Der Himmel über Berlin

I really used to be quite fond of Poland.

They have some very nice beers, especially Tyskie.

I have also always been intruiged by the language. I like the 'L' with the line through it that's pronounced like an English 'W'.

Not to mention the mountains, of course - the Tatras on the border with Slovakia. Very, very beautiful indeed.

Speaking of beautiful, pretty much every Polish female I've ever seen falls into that bracket.

Over the last week, however, my opinions have changed somewhat. You see, in the apartment where I am dogsitting, there is a Polish bar directly downstairs. And, apparently, Polish music has only two volume settings: Brain Implodingly Loud and Eardrum Bashingly Loud.

You only ever hear Eardrum Bashingly Loud after you call them for the second time at SEVEN IN THE MORNING, threatening them with a police visit. Eardrum Bashingly Loud is the conciliatory volume, reserved for the appeasment of cantankerous old buggers like me.

I do have a number of ideas on how to overcome this problem.

1). Become a nocturnal being who sleeps during the day.
Would make working rather difficult though. Still, that's a minor issue.

2). Murder every single person down there, and torch the premises.
Aside from the logistics of torching a pub without the surrounding properties being damaged, I feel that this would only offer the very shortest of short-term relief.

3). Make a playlist of every Beethoven symphony and have it playing in my ears as I drift peacefully to sleep.
This works. Doesn't do anything about the vibrations, of course, but it works. Pity he only wrote nine though. Plus the first movement of the fifth always wakes me up. DADADA DUUUM!

4). Keep blogging rubbish all night until I fall asleep and dribble sleep-goo all over my keyboard.
Might give this one a try.

For the last week, I have been dogsitting for a buddy while he's out of town. Let's get the formalities out of the way - here's a photo for the cuteness freaks:

Jenkins is so much better than most people. True, she sheds more hair than most, and the constant pestering when there is food available grates a little, but in general, she's just the best.

I love the utter happiness that she displays when I come in at the end of the day. She gets so excited that she sprints all around the house, yapping excitedly, incandescent with joy. Heck, it's not even at the end of the day. If I pop out to leave out the rubbish, that's the greeting I get when I return two minutes later. How many people get so excited to see you that they almost wet themselves?

I didn't much like living on my own when I did it for a few months, but with a dog in the house, it's completely different. She domintes the house, but in a good way. How many people could do that?

She's also a really good listener. She'll lie there and never interrupt, unless it's for the occasional reassuing lick. There's no me me me with her. Sure, she'll let you know if she needs to go out and poo, but that's the extent of her needs. How many people are that simple?

She's not even really a dog. She doesn't waste her time with the usual doggy things. No fetching, no chasing things, no snapping at flies. She doesn't even bark properly. It's less of a 'WOOF' and more of a 'HUUUUUUUU'. Doesn't even like other dogs. I swear I can hear her tutting disdainfully when the another dog walks by.

Alas, our ways must part on Saturday. I'm not going to lie, it will be nice to sleep without smelly dog breath in my face all night. It will also be nice to be able to wear black clothes again. I'll really miss everything else about her though. She's the best.

I'm just back from a wonderful week on English camp. I am wrecked.

Just want to share something with blogland though. We have a disco night on camp, and we have a 'Compliment Box' where the kids can send each other (and the teachers) anonymous notes.

This is a translation of one of the ones I got.

I love you truly and full-heartedly forever. I can't sleep, I toss and turn all night. You give my life meaning.

If it was a joke, it was a bloody hilarious one.

If it wasn't, well...

*looks over shoulders fearfully*

EDIT: A quick handwriting analysis identified the culprit as a twelve-year-old boy.

*looks over shoulder even more fearfully*

My doc gave me a clean bill of health today. Four weeks of being careful, he assured me, will mean I'll be well able to climb Mont Blanc in September.

I immediately transferred the sum required to get me on a group expedition in mid-September. Hefty. It'd want to be - I've been saving for this for the last eighteen months. I joined a gym and started training pretty hard in January, single minded in my determination to complete this task.

So that Sunday almost four weeks ago, when I was lying on a bench beside the football pitch with my ankle the size of a tennis ball, the tears I was shedding had nothing to do with the physical pain I was in. I really thought I wasn't going to make it - all the saving, all the sacrifices rendered to nothing because of an incident that happened so fast I can't even replay it in my head.

I missed my warm-up trip to the Tatra mountains in southern Poland, where Poland's highest peak had been scheduled to be conquered by my intrepid climbing buddy and I. So frustrated with everyone and everything, myself above all.

Anyway, now it's on. I am grateful for the injury now. Now I know how much I want this. I know how much this means to me. It's an oft-preached banality, but we take the small things in life incredibly for granted. How easy it is to forget that something as utterly simple as climbing up as steep slope for a week can make one as happy as it is possible to be. I know, for me, that that is the pinnacle (yes, intended) of happiness.

