Carsten's Hometown

I read the articles of immediate interest and shunned those of none including the life of Barack Obama... Really. Who cares? I'm not likely to read a biography of Tony Blair let alone one of a candidate running for a country who's chief attractions include overtly strange people and cheap burritos. Ok, ok I'm joking. I might read a biography of Tony Blair one day ;-)

01 Sorry mate I had to do it

Just as all the decent reading material was starting to dissipate I rolled into Wittenberg-Lutherstadt station and wheeled my suitcase onto a platform surrounded mostly by fields and silence. I followed the other passengers down the platform hoping I hadn't gone to the wrong Wittenberg when I caught a glimpse of Oscar from Sesame Street walking towards me. No, wait... That's Carsten. He'd forgotten to shave for the past year evidently, and I was quick to remind him. "F*** off" came the reply. After the usual pleasantries Carsten drove us to the supermarket where beer was sold in crates rather than boxes, and after you'd drank all the bottles you went up to this machine and just loaded all the empties in the crate onto a conveyor belt and watched as they all disappeared, and money came out. My amazement was palpable. "You mean you get paid to recycle?!"

02 Side street

"Yeah of course. Don't you?"

"Erm, no we have to pay them half the time"

"WASS?"

I'm going to start a points system since the similarities between Germany and England are quite striking. We'll find out which is better at the end of the Berlin writeup. To start off... Getting paid for recycling?..

Germany: 1

I would also like to add at this point that if you have read any of my other entries then you will know that all of my opinions are unbiased and completely objective, and I would never put the designs of our culture above that of any other culture. That said... Our supermarkets are nicer, and better laid out...

England: 1

Oh would you look at that, we're tied.

03 The square

After picking up a couple of crates of the fabled German beer we made our way over to Carsten's house where I was fed with coffee and homemade cakes. This is what I'm talking about. No beans on toast here, no tins of chopped tomatoes with a few herbs washed down with goon oh no. This is proper travelling. After we'd had a few attempts at chatting with Carsten practicing his translation skills we wondered off to climb a tree. Yes the withdrawal symptoms were coming on strong and we wouldn't be able to go climbing until the next day so we had to make do. It was quite a tall tree - 4b I reckon. After we both got scared and climbed down we drove into the town proper to check the place out.

I climbed up higher than Carsten

England: 1

Wittenberg is a tiny, quaint little place that pretty much personifies Germany. It's beautiful. Parking up in one of the few spaces in the town we got out and walked down cobbled streets with little streams running down the side, passed big gothic churches, a town square and plenty of little 3/4 storey buildings all painted in different colours. Bizarrely, though it was about 5:30pm, there was hardly anyone about. There were hardly any pubs, and a only a couple of shops open. It almost seemed like a model village with loads of buildings but with no obvious point to any of them. Quite eerie actually. It would have been nice to see it on a weekend in Summer, as Carsten informed me it's a completely different atmosphere so maybe one day I'll have to pop over for another visit.

Obviously Wittenberg is only representative of a tiny part of German culture and so it must be compared to a similarly sized town in England for marking to be fair. Let's say Wilton... Tudor buildings, small, cosy, but let down by the amount of chavs - as is everywhere in Britain hence...

Germany: 1

England: -3

When we'd had a look around and gone to McDonalds to share a burger and chips (payday wasn't until the next day) we went back to his parents' house and called up a few of his mates for a drinking session in the den in the garden. As everyone arrived and started their greetings in German I began to worry that I would be sitting there like a lemon for hours, but after I was introduced, people began to speak English and where at the beginning people were 'umming' and 'ahhing' and trying to remember the stuff they learnt at school, at the end it was like they had been speaking it for years. And - as ever - they were a cool and interesting bunch of people.

German people are amazing.

Germany: 2

English people are pretty cool too. Just not as universally.

England: 1