Schinken, käse, salami, hackenfleisch, peperoni – that’s ham, cheese, salami, minced beef (remember that one?) and pepperoni to you lot.
Brilliant – all meat, no crap veggies!! Too good to be true. When it finally arrived, I sat down (drooling), and opened the box . . . . . to be confronted by a shocking looking pizza.
Yep, the cheese was there alright. Yes, there was ham – about 1 square centimetre by my reckoning. Yep, there was salami; I found the single piece of salami about five minutes after I started eating. Minced beef? I think there may have been a morsel, but I’m not sure. Pepperoni? Nowhere to be seen.
But there was an extra ingredient that I didn’t expect. I didn’t know what it was, I’d never seen its like before, and it looked very suspiciously like a vegetable, or something else highly unpalatable. Obviously I had the wrong pizza. I asked the secretary to check what number pizza I had ordered. Hmmm, apparently I had the right one, and yes, I was told, all the ingredients that I ordered were there.
So I asked “Well, where’s the pepperoni??” “Right there!” came the response, and she pointed at the suspicious-looking-vegetable-matter.
“That’s not bloody pepperoni!” I said.
“Yes it is!” came the indignant response
“No it fucking well isn’t!”
Well, I didn’t actually say that. I wanted to, but instead I said
“Oh. (pause) (silence) (pause) . . . . In Australia, pepperoni is meat”
“Well, in the rest of the world that is pepperoni (pointing at the offending food stuff)” said some smartarse.
“Well fuck the lot of youse, I want meat on my goddam pizza! NOW DAMMIT!” No, I didn’t say that either. Instead I simply said “Oh.”
I was determined to prove these silly Germans wrong, and so after picking off the disgusting food, and finishing what was left of my pizza, I went to my computer. I have a massive German-English word list, and I looked up “pepperoni”. Hmmm, no entry for pepperoni. I checked the spelling on the menu. Oh, it’s actually “peperoni”. I look up “peperoni”. It turns out “peperoni” is German for red peppers. Great. What’s wrong with “rot peper”??? Hmmmmm? I looked up pepperoni on dictionary.com, and sure enough, there it is:
pep·per·o·ni
1. A highly spiced pork and beef sausage.
2. A slice of this type of sausage.
So actually, smartarse, in the rest of the world (English speaking at least) pepperoni *is* pepperoni, and not friggin’ red peppers. So there.
I finally got to play my first game of competitive soccer in Germany a couple of weeks ago. Because I had to be registered with the Fucking Stupid German Fußball Federation (FSGFF) I couldn’t play until I was registered. As their name suggests, the FSGFF is fucking stupid, and it took about 5 or 6 weeks. Idiots. But finally I was given the all clear, and turned up for my first match. Or so I thought. Things are never that easy are they? No, in fact I was playing with the reserves today, not the seniors. Ah well, I thought, something easy to start of with, no harm in that. The seniors are good, the reserves are crap. The reserves make Bohemenians look like superstars. The reserves consist of men over 50, and some young blokes who appear to have never played before. Shit. One bloke was from Italy, and was useless. He had a birth defect or something, so his left arm always hung limply by his side, and his running style was somewhat, err, hampered to say the least. The main problem was, he thought he was pretty good, and kept on trying all this tricky shit that never worked. His name was Enzo, and I wanted to call him Oil (Lorenzo’s Oil -> Enzo’s Oil – geddit?), but I stuck with the good ol’ “Rabbit”.
The other team weren’t that good, but by half time we were 5-0 nil down. So what does the coach do to rally the troops? “Try and keep it under 10 lads!” was his inspirational speech. So try we did. Perhaps that’s why one of our players decided to handball on the line to stop a possible goal. With the penalty duly converted, we’re down to ten men and really up against it. Then, probably in his enthusiasm to keep “goals conceded” under 10, our useless right winger (and for all you smart arses out there, no, it wasn’t me. This time at least) decided he might viciously kick his opponent. Red card and we’re down to nine – in both men and gaols conceded. That’s how it ended up, and a fairly average start to my Bundesliga career.
I’ve joined a tennis club in Bernhausen (I’m too big for Bonlanden), but because the Fucking Stupid German Tennis Federation (FSGTF) requires that all players who want to play this season (i.e. June to September), must register BEFORE THE PRECEDING CHRISTMAS. How fucked is that??? The FSGTF wouldn’t listen to my protests, that there was no conceivable way I could have registered BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and that they are a bunch of mongoloids. So I can’t play competitive tennis. Thanks a lot, FSGTF. But, I know a guy here who’s ranked 445 in Germany (as in Tommy Haas, top ten?? in the world, is ranked number 1), and I played him. You can imagine he’s pretty good, but I still got a couple of games of the cheeky sod. Despite that, it still sucks to be thrashed by a chain-smoking alcoholic. And he was a bloodnut to boot. Stupid redheads.
I went to Heidelberg with my sister for the Queen’s Jubilee (not to celebrate it of course, but she came over for that long weekend) and it is a fantastic place. The highlight was taking a tour of the impressive castle on the hill overlooking the city. The castle is in ruins, having been destroyed by the pesky Protestants, and then the frustrating French. The lowlight was sitting outside a café, and first having to put up with a Fabio (the most beautiful man in the world) look-alike trying to chat up this Kenyan chick sitting next us, and then a drunk, middle-aged, overweight Siberian and his dorky Finnish friend stumbling up to the other table next us, and trying to chat up the waitress. I don’t think she was that interested though. However, I think I caught my sister sending a few admiring glances the way of the Siberian bloke, but I can’t be too sure. There’s more to say about Heidelberg, but I can’t be arsed writing it all down.
At my latest German lesson, I found out that the German word for lightbulb is Glühbirne. Great, I hear you say – what’s so fantastic about that? Well I’m glad you asked. Y’see, like a lot of German words, it’s two words (often three, four, five . . . etc) stuck together to make a new word. Those two words are, obviously, “Glüh” and “birne”.
Glüh = glow
Birne = pear
So it’s a glow pear! Nice one Germany! It seems that it’s quite legit for me to go into a German shop and ask for a glow pear - no one will look at me strangely. Do that anywhere else in the world, and . . . well, give it a go and see what happens. I don’t think they’ll ever hand you a Glühbirne though, will they?
Okay, in the last ten years, at least, I don’t think I have once heard John Farnham’s crap song “You’re the Voice”. Two months in Germany, and I’ve heard it twice. What’s going on with that? This would have been the last place I would have expected to hear Whispering Friggin’ Jack. I don’t need to wake up to “You’re the voice, try and understand it, make a noise and it make it clear woooo-ooooo-oooo-oooah, wooooo-oooo-ooo-oooah
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