A bit more Brno [#projectBrno blog post, by me]
Swallows.
Swallows everywhere. That's going to be one of my abiding impressions. I arrived at just the right point in late spring or early summer that every time I look up, the sky is full of swallows - or possibly swifts, if you'll pardon my ornithological inexactitude. Here and in Prague, both. It's a delight - they're a rare sight in British cities, although I've seen them in the countryside, of course - but here they swarm right in the city centre. To the point that their scratchy, squeaky calls are almost (but not quite) becoming annoying.
The sounds of Brno in summer: swallows and tram bells. (I really wanted to get a Ransome¹ reference in there but it just wouldn't work.) Apparently trams are my #1 category on Foursquare this month. Not surprised - apart from a couple of nightbuses, they're exclusively how I get around Brno. I'm getting lazy; there seems no point walking 5min around a block when the tram takes 2min and there's one every 2min.
And a month it has now been. Today, I visited the Foreign Police and registered as a resident alien - right on the 30-day deadline - and then took my visa stamp, ink barely dry, and used it to open a current account. Yes, a Czech account. A couple more tokens of permanence, but yes, it's already been a month.
I've actually only spent three-quarters of it here; after a fortnight, $JOB sent me to Munich for some training. Two days of generic applies-to-everyone intro-to-$COMPANY -- although with a bit of a bias towards salespeople -- and then another three days, just for me, with my new team leader.
But this also meant that I got a bit of a chance to explore Munich, a city in an entire region that I've never visited before.
The trip was as interesting as seven hours in a minibus could be. Our driver headed straight for the border, which I didn't initially realise (I still don't have a local SIM, so no roaming data access for me -- too expensive) and within an hour on the road we crossed the border into Austria.
Austria? I thought we were going to Germany. It's not the same. OK, nearly, but not quite.
Interestingly, you can tell the difference immediately. The architectural vernacular is different -- I'm starting to get used to Czech houses, solid, heavy-set and heavily-plastered, and the plaster sculpted to represent floral wreaths and banners and borders, fancily framing windows, doors and eaves, and mostly painted in shades of sepia or sienna.
Austrian houses are predominantly white, or bright pastels. The roofs are steeper, their corners fancier, there are more shutters, and even here, far from the Alps, some have a Tyrolean-cottage look to them. And there are a lot more vineyards -- every farm seems to have one, alternating with the ubiquitous oilseed-rape. [Insert stock rant about biofuel BS here.]
I had not expected the difference to be so apparent.
The other thing I'd not expected is when we got to our first stop, a petrol station shop on the motorway. I walked in, thinking for breakfast -- RIP Desmond Dekker -- and I could read the labels on things again. And, familiarly, there wasn't much vegetarian that wasn't a sweet snack, but I could go up to the counter and just ask. In a language I more or less speak, and which was instantly understood and answered in standard Hochdeutsch -- I only recently learned how different that is from normal Austrian German -- and I could talk to them!
Of course, I can talk to most Czech shop assistants in English. Many of them will even reply in the same tongue. But I hate being one of those Anglophones Abroad who just addresses everyone in his own language and dashed well expects Johnny Foreigner to speak the Queen's English, hang it all. I travelled a lot in my childhood, witnessed this around the world and I still dislike it. I hadn't expected the big rush of relief at being able to speak the local lingo and understand the response. (I was offered, and bought two, ciabatta buns with just mozzarella and tomato, which must be vegetarian, because it's just cheese and vegetables, right? Because they were really sorry but they were out of the vegetarian mini-calzone at the moment. And those apples are dirty, let me wash them for you.)
(Some of my German-speaking friends in London are rather dismissive of my meagre ability in the language. My vocabulary is indeed tiny, but I'm not afraid to use it, find it fairly easy to follow when spoken slowly and clearly, and generally Get By quite well. I can't hold a conversation -- well, actually, I can in some limited domains, as became apparent later -- but I can communicate, and unlike the French, especially the Parisians, in my experience, actual Germans in Germany (and Austrians and Swiss) are delighted at a foreigner making the effort and will bend over backwards to be encouraging, speaking r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and using easy little tiny words. I love them for it.) (I should also tip my hat to my German friends in London who actively encourage my efforts and teach me new words. I have to be quite drunk to speak to someone in their own language when I know that they can speak mine vastly better, though.)
So, yes, Austria. Several hours of it. A second short stop at a much bigger, much nicer service station, presumably abbreviated because the first stop was an emergency "comfort break". [Damn you, Brian!] And a third, longer stop at a tiny truckstop, but one with a distant view of snow-capped Alps.