I'll be at the top of Europe on September 18th. What to do then? I expect a mid-life crisis for a few months, until I have set the next expedition.

...which happens to be rather hilarious too.

Obama is coming to Berlin on July 24th, and even though most Germans have a very positive perception of him, the visit is causing a lot of controversy. There's talk of him speaking at the Brandenburger Tor, the location of Ronald Reagan's famous "tear down this wall!" speech. The argument that allowing him to speak there despite only being a presidential candidate would cheapen the vast historical connotations of that site is a compelling one.

Rumours have it that he'll also throw a German phrase into his speech, taking a leaf out of JFK's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" book. I'm betting on "Ich bin ein Kartoffelkopf", even though the word on the street has it that he'll say "Ich kann zuhören" (I can listen).

Anyway, my point is a big meh. I'll be in rural northern Germany when he is here, and that's fine by me.

So, when's McCain due?

What a good idea.

Since injuring my ankle on June 22nd, I have seen four different doctors.

The first one, in the hospital, couldn't examine my it properly as it was too swollen. Fair enough. He did X-ray it and he did tell me it wasn't broken.

The second doctor, a few days later, didn't even touch my foot and looked at it very briefly. He gave me an aircast to put on it but didn't show me how to use it. He told me I should decide myself if I could make my planned trip to the mountains in Poland, ten days from then.

I decided to find a new doctor.

The third doctor, the next day, showed me how to use the aircast. He X-rayed me again a week later and confirmed that my ankle wasn't broken or fractured. He told me not to put any weight on my foot and to tie the aircast as tightly as possible to my ankle all day, every day for the next four weeks. He told me to come back in mid August, when he would be able to tell me if my mid-September Mont Blanc trip would have to called off or not.

Last week I noticed that my ankle and leg were getting alarmingly thin, and my skin was reacting badly to the constant pressure of the aircast. My foot was constantly swollen for the same reason.

So today I went to a new doctor, highly recommended to me by one of my students. He informed me that if I had followed Doc 3's advice for the next four weeks, I'd need surgery to correct the damage to my foot. He instructed me to start walking immediately (I should have started a week ago) in order to re-grow the muscles that have died away. He informed me that the pigmentations on my skin caused by the aircast probably won't ever properly go away.

My initial euphoria at finally feeling like I'm on the road to recovery is slowly becoming diluted with extreme anger at the amount of incompetence has been shown by people who frankly cannot be trusted to look after their patient's well-being.

Spent some time on the u-bahn on the way to blog HQ today, and it threw up some interesting questions of etiquette.

Usually, I would offer my seat to little old ladies and generally be quite chivalrous. However, being a crutch-bearing cripple, I am no longer sure if this is expected of me. I would say that it isn't.

Still, I felt very odd when I got on a train and a little old lady got up to offer me her seat. Of course I didn't accept, but how fecking pathetic must I look to make a little old lady get up for me?

And then there's the other side of it - the people who make absolutely no effort whatsoever to help, pretty much pushing me out of the way. They're usually teenagers.

Damn teenagers. Can't wait to go on camp in two weeks. Breaking some spirits will make me feel better.

I was just downstairs in a restaurant really close to my apartment. Not a very high brow place, but they make decent pizzas.

I went for a kangaroo steak stir fry in a mushroom sauce. My visiting friend went for lamb chops.

It was nothing special, just fulfilling my hungover desire for flesh of deceased animal. I was three-quarters through it when I found the hair. It was cooked into a chunk of kangaroo meat.

I'm not a very squeamish person; I pulled it out, put the chunk to once side and continued eating.

I found another, and felt I had not choice but to call the waitress over. She looked as disgusted as I did, and took it away. Within moments, a huge Turkish man with a face-obscuring handlebar moustache was at my table, telling me (and this is not a lie) that the hair was part of the mushroom sauce.

Yes. The hairs, the long wiry black hairs that bore a startling resemblance to the ones perched upon the waitress' head, were part of the dish.

She made as to put the plate back in front of me.

We left, but after paying the full amount. We did not leave a tip.

I feel nauseous.

I like that I haven't left my apartment today. I'm not going to either. Last Friday, I only left my bedroom twice, in order to excrete. I had considered just doing it out the window but, in a rare moment of clear thought, decided against it.

I taught a class yesterday - my students were so upset at the idea of not seeing me before the summer break that they picked me up beforehand and dropped me off afterwards. Pity my sense of self-worth was dulled by a nasty hangover from the previous night. Fecking Spaniards.

Hmm, what else? My housemate has appeared to have stepped into the nursey void left by Row's departure, dutifully keeping me supplied with cups of tea, the only thing I have still not figured out how to transport when blighted with these crutches. Well, all liquids, in fact. With the result that my plants, Bruno and Sidney, are slowly but surely dying of thirst.

Yep, it's going to be hard to re-adapt to real life. Not even sure I want to now.