are the two things that little kids fundamentally lack in. So when a kid asks me if it's ok for him to use a red crayon as well as a blue one, I usually respond by asking him if he thinks I care. This would be a difficult question for a kid to answer in normal circumstances, but adding in the complication of their lack of English and the fact that I'm not supposed to speak German to them, it becomes an impossible task. But let's give the kid the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he decides himself to use both crayons; this is good, a positive step in the direction of the eventual development of a sense of logic and independence.

But then the same kid will probably just get bored of his crayon and start to eat it. The problem that I have with that is that he won't ask my permission, maybe because of the newfound sense of independence that I have surreptitiously taught him. Or maybe he just knows that I would say no - eating crayons is, generally speaking, something I don't allow in my class due to the presence of a variety of strongly worded German laws that send me to prison if a child dies of crayon poisoning in my classroom.

Similarly, the child crawling along the ceiling hasn't asked permission, nor have the brawlers or the bawlers, despite minutes earlier being utterly perplexed as to whether it was acceptable to draw a goldfish beside their elephant. This is all incomprehensible to me. At least with teenagers, a certain amount of logic can be applied and a certain amount of reason can be derived from their responses as to why they do things.

So I can't wait to have kids. They'll just have to be born as teenagers. At least.

On my last afternoon before heading off for another week on English camp, I decided to take a nice leisurely cycle. The sun was making a rare and welcome appearance and my new bike was in top shape.

I made for a section of the recently opened Mauerweg, a route around Berlin that follows the path of the old wall. Some sections of the route still resemble the desolate wasteground that it was back in the days of the wall, but mostly it is now surrounded by pretty parks and quaint little sidestreets. The route of the wall is marked by a thin strip of cobbles, which I believe also runs most of the 160km that the wall occupied.

This route took me near one of my favourite places in Berlin, Treptower Park. There is a huge statue of Stalin there, built on a mound of the dead bodies of about 1,000 Soviet soldiers. It's frightening but still an oddly hypnotic and impressive monument.

The onwards along the banks of the Spree, Berlin's main river. There were kids playing happily in the first sunshine since the summer holidays began, ducks waddling around and quacking contentely, people paddling by in little rowboats. It was perfectly idyllic, a lovely way to say goodbye to Berlin for a week.

I was just leaving the park to head home when I noticed a woman running towards the path I was cycling on. She stopped by a tree, pulled up her skirt, bent slightly over, and projectile urinated everywhere. I have never seen a woman publicly urinating while standing up before. I hope I never do again.

I'm off to gouge my eyes out in the hope that it will removed the memory of that horrific sight from my eyes.