Well, last week on Tuesday was my last day with Strato as I had decided not to extend my contract any further. I made this decision because frankly my German still sucks and I’m never going to get ahead if it just stays at this level, I would really prefer having a job that relied a bit more on my qualifications and the only way I can achieve that is if I speak German relatively fluently rather than the broken way in which I speak it now.

So…..a bit daunting but there you go. We’re going to be a bit poorer for a while but we’ll manage somehow. I’m trying to book myself in to a course that is payed for by the government and provided by a lot of private language schools here called “Integrations Kurs”. It goes for 7 months and at the end you receive a certificate that says you can study in German universities, so I’m figuring I must finish up at a good level by then.

The major headache at the moment, as usual, is all the paperwork required. It’s probably pretty difficult for anyone to imagine just how tied up in bureaucracy this country is, before I’d moved here I’d always heard of Germany being somewhat bureaucratic but seriously, I had no idea.

Essentially I require copies of just about everything you can imagine as well as a bunch of forms from various departments, none of which communicate with each other or whose databases are linked in any way, and all of which firstly must approve whether I can do the course or not. One of the major problems is the time spent going from department to department………..no, they are not in the same building or even the same suburb for that matter! Even though I am a EU citizen I still require a piece of paper that states I am able to stay in the country (bit late now since I’ve already been living and working here for 2 1/2 years) and the department that I get that one from is on strike at the moment.

This has kinda fucked things up for me really because I wanted to lodge all my forms to the final department that approves the course on Tuesday (tommorrow) but now I won’t be able to. This final department requires about 14 days to process these forms and the course I wanted to take starts on the 27th so without this final piece of paper I can’t lodge my forms and will most likely miss out on starting the course on this date.

Well, not sure if anyone reading this will be able to make any sense of it, but there you go. I am stuck in the mud and it’s all the governments fault!!!

So, a couple of friends and Ina and I went to see Crystal Castles at Club Maria the other night (Wed). We were quite hyped to see them, well I was Ina wasn’t so much, but unfortunately they weren’t anywhere near as good as I had hoped.

Now before you start slagging me off and saying things like “but it’s hard to do a live show when you’re an electronic act!” let me just say that after my 14 odd years of clubbing with bits of DJing/Promoting thrown in I’ve seen my fair share of live acts and this one was definitely below par. Pity really cause I really like their music but there you go, not all acts can do it great live. She was just screaming into the microphone making my ears bleed whilst he was stuck behind his little desk/portable rack box controlling what was most likely a CD player as I didn’t see a computer in sight. I could have forgiven him somewhat if there was a notebook as he could have been using Ableton but the way all the tracks were tied in along with the absence of a notebook I can only presume a CD mix was used with perhaps some adlib synth use thrown in.

There you go, my brief review…………have a listen to what they do if you like, regardless of the live show they still make some great tracks.

Well, now I’ve got a little time at work I can tell you of our journey home from our holiday in Australia and the surprise it brought.

So, we got on the plane fine in Sydney and had a VERY comfortable ride to Bangkok, not complete flatbeds but pretty damn decent I must say!! Moet champagne prior to takeoff, over 100 movies on demand, full bar service………….felt like home except I didn’t have to do anything. For the first meal (dinner), I started with a lobster entrée followed by a sirloin steak in jus with roast potato, onions and carrots for main. I then had some mixed fruit and pavlova for dessert. Breakfast was the usual fruit and croissants and jam and yoghurt and for the main part of that I had a stir-fry with prawns, scallops, squid and crab.

Kind of get mixed up after that point but it’s safe to say everything was good!! Yummy food, excellent menu with many choices.

So from Bangkok we went on to Dubai, in Bangkok we just stayed on the plane for the hour……….couldn’t be bothered getting off for a walk or anything. Got in to Dubai at around 5.30am or so, was already over 30ºc, the city skyline is dominated by that new monster of a skyscraper they are building and the airport was jammed full of people. Regardless, there was very little difficulty in getting our tickets on the next flight Dubai -> Frankfurt. We even got the same seats!!

Again great food and this time full flatbeds with a bigger lcd screen and everything remote control. The seats even had a massager built-in, very cool!! So we arrived in Frankfurt in good spirits feeling pretty relaxed considering the distance travelled, that was where we incurred problems. We arrived at around 1.15pm and our scheduled flight from Frankfurt to Berlin was at 3.30pm. Unbeknown to us was that several Lufthansa flights had been cancelled which caused a backlog of people trying to get to Berlin. This meant we couldn’t get on the 3.30pm and probably wouldn’t get on the 5.30pm either. Luckily Ina had had the fortitude to do this thing to the tickets which means we can also use them for Air Berlin and that’s what we did. Unfortunately the next flight was at 5.20pm so we had some serious time to kill at that dead boring joint, not really what you want after more than 24hrs. We took it in good spirits though and were just happy to get on that flight.

Finally got home at around 8.30pm or something I think. Could’ve even been later, we pretty much just took our stuff in, had a cup of tea and went to bed. I then woke up at 5.30am to go to work the next day.

At some point that morning I gave Ina a call to see how she was and she said that she’d been flat out and there was somewhat of a strange surprise for us. A neighbour from up the street had dropped a letter into our letterbox claiming to have found our cat Flickr and required a snappy response as they were going on holiday. Philipp of course was checking our mail and rang these people up to organise a viewing of the cat, he saw the cat and wasn’t too convinced that it was Flickr but was unsure so took the cat anyway. He couldn’t keep it at his so left it with a friend for 8 days and Ina picked it up from her on Friday.

Well, I came home, looked at the cat and knew it wasn’t Flickr, so there you go, a stray cat in the house straight after our holiday just to add more complications that we did not need. Weird kind of cat too, anyway, I certainly didn’t want to keep it and nor Ina so we took it to the tierheim on Sunday, kind of like the rspca where they’ll try and find an owner for it.

We are now trying to get the living room into some kind of order since there are a few new things to place and it looks like a bomb hit it. Bought an extension for the desk from Ikea and brought it home and what do you know, it’s the wrong colour. So we’ll exchange it tomorrow for the right colour (hopefully) and can then start to get the living room into some kind of order.

That’s the news though, not a lot but there you go.

Invitation flyer for Ina’s party: