Oktoberfest!!

I'm struggling with this blog site...it could be that it's all in German but more likely I'm incompetant. It took me a long time to work out how to write a new entry, almost as long as it took me to find this website again and remember my password. Btw I don't know what this background I've chosen is like, but I picked on the basis that it was titled "fantastisch".

Oktoberfest this weekend was epic!! Definitely worth the sweaty 19 hour round trip; never underestimate how big Germany is. OK, so it looks roughly the size of the UK on most maps I've ever seen but that is because maps in the UK are bollocks. Munich is really really far.

I'd say that I'm pretty sure all the Germans at Oktoberfest hated us; I could understand that. Oktoberfest has a lot of rules. We didn't know the rules but when we found them out we just did all we could to get around them. For a start, everyone else had Dirndl and Lederhosen, but 100 euros is a lot to spend on something you're gonna wear once; our alternative was white T-shirts with profanities scrawled over them in highlighter pens.

You're meant to have a table before you can get a beer, which means you have to arrive at 7am to get a good table. Wrong. It means you have to hang around other tables and then impose yourself on well-behaved German people (or if you're less lucky, pervy italian people), demanding to sit at their table. When they protested, our only form of negotiating was cheerfully shouting "PROST!!", standing and clinking glasses with everyone so loud that there was no way we could be aware that they wanted us to leave. Leeds Uni 1: Oktoberfest 0.

Ok, so we nearly got chucked out a lot of times, were moved on security very frequently and I was definitely told off and forcibly removed from a table by an angry waitress. But overall it was a wicked weekend.

Today I managed to get up on time, make myself look presentable and go to lessons. I taught a small group of 13 year olds for half an hour which wasn't that productive but I don't think they minded. We got through the 3 exercises the teacher gave me quite quickly and the kids weren't that chatty. So I explained that they could go back into the class, or we could chat in English for the next 10 minutes and they wouldn't have to do any work. They perked up a bit after that.

I was meant to meet 3 different teachers today to help plan lessons and I am pretty sure I got stood up by all three; either that or I somehow got the times and meeting places of all three completely wrong. No, definitely the former. Everyone knows I'm not that incompetent...

Dora.
xxx