A Quickie in Würzburg

It's been a benign three weeks since my last post, and at some point in the last three weeks I realised that I finally felt "settled" in my school as a staff member. The other staff members seem to be "used" to me now, and some have even expressed appreciation for what I do, which means a lot because the culture here is seldom complimentary for the sake of it.

Shit Beer Showdown

Here in Germany there is no lack of great beer; there is also no lack of shit beer. There are several shit German beers which have achieved international fame, the usual big name swills: Beck's, Bitburger and Radeburger, which are all relatively unpleasant pilseners. By no means are these the worst, and it is my mission to find the cheapest, nastiest, skunkiest pisswater in all of Germany.

Cham, Regensburg and a visitor from the North

It’s that time again for a short blog entry. January has flown by and things at school are slightly confusing as three teachers in the English faculty are either sick or on parental leave. Therefore, my timetable has changed slightly and I have a few new classes. It has been snowing in snatches and the daylight hours are gradually getting longer (at the peak of winter the sun sets at about 4pm but now it sets at around 5).

German Lagers

Lager beer is, for better or worst, the most popular type of beer in the world. Most of the nastiest, cheapest, watery beers produced gigalitre by gigalitre by the enormous multinational breweries around the world are ignominious attempts at brewing lager.

Silvester: sliding into the new year

New Year’s Eve in Germany is called Silvester which is named, for some positively boring religious reason, after Pope Sylvester I and, unfortunately, not after the lisping cat from the Looney Tunes. We had a Sause, a crude colloquial nominalisation denoting a “booze-up”, a word which I had learnt some years prior from a few German undesirables in Lithuania of all places.

Frohe Weihnachten

Since it was my first Xmas outside of Australia and I have no family here to celebrate with, my friend, Mirj, who lives in Nuremberg, invited me to her family’s Xmas celebrations, which was super nice of her. So I was not only having my first German Xmas but my first Franconian one, and it should be very obvious already that Franconia is my favourite region in Germany.