Then a bit of Germany -- like Austria, but grimier and more modern, more industrial and less pretty -- and then we were at our hotel, way out in a distant suburb. Everyone checked in in English, except muggins here who tried it auf Deutsch. Worked fine, too, until I asked about somewhere to eat, when the directions all went a bit rapid and the receptionist noticed me glazing over, asked if she was going too fast -- I'm sorry, but yes -- and rather than slowing down, switched to English. The Czechs wanted a Bavarian meal, but we got Greek instead. But with Bavarian beer.
And we found a couple of errant Brit $COMPANY-ers in the hotel lobby! That accent was a very welcome respite -- again, to an extent that surprised me. They were a bit bemused to learn that no, I was with the Czechs and worked in Brno. But one of 'em was an old Amiga fan, so that was all right.
At the end of our first day's training, we then got a free tour of the city centre, from an engaging, hippy-ish, surfer/snowboarder Bavarian who was enthusiastic, funny and complemented me on my pronunciation of Rheinheitsgeböt and then ignored my further efforts at German. We saw some of the sights, heard some of the history, had a Bavarian mean in a beer-hall and then got to wash it down with some local brews.
By randomly fortuitous coincidence, my end of the main table held what I'm fairly sure must have been the only three vegetarians in the party.
So, this vegetarian Argentinian, Czech and Englishman walk into a restaurant in Bavaria...
And to their great surprise, have a choice of both starters and mains and all eat really well. The end. It's no joke. We really did. (But who knew that there were vegetarian Argentinians? No wonder he lives in Grenoble!)
So, yes, I've not seen much, really, but München is pretty, steeped in history, has some beautiful architecture and you can't tell the new bits they've rebuilt from the old bits that my grandads' mates bombed into rubble. (Sorry about that.) Actually the new bits often look way older than the actually old bits, and some of them are authentically cracked and crumbling, although it's possible that this is not entirely intentional. I want to go back and see more. On the end of my second day, when my Brno buddies all went back on the minibus, I got an afternoon mostly off. I switched hotels to one a bit closer in, managing to check-in entirely in my wretched broken German -- the late-middle-aged manageress was extremely polite about it and complimented me upon it, which was lovely if entirely inaccurate -- and then went into the city and met my team-leader for dinner and a few beers.
The next night, I was too tired to do anything much. I Googled for the best vegetarian Indian restaurant in Munich (Indian Mango, apparently), went to it, had a large and pretty good curry, went back to my hotel and crashed out. On the next night, we went for a Japanese meal followed by a few beers in the famed, vast Augustiner beer hall followed by another one in the student quarter, and the night after that, I flew back to London.
I grabbed a slice of pizza and a couple of bottles of beer in the main station, used the free loos in Burger King -- Foursquare does have its uses -- and then got the train out to the airport. The ride afforded me an opportunity to stretch my German. I'm not going to attempt to represent the conversation in the original...
"Hey, is that a five? Hello? Is that a five?"
"Er, sorry -- me? I do not understand -- a five? Five of what?"
"Your mobile, your pocket-telephone -- is it a five?"
"Er, er, what? Oh! No! It is not a 5. It's a Note 2, er, Galaxy Note Two."
"Oh, I wondered, because it has such a big screen! Why's it got so big a screen?"
"Er, well, it is... like a tablet? Like an little iPad?"
"Aha! Because I have an old S3, look, and I wanted to see the new S5! Your keyboard is really weird. What is that?"
"Er, er, it is called Swype. It is very good. You can buy it in the App, er, no, Play Store. Playshop? It is not so much, maybe two or three Euros?"
"You do these little shapes, like wiggles, with your finger! It's funny!"
"Yes! Look... It is a piano, er, no, keyboard, but you write, like this... It is fast."
"Yes, I see that, it is! Thank you! That is really cool! This is my stop -- I have to go now. Bye-bye!"
And she was gone. But dammit, that's a conversation, isn't it? I'm counting that as conversational German. Sadly I did not get to use any of my new words or phrases, such as "to pay" or "fried egg" or "from 7AM until 10", but I guess they're a bit specialised.
So, yes. Munich. I rather like it.
Then I was back in London. With no checked luggage, I still had to queue to escape, then there was a one-hour gap in the Croydon service, so I had to pay five times as much to go into central London and then wait for a bus back out and didn't get back to my near-empty house for three hours. I've really not missed London much at all. Skeptics in the Pub, the Ton, the various other SF-fan-meets, yes -- but not dirty, inefficient, poor-service-with-a-scowl London.
And then it was back to Czechia, but this time, for my first brief fleeting visit to the remarkable capital, Prague, and my first experience of the Czech train system. However, I'm running out of battery and I have a beer and Ender's Shadow to pay attention to and I need to save something for part 4.
Tschüss!
¹ You know, Swallows and Bells-on-trams² or something like that.
