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Now I know I happen to be in Germany during the World Cup, but I am not a football fan and personally it’s far more fun to watch the fans, whether it be the Germans chanting, “Wir fahren nach Berlin!” or as it was tonight the Swedish and the English.

As a result of the fan watching I have managed to get a couple of quite reasonable photos which is good, but I have also had a greater exposure to football that I really wanted.

To put it in perspective before the Sweden – England match I was hoping for a win by Sweden, not because I am unpatriotic, although when it comes to football I am certainly not patriotic, but because if England loss that would have meant that German would have played England on Saturday and I could have watched the England – Germany just before I left to return to pointing out to the Germans that they would still travel to Berlin, it would just be to go home in this case.

Unfortunately I was disappointed and largely due to the man I suspect everyone else is currently praising – Steven Gerrard.  I hate this man as without him England would not have got the draw as he managed to stop what should have been a goal for Sweden clearing it from the goal line and then a bit later on scored England’s second goal and thereby denying me what would have been an unmissable match on Saturday.

My second disappointment was that Rooney didn’t come on and fall over only to do his foot in again.

So all in all a disappointing game!

There are few things that will make me turn the air blue, unfriendly Germans will prompt me to do it for fun, but to have me turn the air blue and really mean it it takes a lot more – but one thing guaranteed to do it is the loss of photos.

It doesn’t happen often but when it does I get extraordinarily pissed off and a prime example happened earlier today.  I had managed to get myself invited onto the HMS Edinburgh with my camera in hand and whilst I don’t know if the photos were worth having I will never know as whilst downloading them onto my laptop it died and has sent them to oblivion.

I didn’t let them go without a fight though as after I finished swearing in both of the languages I can swear fluently in it was off to a computer with internet access to see if I could find some recovery software and I found recovery software which would tell you we’ve found the files to recover, but pay up now if you actually want them recovered!

Fucking money-grabbing bastards!

I managed to find a completely free piece of kit and it could recover the files, but the files wouldn’t open after being recovered so unfortunately any secrets I accidentally photographed on board are still safe along with a wonderful photo of a purple cow being dragged up onto the bridge level by a rope around it’s neck – now that photo would probably have been worth keeping.

In my nine months in Germany I didn’t manage to meet any outright unfriendly Germans, although within twelve hours of arriving back in Kiel I managed to put that to rights and nearly manage to get into a fight.

Now I am not saying all Germans have been amazingly friendly, but unlike the one I met last night they have never told me to fuck off back to England or to go and a take a swim in the Baltic.

Now I met this unfriendly German after meeting a losing my friends and finding a couple of friendly Germans who I recognised from my time at the Irish Pub and whilst talking to them I was tapped on the shoulder and subjected to a stream of rapid incomprehensible German from someone who was obviously drunk. 

Naturally I adopted the universal procedure for dealing with drunks of nod, agree with the drunk and then go back to what I was doing before I was accosted, but this didn’t work.  I turned back to chat to the friendly Germans and I was tapped on the shoulder again and this time I caught the sentiments being expressed and this time I didn’t agree and tried to ignore him…

I managed this for about five or ten minutes…

After five or ten minutes of this I was beginning to have enough of this and the tapping was turning into shoving and I decided to have a little fun.  So I turned around and pointed out in German that I was here to have a good time I was here with friends being polite, speaking German and what on Earth had I done to justify him talking to me like he had been and would he kindly leave me alone.

Naturally he didn’t…

So the next time I turned around to him I decided that I wouldn’t be so polite although I would still use German and see how well I could swear at and insult him in German – it seems I could do it well enough for him to become aggressive and ask me if I wanted a fight with him, which to be fair I didn’t and so me and the friendly Germans went off to celebrate somewhere else until 5 in the morning.

After travelling for about nineteen hours on a mixture of coach and train (although mainly coach) I arrived as fresh as one can in Hamburg and with a desire to stretch my legs.

So I dumped my bags in a locker and set off to wander around Hamburg with my camera in my hand and promptly managed to get lost as although I knew where I had been and so when I arrived back at the train station it was with a certain element of relief until I realised I had arrived at a station not the station I was looking for I was at Hamburg Dammtor as opposed to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof.

Still on the plus side I got to stretch my legs after having them cramped up on the coach and I did find a delightful public Japanese garden to take a break and relax in.

Shame I don’t drink tea…

I got up this morning and I was running through in my head all the things I had to do today and things like where my passport and tickets were and I realised that I had made a small oversight…

I had only bought tickets as far as London and unfortunately my family don’t live there, although as I wanted to go to Chippenham I was able to still get a ticket as after all who else would want to go there?

Well I managed to wind up with an extra lesson today as one student told me that I could not go without saying goodbye to their class and as I am still unable to say no to blondes i went along.

As it was very ad hoc I did a little bit on Romeo and Juliet to wrap off my work on it, I had arrived a few minutes early and as a result I had told a some of the students a few jokes before the lesson and this ultimately resulted me in giving this particular class a choice between jokes on the topics of necrophilia or the second world war. (I had time to cover both topics in the end.)I also managed to tell them a joke that I had managed to write on the way to school whilst sat on the bus, a joke that for once is about a fictional idea instead of actual experience on my part. 

The highlight of the day though for me was going to be my last lesson and I had come up with a concept for the lesson – throughout the year I have been putting their English to the test and so today it was time for them to test me and so I got them to give me sentences in English that I had to attempt to translate into perfect German, this of course was rather amusing for the students as not only were my usual pronunciation errors put to the test I was also made to say (amongst other things), “I hope that Germany will win the World Cup and that England get knocked out in the first round.”

My favourite sentence from my German test though would have to be “Mein Hamster ist sehr suss aber manchmal langweilig, weil er nur isst, schlaft und scheisst!” (My Hamster is very sweet but sometimes boring because he only eats, sleeps and goes to the toilet) I took a slight liberty on my translation of going to the toilet for comedic effect.