² Note for foreign readers, of which I gather I'm getting a few: it's a terrible pun on the title of a classic British children's book, Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
Swallows everywhere. That's going to be one of my abiding impressions. I arrived at just the right point in late spring or early summer that every time I look up, the sky is full of swallows - or possibly swifts, if you'll pardon my ornithological inexactitude. Here and in Prague, both. It's a delight - they're a rare sight in British cities, although I've seen them in the countryside, of course - but here they swarm right in the city centre. To the point that their scratchy, squeaky calls are almost (but not quite) becoming annoying.
The sounds of Brno in summer: swallows and tram bells. (I really wanted to get a Ransome¹ reference in there but it just wouldn't work.) Apparently trams are my #1 category on Foursquare this month. Not surprised - apart from a couple of nightbuses, they're exclusively how I get around Brno. I'm getting lazy; there seems no point walking 5min around a block when the tram takes 2min and there's one every 2min.
And a month it has now been. Today, I visited the Foreign Police and registered as a resident alien - right on the 30-day deadline - and then took my visa stamp, ink barely dry, and used it to open a current account. Yes, a Czech account. A couple more tokens of permanence, but yes, it's already been a month.
I've actually only spent three-quarters of it here; after a fortnight, $JOB sent me to Munich for some training. Two days of generic applies-to-everyone intro-to-$COMPANY -- although with a bit of a bias towards salespeople -- and then another three days, just for me, with my new team leader.
But this also meant that I got a bit of a chance to explore Munich, a city in an entire region that I've never visited before.
The trip was as interesting as seven hours in a minibus could be. Our driver headed straight for the border, which I didn't initially realise (I still don't have a local SIM, so no roaming data access for me -- too expensive) and within an hour on the road we crossed the border into Austria.
Austria? I thought we were going to Germany. It's not the same. OK, nearly, but not quite.
Interestingly, you can tell the difference immediately. The architectural vernacular is different -- I'm starting to get used to Czech houses, solid, heavy-set and heavily-plastered, and the plaster sculpted to represent floral wreaths and banners and borders, fancily framing windows, doors and eaves, and mostly painted in shades of sepia or sienna.
Austrian houses are predominantly white, or bright pastels. The roofs are steeper, their corners fancier, there are more shutters, and even here, far from the Alps, some have a Tyrolean-cottage look to them. And there are a lot more vineyards -- every farm seems to have one, alternating with the ubiquitous oilseed-rape. [Insert stock rant about biofuel BS here.]
I had not expected the difference to be so apparent.
The other thing I'd not expected is when we got to our first stop, a petrol station shop on the motorway. I walked in, thinking for breakfast -- RIP Desmond Dekker -- and I could read the labels on things again. And, familiarly, there wasn't much vegetarian that wasn't a sweet snack, but I could go up to the counter and just ask. In a language I more or less speak, and which was instantly understood and answered in standard Hochdeutsch -- I only recently learned how different that is from normal Austrian German -- and I could talk to them!
Of course, I can talk to most Czech shop assistants in English. Many of them will even reply in the same tongue. But I hate being one of those Anglophones Abroad who just addresses everyone in his own language and dashed well expects Johnny Foreigner to speak the Queen's English, hang it all. I travelled a lot in my childhood, witnessed this around the world and I still dislike it. I hadn't expected the big rush of relief at being able to speak the local lingo and understand the response. (I was offered, and bought two, ciabatta buns with just mozzarella and tomato, which must be vegetarian, because it's just cheese and vegetables, right? Because they were really sorry but they were out of the vegetarian mini-calzone at the moment. And those apples are dirty, let me wash them for you.)
(Some of my German-speaking friends in London are rather dismissive of my meagre ability in the language. My vocabulary is indeed tiny, but I'm not afraid to use it, find it fairly easy to follow when spoken slowly and clearly, and generally Get By quite well. I can't hold a conversation -- well, actually, I can in some limited domains, as became apparent later -- but I can communicate, and unlike the French, especially the Parisians, in my experience, actual Germans in Germany (and Austrians and Swiss) are delighted at a foreigner making the effort and will bend over backwards to be encouraging, speaking r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and using easy little tiny words. I love them for it.) (I should also tip my hat to my German friends in London who actively encourage my efforts and teach me new words. I have to be quite drunk to speak to someone in their own language when I know that they can speak mine vastly better, though.)
So, yes, Austria. Several hours of it. A second short stop at a much bigger, much nicer service station, presumably abbreviated because the first stop was an emergency "comfort break". [Damn you, Brian!] And a third, longer stop at a tiny truckstop, but one with a distant view of snow-capped Alps.
Then a bit of Germany -- like Austria, but grimier and more modern, more industrial and less pretty -- and then we were at our hotel, way out in a distant suburb. Everyone checked in in English, except muggins here who tried it auf Deutsch. Worked fine, too, until I asked about somewhere to eat, when the directions all went a bit rapid and the receptionist noticed me glazing over, asked if she was going too fast -- I'm sorry, but yes -- and rather than slowing down, switched to English. The Czechs wanted a Bavarian meal, but we got Greek instead. But with Bavarian beer.
And we found a couple of errant Brit $COMPANY-ers in the hotel lobby! That accent was a very welcome respite -- again, to an extent that surprised me. They were a bit bemused to learn that no, I was with the Czechs and worked in Brno. But one of 'em was an old Amiga fan, so that was all right.
At the end of our first day's training, we then got a free tour of the city centre, from an engaging, hippy-ish, surfer/snowboarder Bavarian who was enthusiastic, funny and complemented me on my pronunciation of Rheinheitsgeböt and then ignored my further efforts at German. We saw some of the sights, heard some of the history, had a Bavarian mean in a beer-hall and then got to wash it down with some local brews.
By randomly fortuitous coincidence, my end of the main table held what I'm fairly sure must have been the only three vegetarians in the party.
So, this vegetarian Argentinian, Czech and Englishman walk into a restaurant in Bavaria...
And to their great surprise, have a choice of both starters and mains and all eat really well. The end. It's no joke. We really did. (But who knew that there were vegetarian Argentinians? No wonder he lives in Grenoble!)
So, yes, I've not seen much, really, but München is pretty, steeped in history, has some beautiful architecture and you can't tell the new bits they've rebuilt from the old bits that my grandads' mates bombed into rubble. (Sorry about that.) Actually the new bits often look way older than the actually old bits, and some of them are authentically cracked and crumbling, although it's possible that this is not entirely intentional. I want to go back and see more. On the end of my second day, when my Brno buddies all went back on the minibus, I got an afternoon mostly off. I switched hotels to one a bit closer in, managing to check-in entirely in my wretched broken German -- the late-middle-aged manageress was extremely polite about it and complimented me upon it, which was lovely if entirely inaccurate -- and then went into the city and met my team-leader for dinner and a few beers.
The next night, I was too tired to do anything much. I Googled for the best vegetarian Indian restaurant in Munich (Indian Mango, apparently), went to it, had a large and pretty good curry, went back to my hotel and crashed out. On the next night, we went for a Japanese meal followed by a few beers in the famed, vast Augustiner beer hall followed by another one in the student quarter, and the night after that, I flew back to London.
I grabbed a slice of pizza and a couple of bottles of beer in the main station, used the free loos in Burger King -- Foursquare does have its uses -- and then got the train out to the airport. The ride afforded me an opportunity to stretch my German. I'm not going to attempt to represent the conversation in the original...
"Hey, is that a five? Hello? Is that a five?"
"Er, sorry -- me? I do not understand -- a five? Five of what?"
"Your mobile, your pocket-telephone -- is it a five?"
"Er, er, what? Oh! No! It is not a 5. It's a Note 2, er, Galaxy Note Two."
"Oh, I wondered, because it has such a big screen! Why's it got so big a screen?"
"Er, well, it is... like a tablet? Like an little iPad?"
"Aha! Because I have an old S3, look, and I wanted to see the new S5! Your keyboard is really weird. What is that?"
"Er, er, it is called Swype. It is very good. You can buy it in the App, er, no, Play Store. Playshop? It is not so much, maybe two or three Euros?"
"You do these little shapes, like wiggles, with your finger! It's funny!"
"Yes! Look... It is a piano, er, no, keyboard, but you write, like this... It is fast."
"Yes, I see that, it is! Thank you! That is really cool! This is my stop -- I have to go now. Bye-bye!"
And she was gone. But dammit, that's a conversation, isn't it? I'm counting that as conversational German. Sadly I did not get to use any of my new words or phrases, such as "to pay" or "fried egg" or "from 7AM until 10", but I guess they're a bit specialised.
So, yes. Munich. I rather like it.
Then I was back in London. With no checked luggage, I still had to queue to escape, then there was a one-hour gap in the Croydon service, so I had to pay five times as much to go into central London and then wait for a bus back out and didn't get back to my near-empty house for three hours. I've really not missed London much at all. Skeptics in the Pub, the Ton, the various other SF-fan-meets, yes -- but not dirty, inefficient, poor-service-with-a-scowl London.
And then it was back to Czechia, but this time, for my first brief fleeting visit to the remarkable capital, Prague, and my first experience of the Czech train system. However, I'm running out of battery and I have a beer and Ender's Shadow to pay attention to and I need to save something for part 4.
Tschüss!
¹ You know, Swallows and Bells-on-trams² or something like that.
² Note for foreign readers, of which I gather I'm getting a few: it's a terrible pun on the title of a classic British children's book, Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.